Title: Rêverie
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: pastel et fusain on paper
Dimensions: 54.5 x 37.8 cm
Date Created: circa 1900
Description
Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” In 1882, Odilon Redon exhibited an album of works titled À Edgar Poe. The writer Joris-Karl Huysmans later hailed him as “the prince of mysterious dreams.” Redon’s iconic visage, of ambiguous gender and timeless attire, is rapt in pensive silence, immersed in the glow of inner visions, carried on spectral currents to unknowable realms.
After 1893, Redon embraced color. The nightmarish “noirs” of his earlier graphic work, rendered in black lithographic crayon and charcoal, gave way to a more beatific revelation. Especially in the vibrant hues of pastel, he conjured an otherworldly fluorescence to capture the fleeting essence of dreams. Rêverie inhabits an evanescent dimension where nothing bears the weight of substance found in nature or contemporary art. Instead, through a phantasmagorical display of lyrical, chromatic abstraction, he creates a private inner reality, embracing both somber shadows below and vivid effulgence above.
Redon declared, “True art lies in a reality that is felt.” The sensitively contemplative aspect of his work stems from an exploration of the mystical dimension in human aspiration, an assertion of idealism that preoccupied fin-de-siècle French intellectuals as a spiritual counterweight to positivist materialism. He navigated the anti-naturalist milieu of Symbolism, drawing from the Catholic Revival, Eastern thought—particularly the life of the Buddha—and esoteric currents like Theosophy.
His singular oeuvre was controversial. He shared with Mallarm
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Image Dimensions: 2244 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 509 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
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License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
