“Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions,” an exhibition featuring the French artist’s fantastical works from mysterious darkness to luminous color is on view at the Getty Center in Brentwood from July 14 through Oct. 18.
The exhibit features a group of charcoal drawings, lithographs and pastels from the Getty’s collection that includes the macabre “Battle of the Bones,” a recent acquisition, as well as loans from a handful of other museums.
“Visitors will explore Redon’s singular artistic vision through his diverse sources of inspiration, from religion and mythology to literature and modern science,” according to the Getty Center.
“As an artist who dissolved the boundaries between the visible and the imagined, this display brings renewed attention to Redon’s visionary work which has always been highly popular with our visitors,” Timothy Potts, director of the Getty Museum, said in a statement. “Building on that popularity, in this exhibition we are delighted to share the Museum’s remarkable collection of Redon’s noir drawings, pastels and prints in one cohesive experience.”
Redon was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1840 and began his career working almost exclusively in charcoal and black-and-white lithography. He created atmospheric compositions featuring many strange monsters and peculiar apparitions. In the 1890s, Redon started working with pastel and oil paint, abandoning his signature dark aesthetic for vibrant color.
The exhibition reveals Redon’s unusual visual world through four key aspects of his work — noir, lithography, print portfolios and color.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Redon focused on creating what he called “noirs,” drawings done in charcoal and other black media depicting equally shadowy subject matter.
“Redon used various shades of black as one would a full spectrum of color, finding new ways to engage with the interplay of light and darkness,” according to the Getty.
Featured among the noir pieces in the exhibition is the recently acquired “Battle of the Bones,” which was inspired by a passage from a poem by Maurice Bouchor. “Battle of the Bones” shows the aftermath of a fantastical duel between two skeletons. Redon framed the skeletons against a deep black background and expertly crafted the bones from blank reserves of tan paper.
During this period, Redon also started to work with lithography, a printing process with a close affinity to drawing.
“Through the rich black ink of his lithographs Redon found another powerful way to express his vivid imagination,” exhibit organizers said. “In his striking lithograph ‘Light,’ he presents an encounter with the surreal, as two small figures look through a window at the brightly lit profile of an enormous face, glimpsing the fantastic as it is illuminated through a frame.”
Over the course of his career, Redon created 11 print portfolios, which are groups of lithographs that have a shared theme. Portfolios often related directly to literary and religious texts.
The exhibition features the first of his three portfolios inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s surreal novel “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” which recounts the events of a single night as the saint experiences a series of horrific visions. Based on a quote from the novel, the strange and playful print “Then There Appears a Singular Being, Having the Head of a Man on the Body of a Fish,” shows a creature with a human head and a fish body floating in an ambiguous space. Rather than directly illustrating the texts, Redon used sources such as Flaubert’s novel as inspiration for his evocative and often puzzling images.
In the late 1890s, Redon shifted away from his signature noir aesthetic in favor of bold, bright colors. In pastel and oil paint he retained much of his signature symbolic imagery but also embraced new subjects that were more suitable for vivid colors.
A highlight of the pastels in the exhibition is the radiant “Baronne de Domecy,” a portrait of the wife of Redon’s patron and friend Baron Robert de Domecy. The artist depicted the baroness lost in reverie, gazing outward as if removed from the material world. Her monochromatic face contrasts sharply with the luminous field of flowers that appears to float on the portrait’s surface, as if projecting the realms of her inner world.
“Odilon Redon used his art to offer new interpretations of the familiar, rendering literary subjects and the natural world in original ways,” Danielle Canter, assistant curator of drawings at the Getty Museum, said in a statement. “We hope visitors who experience Redon’s dreamlike world through the exhibition will find inspiration in the artist’s unique vision and boundless imagination.”
Accompanying the exhibition is a publication about Redon’s artwork. On Saturday, July 18 at 4 p.m., the Getty will host “Odilon Redon Salon: Words and Music,” an afternoon concert and talk that will explore the connections between sound, literature, imagination and the Symbolist art that influenced Redon.
Visitors can also take part in free printmaking sessions related to the exhibition on select Sundays in July and August.
The museum is located at 1200 Getty Center Drive in Los Angeles.
