Word: redon
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Other big prices: $2.500 for Rouault's The Clown; $1,600 for Modigliani's Lunia Czechowska; $3,500 for a Derain still life; $3,000 for a Redon flower piece. Collector Chrysler also bought small Picasso and Cézanne water colors for $1,350 and $1,625 respectively...
...West of it volleyed and thundered in and around both World's Fairs, Chicago's Art Institute last week rummaged around and quietly put on nine first-rate shows of its own. The best show: 46 of its 329 lithographs by the late great French Artist Odilon Redon. The Art Institute's collection of Redon prints, purchased from the artist's widow when Redon prices were low, is the world's best: it includes all of the first impressions...
Long considered an isolated figure in art, an independent who withdrew from the life and thought of his time to paint creepy, imaginary worlds, Odilon Redon (1840-1916) is often classed by critics with the 19th-Century romantics; surrealists claim him as a pre-surrealist. In his melancholy youth Redon had tried architecture, sculpture, studying the old masters, imitating the Barbizon landscapists, copying the romantics. As far as he was concerned, nothing seemed to click. Then, one day, in 1875, he found that charcoal was his meat. From charcoal drawings he went on to lithography. It had taken...
...Black," wrote Redon, "is the most important color; nothing can prostitute it." Although he liked to call them his noirs, Redon lithographs run the gamut of neutral tones from rich black to glaring white, rely upon contrasts for their emotional effect. Typical of Redon's noirs were the Chicago show's mythical Pegasus, The Winged One, a Child's Head with Flowers, and unearthly chimeras ranging all the way from The Head of the Infinite Suspended in a Dim, Precarious Light to a shocking confrontation that anyone who has ever had a hangover could understand...
...painters, is one of those Himalayas of art whose height seems to increase with distance. Students of Romantic painting have found Turner's shadow longer than that of his French contemporaries (Gericault, Delacroix), longer than that of the Impressionists, whom he anticipated, and somewhere above such abstractionists as Redon, Kandinsky and Klee. John Ruskin spent most of his days interpreting Turner's art. But Turner's life has remained muddied by the fictions of his first biographer, a prolific hack named George Walter Thornbury...