Word: odilon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...greatest of the surrealists," is the title leading French Critic Claude Roger-Marx has bestowed posthumously on Odilon Redon, the strange, self-effacing painter of dreams and visions who so perplexed his 19th century impressionist colleagues. Although he was a contemporary of such greats as Manet, Monet, Renoir and Cézanne, Redon was out of step with his generation. He set out on his own path, investigated what lay in and behind the shadows that the sun-struck painters of his day chose to ignore...
...artists have come as haltingly to art as Redon. Born in Bordeaux in 1840, the son of a French émigré who had struck it rich in New Orleans, young Odilon (named for his Creole mother, Odile) spent a sickly childhood. As an escape from loneliness he turned to music, drawing and daydreams. An indifferent scholar, he later tried, and failed, at architecture and sculpture, lasted only briefly in academic painting classes, fought in the Franco-Prussian War. Not until he was 35 did he find his medium-charcoal-and then the lithographer's stone...