Word: redon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Impressionists thought his work was queer. Up to the time of his death (1916) he sold his pictures (if at all) for as little as $15 apiece. Today he is a collectors' favorite, regarded by critics as one of the greatest painters of modern France. His name: Odilon Redon...
...Redon purchaser who got in on the ground floor was Chicago's famed steelman and art-lover Martin A. Ryerson, who bought the first impressions of all Redon's 323 lithographs from Redon's widow in 1919 for the Art Institute of Chicago. The Institute now claims to have more Redons than any other museum in the world. Last week gallery-goers went to the Institute to see an exhibition of 19 more Redon charcoal drawings...
Typical products of Artist Redon's weird, abstracted mind, they seldom depict recognizable incidents from Flaubert's story. They crawl with strange, imaginary, amoebic organisms and flower forms, emaciated, corpselike beings, fantastic planetary convulsions, disembodied bits of human anatomy. In one an enormous human head suspended in space gazes broodingly over a dreary seascape. Another shows a devil clawing at a pot of stewing human skulls. Redon fans, admiring the artist's meticulous drawing and the strange velvety sheen of his blacks, agreed last week that his nightmares had never been more vivid than these...
...Odilon Redon just missed being born in the U.S. Son of a New Orleans Creole mother and a French father who went to America to make his fortune during the Napoleonic wars, Redon was born in 1840 just after his parents landed in Bordeaux. A sickly child in a fairly well-to-do family, he was allowed to dawdle unsuccessfully at his early school studies, got his real education from an eccentric botanist who whetted his appetite for writers like Flaubert, Baudelaire, Poe. In Paris he took up architecture, then sculpture, failed at both. A moody young...
...until Redon was 35 did he find his best refuge from reality in charcoal drawing and lithography. He took no part in Paris' gregarious Bohemia, knew intimately very few of the Left Bank great. Prim and methodical in his daily life, he worked continuously in a small parlor full of old-fashioned furniture and knickknacks, wore white cloth gloves while working, took an occasional evening off to drink tea with a small circle of intimate friends: the poet Mallarme, the composer Ernest Chausson, the decadent novelist Joris Karl Huysmans...