Odilon Redon : “The Siren Clothed in Barbs, Emerged from the Waves” (1883)

Conceived in shades of black, Odilon Redon’s early works, his so-called noirs, have been described as a “synthesis of nightmares and dreams.” They are an exploration of the of artist’s own psyche, a quest to place “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” J.K. Huysmans popularized Redon in his novel Against Nature, the story of a decadent aristocrat, in which he writes:

“Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over their stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanoes erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance — heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top — recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.”