Odilon Redon Art Prints

Odilon Redon French, 1840-1916

9 museum-quality prints of works by Odilon Redon, each made to order on archival paper and shipped to your wall.

Odilon Redon, born in Bordeaux in 1840, spent the first half of his career working almost exclusively in black. His charcoal drawings and lithographs — he called them his noirs — conjured winged heads, sentient plants, and dream architecture from the medium’s depths; The Sphinx (1883) and Strange Flower (Little Sister of the Poor) (1880) are characteristic. Trained in etching by Rodolphe Bresdin and in lithography by Henri Fantin-Latour, Redon remained obscure until 1884, when Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours made his drawings a touchstone of the Symbolist movement.

In the 1890s Redon turned to pastel and oil, and after 1900 abandoned the noirs entirely for a palette of unprecedented brilliance, applied chiefly to flower still lifes, portraits, and mythological reveries such as Sita (c. 1893). The younger Nabis painters revered him, and Matisse acknowledged the influence of his pastels; the Surrealists later claimed the noirs as their own ancestry.