1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Then There Appears a Singular Being, Having the Head of a Man on the Body of a Fish is a 1888 by Odilon Redon, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a man’s head stuck on a fish’s scaly body, floating in empty space. Redon made this strange creature after reading a novel about a saint’s nightmares. The book never described this exact monster—Redon just dreamed it up. The dark, grainy look comes from lithography, a printmaking method that lets artists draw with greasy crayons on stone. If you like odd, dreamy creatures, look up the technique sfumato.
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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