Colour studies in Paris/Odilon Redon
ODILON REDON
The name of Odilon Redon is known to but few people in France, and to still fewer people in England. Artistic Paris has never had time to think of the artist who lives so quietly in her midst, working patiently at the record of his visions, by no means discouraged by lack of appreciation, but probably tired of expecting it. Here and there the finer and more alert instinct of some man who has himself brought new gifts to his art—Huysmans, Mallarmé, Charles Morice, Emile Hennequin—has divined what there is of vision and creation in this strange, grotesque world which surges only half out of chaos—the world of an artist who has seen day and night.
The work of Odilon Redon—his later work, that which is most characteristic of him—consists of a series of lithographic albums, all published since 1880: Dans le Rêve, À Edgar Poe, Les Origines, Hommage à Goya, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, À Gustave Flaubert, Piéces Modernes, and Les Fleurs de Mal. Each album contains from six to ten plates in large folio, printed on beau papier de Chine, without text, often without title, or with a vague and tantalising legend, such as Au réveil, j'aperçus la Déesse de l'Intelligible, au profit severe et dur. So, without an attempt to conciliate the average intelligence, without a word of explanation, without a sign of apology for troubling the brains of his countrymen, Odilon Redon has sent out album after album. So little effect have they produced that it has taken ten years to sell twenty-four out of the twenty-five copies of Dans le Rêve. "Reste l'exemplaire."
Odilon Redon is a creator of nightmares. His sense for pure beauty is but slight, or rather for normal beauty; for he begets upon horror and mystery a new and strange kind of beauty, which astonishes, which terrifies, but which is yet, in his finest work, beauty all the same. Often the work is not beautiful at all: it can be hideous, never ineffective. He is a genuine visionary: he paints what he sees, and he sees through a window which looks out upon a night without stars. His imagination voyages in worlds not realised, voyages scarcely conscious of its direction. He sees chaos, which peoples its gulfs before him. The abyss swarms—toutes sortes d'effroyable bêtes surgtssent—animal and vegetable life, the germs of things, a creation of the uncreated. The world and men become spectral under his gaze, become transformed into symbols, into apparitions, for which he can give no account often enough. Cest une apparition—voila tout! He paints the soul and its dreams, especially its bad dreams. He has dedicated some of his albums to Flaubert, to Poe, to Baudelaire; but their work is to him scarcely so much as a starting-point. His imagination seizes on a word, a chance phrase, and transforms it into a picture which goes far beyond and away from the author's intention—as in the design which has for legend the casual words of Poe: "L'œil, comme un ballon bizarre, se dirige vers l'infini." We see an actual eye and an actual balloon: the thing is grotesque.
The sensation produced by the work of Odilon Redon is, above all, a sensation of infinitude, of a world beyond the visible. Every picture is a little corner of space, where no eye has ever pierced. Vision succeeds vision, dizzily. A cunning arrangement of lines gives one the sense of something without beginning or end: spiral coils, or floating tresses, which seem to reach out, winding or unwinding for ever. And as all this has to be done by black and white, Redon has come to express more by mere shadow than one could have conceived possible. One gazes into a mass of blackness, out of which something gradually disengages itself, with the slowness of a nightmare pressing closer and closer. And, with all that, a charm, a sentiment of grace, which twines roses in the hair of the vision of Death. The design. La Mort, is certainly his masterpiece. The background is dark; the huge coils which terminate the body are darker than the background, and plunge heavily into space, doubling hugely upon themselves, coils of living smoke: yet the effect of the picture is one of light—a terror which becomes beautiful as it passes into irony. The death's head, the little vague poverty-stricken face, is white, faint, glimmering under the tendrils of hair and roses: tresses of windy roses which stream along and away with an effect of surprising charm, the lines running out in delicate curves, to be lost in the night. And below, separated from the head by a blotch of sheer blackness, one sees a body, a beautiful, slender supple body, glittering with a strange acute whiteness, with a delicate arm raised to the empty temples of the skull. Below, in its frightful continuation of the fine morbid flesh of the body, the black column, the huge and heavy coils, which seem endless. The legend is from Flaubert. Death speaks, saying: Mon ironie dépasse toutes les autres.
Ammonaria and Le Sphinx et la Chimère are from the same album, which illustrates Le Tentation de Saint Antoine, and are characteristic, though not the finest, examples of Redon's work. The scene of Ammonaria is before the temple of Serapis, at Alexandria. It is a Christian martyr whom they are scourging: she writhes under the blows, in the cruel sunlight: one feels the anguish of the bent and tortured figure, suffering visibly. The other design renders that marvellous dialogue between the Sphinx and the Chimera. "C'est que je garde mon secret!" says the Sphinx. "Je songe et je calcule.… Et mon regarde que rien ne peut dévier, demeure tendu à travers les choses sur un horizon inaccessible. Moi," replies the Chimera, "je suis légère et joyeuse!" and it is a veritable hilarity that one discovers, looking at it rightly, in the regard of the strange creature: a spasm of ironic laughter in the blots of blackness which are its eyes, in the mouth that one divines, in the curl and coil of the whole figure. In the calm gaze and heavy placid pose of the Sphinx, lines of immeasurable age above its eyes, there is a crushing force which weighs on one like a great weight, something external. The power of the Chimera is of the mind and over souls. Vague, terrible, a mockery, a menace, it has the vertigo of the gulf in its eyes, and it draws men toward those "new perfumes, those larger flowers, those unfelt pleasures," which are not to be found in the world. In another design the Chimera, spitting fire from its nostrils, light glittering and leaping on wings and tail, turns on itself, distending its jaws in a vast ironic bark: la chimère aux yeux verts, tournoie, aboie. More terrible, more wonderful, more disquieting is Le Diable avec les sept Péchés cardinaux sous ses Ailes. The design is black upon black, and it is only slowly that a huge and solemn, almost a maternal face, looms out upon one: Satan, placid, monstrous, and winged, who cradles softly the little vague huddled figures of the seven deadly sins, holding them in his large hands, under the shadow of his wings. And there is another Satan, valiantly insurgent against the light that strikes him, a figure of superb power in revolt. Yet another design shows us Pegasus, his beautiful wing broken, a wing that had felt the high skies, falling horribly upon the rocks: all the agony and resistance of the splendid creature seen in the trampling hoofs and heaving sides, and the head caught back by the fall. Again one sees a delicate twilight landscape of trees and birds, a bit of lovely nature, and in it, with the trouble of a vague nightmare, coming there inexplicably, Le Joueur, a man who holds on his shoulders an immense cube painfully: the man and the trees seem surprised to see each other. There is another landscape, a primeval forest, vague and disquieting, and a solitary figure, the figure of a man who is half a tree, like some forgotten deity of a lost race: the forest and the man are at one, and hold converse. And there are heads, heads floating in space, growing on stalks, couched on pedestals; eyeballs, which voyage phantasmally across the night, which emerge out of nests of fungus, which appear, haloed in light, in the space of sky between huge pillars; there are spectral negroes, there are centaurs, there are gnomes, a Cyclops (with the right accent of terrifying and yet comic reality), embryonic formless little shapes, and, persuasively, the Sciapodes of Flaubert: "La tête le plus has possible, c'est le secret du bonheur! Il y doit avoir quelque part," says Flaubert, "des figures primordiales, dont les corps ne sont que les images," and Redon has drawn them, done the impossible. The Chimera glides mystically through the whole series. Death, the irony; Life, the dream; Satan, the visible prince of darkness, pass and repass in the eternal dance of apparitions.
1903.