From the Darkness, Light: Revisiting Odilon Redon's noirs
“Black is the most essential of colors. . . . It is not pleasant to the eye and awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the spirit, far more than the fine colors of the palette and prism.” Thus wrote Odilon Redon in 1913, three years before his death, long after he had made the transition from the dark, monochrome world of charcoal drawings and lithographs to the jewel-like, diaphanous visions, realized in pastels and paint, for which he is now best known.
Those charcoals and lithographs, commonly called noirs—“blacks”—were Redon’s first “manner,” that is, the works in which he initially emerged as an original artist by exploring, in depth, the visionary qualities that would mark nearly all his creations. They were also, in every sense, an expression of the primordial darkness from which all creation ensues. Not by accident did he name an 1883 album of lithographs “Les Origines.” In it is a plate entitled When Life Awoke in the Heart of Dark Matter, depicting a luminous, hybrid beast—at once human and canine—smiling strangely as it emerges from the enveloping, formless shadows to which it remains in part attached.
Redon was to remain in his own “shadows” for quite some time, from the late 1870s to the early 1890s, venturing only rarely into color. During this time, he developed an approach to charcoal that would leave the medium forever changed. Drawing technical inspiration from Leonardo and Rembrandt, and seeing in the latter’s use of chiaroscuro not a means to portray bodies and objects in the round but rather an expression of spirituality and immateriality, he wielded his charcoals with great versatility, obtaining gradations that range from absolute opacity to an ethereal transparency that suggests a manifestation of invisibility.
In the 1889 charcoal Sleep, in profile, with hand on face, for example, the immateriality of sleep is rendered with an ever so fine, gauzy stumping that vanishes, along with the figure’s features, as the viewer approaches, as if he or she were drifting off, too. The unconscious realm is pure light, rendered as material absence, reality the dark solid night behind the head. Sleep’s personification assumes the hieratic profile typical of Redon’s treatment of legendary figures and saints—such as the golden Beatrice (1885) or Joan of Arc (1895)—poised on the luminous threshold between being and nonbeing.
A dozen or so important charcoals, including Sleep, were recently available for public viewing at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, in a small exhibit of graphic works from the museum’s own collection. While a relatively limited show—Redon produced nearly a thousand noirs in all, between drawings, charcoals, lithographs, and early etchings—it still displayed enough of the artist’s unique vision to feature, among other things, a smiling spider, a devil, a few angels (which Redon called “winged figures”), and numerous disembodied heads.
“Spirits dwell in his lines and smears of charcoal,” wrote Émile Bernard about Redon in 1904, highlighting the “occult power” of his drawings. To which the artist, when reading that text, jotted in the margin, “I’m no spiritualist!” Hard to believe, perhaps, what with all the otherworldly beings populating his art. But Redon was speaking specifically of his creative process, which sprang, like life itself, from nature. Later, in May 1909, he wrote, “My most fertile method . . . as I’ve often said, [is] to copy reality directly, attentively reproducing the objects of outward nature in its most minute, peculiar, and accidental aspects. After making the effort of meticulously copying a pebble, blade of grass, hand, profile, or any other thing from living or inorganic life, I feel my mind begin to bubble up, and then I need to create, to let myself go, and represent the imaginary.”
The process he describes is nearly identical to dreaming—indeed, his first album of lithographs (1879) was called Dans le rêve (In the Dream). In dreams, otherworldliness is our own mind’s extrapolation from the world; the spirit is one with the body: immanent, not transcendent. Philosophically, poetically, and visually, Redon foreshadows surrealism to the letter, and perhaps no other piece among the noirs shows this better than Eye with Poppy (1882), a conjunction of “distant realities” in a windowlike frame within a frame, long before René Magritte conceived a similar subject. The paper support, the image in the image, is the seeing eye, art as pure vision.
From such shadows as these, Redon would move progressively into the light in his later pastels and paintings. For just as black was a color to him, charcoal was simply dark pastel, and colored pastel an extension of the medium into the spectrum—a breakdown of darkness into light.
