Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Shows Odilon Redon

Written by Chaz Handy Tuesday, 26 April 2011 20:34

Frankfurt, Germany - The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is planning a comprehensive exhibition devoted to the work of the French artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916).  The aim of this representative selection of drawings, prints, pastels, and paintings from public and private collections – particularly from France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States – is to update public perception of this artist, one of the great precursors of Modernism.  Under this point of view Odilon Redon can maybe be compared with Paul Cézanne in many respects. On exhibition 27 January – 29 April 2007.

Earlier exhibitions such as in Bremen 1982, the retrospectives in Chicago, Amsterdam, and London in 1996, and an exhibit in Lugon in 1996 did not to create among the German-speaking public the recognition Redon deserves as one of the central figures of Symbolism.  His images not only influenced the artists of Surrealism, but still continue to influence artists today.  The fact that France had its own version of Romanticism, as represented by Delacroix’s works to which Redon refers, as well as a different sense for the connection between image and language may explain the delayed reception of Redon’s art in Germany.

As a direct contemporary of the Impressionists – among whom were Monet, Degas, Manet, Renoir – who were devoted above all to the reproduction and composition of visual reality, Redon created in his works a metaphorical world.  He was deeply stimulated by the poetry and especially the aesthetics of Baudelaire, who gave primacy to the subjective imagination as the reason of all creativity.  The same is to be said about Redon’s affinity to Edgar Allan Poe, Flaubert, and Mallarmé.  They also stimulated this artist’s interest in the phenomenon of dream and its psychic conditions.

Redon has been influenced by his intimate friendship with Armand Clavaud, a botanist who focused primarily on algae and the intermediate state between plant and animal following Darwin’s theory of evolution.  It was his microscope that made young Redon aware of the existence of a second world, one that was concretely present but could not be perceived by the naked eye, presenting a double reality.  It is Odilon Redon’s particular merit, not to illustrate this double reality, but to have elaborated a strategy of combinatorics, superimposition, and ambiguity.

 Despite his predilection for isolation, Redon was gifted with a nearly seismographic sensorium for the moving forces of his time.  This inspired his new understanding of religion and mythology, for which he invented unconventional images.  In those days there were few artists like Redon whose works so strongly need an interdisciplinary approach which will be followed in the exhibition catalogue in German and English. 

 The exhibition will be curated by Prof. Dr. Margret Stuffmann, former head of the graphic department at Städelsches Kunstinstitut and guest curator at Schirn Kunsthalle.

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