Word: redone
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...long way to success. Revival of widespread interest in Redon's work has come about only in the last decade. In the last four years prices for his pastels and oils have increased tenfold. This week in Paris, France's official Orangerie Museum is exhibiting 205 of his works, the first major Redon show in 30 years...
...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...
...Redon's predilection for portraying the strange creatures of his imagination-looming one-eyed Cyclopes, curiously grinning spiders, claustrophobic images of terror half-seen in the corner of a mirror, and sad, lost fools-testify to his view that in art "everything is done through docile submission to the 'unconscious.' " Redon found a meager market for his nightmares, eked out a living illustrating books, including Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," and peddling his prints to dealers...
...turn of the century brought a sharp turning point in Redon's work: he found his charcoal and lithograph dreams of terror giving way to a glowing world of pastels and oils. One of his favorite subjects became the bouquets of fresh Ile de France flowers. In one of his best (see color page), he has caught not only the fragile beauty of mimosa and anemone, but somehow echoed the haunting mystery of the "silent valley" that he loved to contemplate outside the windows of his summer studio as he painted...
...later-day subjects none inspired better work than the giant seashell his wife brought as a souvenir of her birthplace, and kept on the white-marble fireplace mantel of their quiet Paris apartment. Fascinated by the shell, Redon used it as the starting point for a motif as old as antiquity. His Birth of Venus is a subject that has inspired artists from the time of the Greeks to Botticelli. Redon painted it as something glimpsed deep in the sea or seen fleetingly but unforgettably in a dream...