Odilon Redon As in a Dream

The French painter, draftsman and mystic, Odilon Redon, was already in his forties, an eminence grise, when a group of young colleagues asked him to the 1884 founding of the Societe des Independants. He was in his seventies when his work appeared in the 1913 Armory show, which woke American audiences to a new aesthetic. And while he lived only a few years longer, his work carried forward, not only in collections around the world, but in his influence on major artists including Cezanne, Degas, Gaugin and Matisse. In its darkness and abstraction, Redon's work remains exceptionally relevant today: his spiders, floating heads and glowing conch shells in near-empty frames could easily be contemporary. His figures and objects from the worlds of antiquity, Christianity and nature are often veiled in iridescent clouds of intense color, to enigmatic and mystical effect. In charcoal drawings and lithographs, Redon devoted himself to the human subconscious, with its fears and nightmares, and produced an urgent and eerie Symbolist oeuvre. This substantial retrospective underlines his central importance for an emergent Modernism. Redon is credited not just with changing the course of Impressionism, but with influencing artists as disparate as Duchamp, the Surrealists and Jasper Johns.