Strange—And Wonderful—Odilon Redon At Cleveland Museum Of Art

How did a nascent Midwestern art museum end up with one of the world’s preeminent collections of work from one of the most avant-garde painters working in France at the turn of the 20^th century? This story begins at the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show. The show was considered the official introduction of Modern art to Americans.

Picasso, Gauguin, Duchamp, Hopper–the “Armory Show” shocked and astonished large crowds, first in New York before traveling to Chicago and Boston.

Of the hundreds of artists represented, no one had more work featured in the historic Armory Show–74–than Odilon Redon (1840-1916).

Unfamiliar with Redon, but fascinated by what he saw, was an early curator and future director at the Cleveland Museum of Art, William Milliken.

“(Milliken) shared Redon’s name with (Cleveland) philanthropist and early museum trustee, Ralph Thrall King, who fell in love with his work and immediately began to collect his drawings and prints,” Britany Salsbury, Cleveland Museum of Art Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, told Forbes.com. “King was known for his habit of going up and down Fifth Avenue and buying each gallery’s entire inventory of Redon prints–supposedly, they were known to say, ‘Get out your Odilon Redons, Ralph King is coming.’ In doing so, he was able to acquire numerous complete print portfolios by Redon—unusual since dealers would often break up the series to sell the prints individually.”

The CMA’s history with Redon, from the earliest works in its collection to a print acquired in 2020, are shared in the exhibition “Collecting Dreams: Odilon Redon,” on view now through January 23, 2022.

Milliken and King would further work together on the acquisition of two major pastels by Redon, Orpheus–considered by some historians the artist’s finest work–and Violette Heymann. Doing so attracted international press for the museum which first opened its doors in 1916. These early acquisitions earned the CMA an international reputation as the most important repository of works by Redon outside France. The museum continues augmenting its remarkable collection to this day. 

Quasimodo

The most recent addition to the CMA’s collection of Redon artworks, a charcoal drawing titled Quasimodo acquired in 2020, serves as a highlight of the exhibition, enjoying public display for the first time. Even for an artist as enigmatic as Redon–he has been referred to as “the prince of mysterious dreams”–this picture is strange.

Quasimodo belongs to a group of drawings that Redon termed “noirs” for their use of black materials, such as charcoal, and their foreboding mood. Redon studied briefly in Paris before rejecting his conservative training and returning to his native Bordeaux in southern France. There, he spent a decade depicting highly original, often bizarre themes executed exclusively in black, ranging from inky lithographs to dense charcoal drawings.

Everything about this series stands in stark contrast to the colorful, fanciful pastels Redon has become most famous for.

“One of the things that seems to have appealed to Redon most about (charcoal drawing) was its privacy; unlike painting, which often involves more expensive materials and needs to be exhibited in a gallery, Redon could work privately and independently with his prints and drawings,” Salsbury said. “He could take on subject matter that might be more difficult to find an audience for in painting, and he could develop new techniques. He was very innovative in how he used charcoal–he’d often combine it with other black materials, rub it with cloth, breadcrumbs, or even his fingers to blur it, and use adhesive to secure it to the paper’s surface so he could build layers on top of it.”

Similar to van Gogh and Cezanne, Redon’s palette would eventually lighten dramatically into his signature style. Around 1890, Redon’s work took a stunning turn when he discovered pastel, a powdery material made from pure pigment. For the remainder of his life, he created colorful visions drawn from mythology, religion and his social circle.

“I think that when he switched to pastel, he was still looking for many of the same things in a different material,” Salsbury said. “He was just as experimental in pastel, often layering it, using a wide range of marks, and choosing colored papers that changed the way that his colors appeared. His primary interest seems to have always been in experimentation.”

Andromeda

Andromeda (1912), a special loan from the Arkansas Art Center exhibited for the first time in the United States at the CMA in 1926, also headlines the exhibition. It is one of the artist’s most significant late paintings and demonstrative of the dramatic stylistic turn Redon took from his “noirs.”

All of the work, his imaginative paintings, drawings and prints which mined fantasy, literature and the subconscious, clearly prefigure Surrealism which was waiting just around the artistic corner following Redon’s death in 1916.

In plainspoken terms, Redon’s artwork was strange, his career straddling a rapidly-changing art world which saw the invention of Impressionism on one end and the invention of abstraction on the other.

“His art belongs to a movement called Symbolism, which responded to Impressionism, and its focus on subjects taken from modern urban life, by turning inward,” Salsbury explained. “Rather than representing the world around them, they drew from imagination.”

Which makes those speculative purchases by early CMA leadership and supporters all the more courageous in hindsight. Redon’s artwork could have easily been dismissed as simply “weird,” with a more conservative course of collecting sought.

Thank goodness for the CMA’s risk takers. History has validated their choice.

“I think that his work has held up after so many years because of its fascinating strangeness. Although many of his early works are quite dark in theme, there’s something fun about them, too,” Salsbury said. “We get images of eyes floating in hot air balloons, crying spiders, disembodied hands, and so many different kinds of monsters—it’s not something many people could ever imagine let alone something we see in Modern art. There’s something endlessly interesting about an artist who invents a whole world entirely of his own and lets us into it.”