Cover
1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
Artist
Odilon Redon
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 page1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Cover is a 1888 by Odilon Redon, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a shadowy, floating eye with bat wings, drifting over a dark, empty landscape. Redon made this print for a book by Gustave Flaubert about a saint’s nightmares. The monsters aren’t from the story—they’re what Redon imagined the story *felt* like. The deep blacks come from charcoal, a medium he loved for its smudgy, dreamy look. If you like this eerie style, look up *sfumato*—a technique that softens edges into mist, used by artists like Leonardo da Vinci.
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.
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