Beyond The Visible: The Art Of Odilon Redon
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Beyond The Visible: The Art Of Odilon Redon Details
Caught between description and dream, the felt and the imagined, French artist Odilon Redon, whose career bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transformed the natural world into nightmarish visions and bizarre fantasies. Closely allied with the Symbolist movement, Redon offered his own interpretations of literary, biblical and mythological subjects; created a universe of strange hybrid creatures; and presented landscape in a singular way: we see grinning disembodied teeth, smiling spiders, melancholic floating faces, winged chariots, unfamiliar plant life, and velvety black or colored swirls of atmosphere. With a recent gift from the Ian Woodner family, The Museum of Modern Art is now the site of the most significant body of the artist's work outside France, and this book will showcase the full range of Redon's varied oeuvre--charcoal "noirs," luminous pastels, richly textured canvases, literary collaborations and experiments in printmaking--and will illuminate the hold his particular kind of Modernism has had on both twentieth-century and contemporary artists.
Reviews
Having been a fan of Redon since the early seventies, I had positive expectations for this book. I was disappointed. The text at the beginning of the book was excellent, but the actual display of his work was only mediocre. Most of the plates were small (some quite tiny) and more of his gray toned works were displayed than his art using color where his magic really shines. Most of his best color paintings, in my opinion, simply weren't in the book. Since I own a Redon book, purchased in the seventies, one that's literally filled with color plates, my first question was to wonder if the lack of them in this book was a cost saving measure. To me, it's simply not an adequate or satisfying representation of his range. I would not purchase this book had I seen it first.