Drawn On Redon
Odilon Redon [1840 – 1916]
My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.
Black is the most essential colour … [it] should be respected. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and does not awaken sensuality. It is the agent of the spirit much more than the splendid colour of the palette or of the prism
I was born on a wave of sound
— Odilon Redon, ‘Confidences d’artiste’, L’Art moderne 14, 1894
The gallery of Redon’s art below includes a set of images he made to illustrate the Lafcadio Hearn translation of Gustav Flaubert’s “Tentation De Saint Antoine” (1910).