Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon (April 20, 1840 – July 6, 1916) was a French painter. Many of his works were inspired by phrases from books, resulting in what he called ‘correspondences’. It’s a nice historical twist that his extraordinary visuals, in turn, have now inspired words. The words in this book are in freestyle tanka form, a Japanese poetic genre which is the oldest type of verse still in use today after some 1300 years.
One of the greatest of all tankaists was Saigyo (1118 – 1190) and here we have versions in Irish and English of a tanka by Saigyo, reproducing the classic configuration of 5-7-5-7-7 syllabets:
as at them i gaze
I’ve grown very close indeed
to these blossoms all
parting with them when they fall –
such a bitter day ‘twill be
nuair a fheicim iad
braithim an-chóngarach
do na blátha seo
titfidh siad go léir ar ball
och monuar nach trua an scéal
Redon, in his art, was hugely influenced by Japanese aesthetics. He was only a young boy when France resumed trade with Japan, a country closed to the West since 1600 and Japonisme – the craze for Japanese art and design – was the artistic cult of his age. ‘Cult’ is a word that could also describe the attitude of his Parnassian contemporaries who saw art as something worthy of religious devotion, a notion almost alien to the aesthetics of the 21st century, at least in the West.
He was born in Bordeaux and preferred the nickname Odilon (after his mother Odile) to his given name, Bertrand-Jean Redon. As a youth, he enjoyed watching clouds and listening to folktales. He was already drawing by the age of ten.
Redon briefly joined the army. The FrancoPrussian War affected him deeply. Like his father before him, he married a Creole woman. Her name was Camille Falte. It was a happy marriage but Redon’s artistic career was slow to make a mark. At the age of 58 he wrote to his mother: “I have nothing. There are only a few francs in my pocket.”
The world came to hear about him in a strange way. In 1884 a novel appeared by Joris-Karl Huysmans featuring an aristocrat who collects the paintings of Redon. In the words of Huysmans:
“These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium . . .”
It was a fine Irish writer, by the way, George Moore, who first recognised the literary talents of Huysmans.
Redon worked mostly with charcoal at first – works which he described as ‘noirs’ – and it is not until after 1900 that we see all those vivid flowers of his in oil and pastel.
Through his interest in Theosophy, Redon’s understanding of the ‘aura’ deepened – the glow of thought waves. A botanist friend, Armand Clavaud, recommended such Indian classics as Valmiki’s Ramayana. He enjoyed reading great poetry from India as well as the work of his fellow French writers Baudelaire and Flaubert. A critic, Marius Leblond, said of him, ‘he made French idealism spring back and radiate in painting.’
Redon was also fascinated by Celtic culture, druids – and druidesses! – and the Celtic view of the natural world. Brittany felt to him like an ‘ancient homeland’ where he had once lived and loved.
His illustrations of Poe are remarkable. This raven looks like it could talk.