1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
And a Large Bird, Descending from the Sky, Hurls Itself against the Topmost Point of Her Hair is a 1888 by Odilon Redon, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A woman stands still while a giant bird dives straight at her head. The bird’s wings are spread wide, claws out, beak open—like it’s about to crash. Redon drew this after reading a strange book about a saint’s nightmares. The bird isn’t in the story; Redon made it up to feel like a bad dream. The dark, grainy lines make everything look like it’s happening in shadow. If you like this eerie mood, look up chiaroscuro—a way artists use light and dark to make things feel spooky.
This portfolio is one of three made by Odilon Redon inspired by avant-garde writer Gustave Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). Captivated by the book’s fantastical account of moralizing tests encountered by a hermit in the desert, Redon executed charcoal drawings and attempted to evoke that medium’s dense blackness in his lithographs. Based on the text’s darkly imaginative tone rather than its actual content, the works in this series present invented monsters and figures in otherworldly settings with jarring tonal variations. Although Redon felt that the prints…
Publisher Edmond Deman commissioned this portfolio after he saw an 1886 exhibition of Redon's work in Brussels, Belgium.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Born Bertrand-Jean Redon on 20 April 1840 in Bordeaux, the artist adopted the name Odilon from his mother, Marie-Odile.
See the richer artist page
