A collector’s guide to Odilon Redon

‘I have made an art according to myself,’ Odilon Redon declared in the opening line of his memoirs, written a year before his death in 1916, aged 76.

He was born in Bordeaux in 1840, the same year as Auguste Rodin and Claude Monet, and his career brought him into contact with many of the major art movements of fin de siècle France. Yet his visionary world of strange monsters, shadowy nightmares and radiant dreams was unique, resulting in work that defies labels and resists any attempt to decipher it.

‘You leave his exhibition with a troubled, amazed spirit, filled with the fleeting visions of all these disturbed, pale, desolate faces,’ wrote the critic Auguste Barbey in 1894. ‘How rare are such artists and how glad one is to encounter one like Monsieur Redon amidst the banality of everyday life and art.’

Redon’s early career

Redon was christened Bertrand-Jean Redon. His father, also named Bertrand, had met his French Creole mother while living in America. Her name, Odile, provided the artist with the nickname Odilon.

Persistent illness meant that Redon spent much of his childhood isolated on a relative’s country estate. He later recalled being a ‘sad and weak’ child who ‘sought out the shadows’, taking ‘singular and profound joy in hiding among the great curtains in dark corners of the house’.

Despite his father pushing him towards architecture, the young Redon showed a passion for art, particularly drawing. Aged 20, he befriended the botanist Armand Clavaud — a bohemian who inspired a fascination not only with plants, but also with microscopic life, evolutionary science, Eastern philosophy, the Gothic writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Eugène Delacroix’s Romanticism.

Four years later, Redon travelled to Paris to study under the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, an experience he described as ‘tortured’ owing to his master’s preference for mimetic representation. Before long, he was back in Bordeaux, learning printmaking from the engraver Rodolphe Bresdin. His nascent career was interrupted in 1870, however, when he was drafted to serve in the Franco-Prussian War.

Following France’s defeat, Redon returned to Paris. The horrors of war had a profound effect on him, compounded by the death of his father shortly afterwards. In 1873, he moved to a new apartment and studio at 81 Boulevard du Montparnasse; a sketch now in the Louvre shows the space where his fantastical visions began to take shape.

Redon’s ‘Noir’ series and the pursuit of printmaking

Redon spent the 1870s and 1880s creating charcoal drawings of correspondingly dark subject matter: headless skeletons, grimacing spiders, and eyeballs tied to hot-air balloons. The colour black, he said, was the ‘agent of the spirit’. He disseminated these haunting images — which he named his ‘Noirs’ — through lithography, a medium whose own expressive capacity he soon began to appreciate.

Inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s intricate line work, Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro and the tormented late visions of Francisco de Goya, he produced around 170 lithographs during this period, mastering delicate hatching and subtle gradations to push the boundaries of the medium. With his wax crayon, he could replicate the effect of charcoal on paper, but the medium also allowed him to scrape away the surface to create highlights, and to achieve wonderfully rich, inky blacks.

In 1879, Redon published Dans le Rêve (‘In the Dream’), the first of his 11 portfolios of lithographs. The following year, he married a Creole woman named Camille Falte, but the tragic death of their firstborn child only deepened his depression.

Redon never explained the meaning behind the unearthly images he created, seeing their ambiguity as inherent to his practice. ‘My drawings inspire and do not define themselves. They determine nothing,’ he said. ‘They place us, just as music does, in the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.’

Redon and Parisian society

Despite this resistance to labels, Redon was most closely associated with Symbolism, the late-19th-century movement that favoured the dreamlike and the subjective over naturalism — art of the imagination, rather than observation.

Immersed in Paris’s vibrant cultural life, Redon found inspiration in the Symbolist music of Debussy and the poetry of Baudelaire. In 1884, along with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, he was a founding member of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, a collective that staged an annual exhibition as an alternative to the government-backed Salon.

Redon’s visibility was given a further boost that year when the Symbolist writer Joris-Karl Huysmans published his most famous work, A rebours (Against Nature), which features a reclusive duke who collects the artist’s drawings.

‘They contained the most fantastic of visions,’ wrote Huysmans. ‘Sometimes Redon’s subjects actually seemed to be borrowed from the nightmares of science, to go back to prehistoric times… These drawings defied classification, most of them exceeding the bounds of pictorial art and creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium.’

In 1886, Redon participated in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition with Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro and Seurat, who unveiled his landmark Pointillist painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884.

In the 1890s, Redon worked with Auguste Clot, the printmaker favoured by the Nabis, and was championed by their principal dealer, Ambroise Vollard, at his trailblazing gallery on Rue Laffitte. In Maurice Denis’s painting Hommage à Cézanne (1900), a group of Nabis artists — including Denis himself, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard — standing in Vollard’s gallery, turn reverentially to face the older Redon. They admired how he had broken free of the conservative training they had all undergone, in order to express, in Denis’s words, ‘a state of soul… depth of emotion… and an interior vision’.

It was through the Nabis that Redon was introduced to Japonisme and the applied arts. He would go on to paint folding screens and murals, including two enormous panels for the library of an 11th-century abbey belonging to his patron Gustave Fayet.

Redon’s switch to colour

Despite the critical and financial success he had achieved, Redon unexpectedly transformed his output around the turn of the century. Instead of exploring darkness, his pictures became expressions of vivacious colour, particularly in oil and pastel.

Redon was still dipping the brush into his subconscious, creating images of mythological beasts and haunting landscapes, but he also started to produce still lifes and portraits in vibrant palettes — whether depicting ethereal vases of anemones, or sitters surrounded by kaleidoscopes of blossoms.

Often floating on a nebulous field of powdery colour, these subjects preserved the artist’s distinct vision — seeming to emerge from the same realm as his ‘Noir’ monsters — while affording him even greater commercial success.

This decisive switch has been likened to a religious awakening, with some suggesting that it resulted from the lifting of his melancholy. Reflecting on the transition, Redon wrote: ‘If the art of an artist is the song of his life, a solemn or sad melody, I must have sounded the key-note of gaiety in colour.’

One vivid canvas from that period, Fleurs, painted around 1905, sold at Christie’s in 2018, as part of the Rockefeller Collection, for $4,092,500, setting the artist’s record price.

Redon’s later life and legacy

In 1903, Redon was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. A decade later, he exhibited more work than any other artist at New York’s International Exhibition of Modern Art — better known as the Armory Show — which is credited with introducing American audiences to the European avant-garde.

During his lifetime, Redon’s emotional use of colour influenced the Fauves, including Henri Matisse, and the Expressionists, among them Edvard Munch. In the decades following his death, his macabre and absurdist motifs inspired André Breton and his fellow Surrealists, as well as the pioneer of Dada, Marcel Duchamp, who declared: ‘If I am to tell what my own departure has been, I should say that it was the art of Odilon Redon.’

In 2018, the Pola Museum of Art in Kanagawa, which holds one of the most important collections of Redon’s work in Asia, mounted an exhibition that illustrated how he helped shape the output of contemporary Japanese artists, including Ikemura Leiko and Konoike Tomoko. His influence can even be felt in the films of Hayao Miyazaki.

The Art Institute of Chicago is the most important repository of Redon’s work outside France — the result of a landmark gift in 1925. Another 54 of his works, now housed in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, form the collection of Andries Bonger, a Dutch insurance broker who was introduced to the artist at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in 1894.

Since the turn of the millennium, important Redon retrospectives have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Grand Palais, Paris; the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands. Until 18 October this year, Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions is on show at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Works by Odilon Redon from the Radiant Modernism: Signac to Albers collection will be offered in the 20th/21st Century: Paris Evening Sale including Thinking Italian on 22 October 2026 and Art Moderne — Vente du Jour, including Works from the Durand-Ruel Collection and Works from the Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection on 23 October, at Christie’s in Paris