Word: redon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Best Publicity." But often, when the catalogue said more, confusion reigned. A Hartert Redon was said to have been owned by A. Giez Delius, but a Hartert Vlaminck was listed as having belonged to F. Delius Giese. Three Seurats were listed as having been bought at Paris' municipal auction in 1949, but the Paris art world has no memory of this important sale...
...three-Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau and Rodolphe Bresdin-only Redon is well known today, though more for his glowing flower pieces than for his excursions into eeriness. Moreau is a clouded memory, and if Bresdin is remembered at all, it is primarily as Redon's teacher. The exhibition links the three as fathers of surrealism...
Unseen Monsters. Far more important to the surrealists was Odilon Redon, who was born in Bordeaux in 1840. Probably no child lived in a world of such frantic fantasy, and almost all of his works in later life have their roots in his childhood. Shortly before he died, Redon visited the town where he grew up, and reported, "I have completely understood the origins of the sad art I have created. It is a site for a monastery, an enclosure in which one feels oneself alone-what abandon! It was necessary there to fill one's imagination with...
While Moreau's centaurs, sphinxes and Cyclopes are conventional symbols, Redon created monsters seen only by himself. Eyes float like balloons, ears become wings, strange plants sprout out of human heads. Fantasy, said Redon, is "the messenger of the 'unconscious,' of the eminent and mysterious personage . . . who arrives in his own time, according to the moment, the place, even the season." Redon never could explain how the "mysterious personage" worked for him, but he had no real need to. As the show proves once again, seldom has one man's imagination disgorged such an astonishing array...
Microscopic Eyes. Least known of all is Rodolphe Bresdin. Redon accepted him as a master, wrote that "his power lay in imagination alone. He never conceived anything beforehand. He improvised with joy." Victor Hugo and Baudelaire also admired him, but the public ignored him. He was found dead one day in 1885 in a cold garret in Sèvres, almost as unknown as he was the day he was born...