Odilon Redon: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

Odilon Redon turned charcoal and lithographic stone into a private theatre of dream — the noirs — before flooding his late work with pastel color. This mix traces the Spanish and Romantic print tradition behind him, the obscure Bordeaux etcher and caricaturist who taught him to breed monsters, the Symbolist literary circles that adopted him, and the Surrealists who claimed him as an ancestor.

The Kynda mix for Odilon Redon

• Key Influence · Los Caprichos by Francisco Goya (1799). Redon's debt is explicit: in 1885 he published the lithographic album 'Hommage à Goya', six plates of floating heads and deformed visionaries that answer the Spaniard's aquatints directly. Goya's 'Caprichos' — with its sleeping reason and swarming hybrids — gave Redon the model of the print cycle as a sequence of waking nightmares, and the technical proof that black alone, worked tonally, could carry horror, satire and reverie at once.1 ignored.gif no.pdf
• Influencia Obscura · La Comédie de la Mort by Rodolphe Bresdin (1854). Bresdin, an eccentric, near-destitute etcher living outside Bordeaux, was Redon's true teacher in the 1860s, instructing him in etching and lithography and in the independence of the visionary artist. 'La Comédie de la Mort' — a dense forest crawling with skeletons and vermin, every inch stippled — is the direct ancestor of Redon's noirs: microscopic detail serving a wholly imagined, hallucinated world.
• Local Roots · The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur (1853). Bonheur was born in Bordeaux in 1822, the city where Redon was born in 1840 and raised at the family property of Peyrelebade in the Médoc. Her meticulous animal studies represent the observational, naturalist strain of Bordeaux's nineteenth-century artistic output — the provincial academic world Redon grew up inside and deliberately turned away from when he chose monsters and charcoal over the study of nature.
• Beyond the Medium · La Tentation de saint Antoine by Gustave Flaubert (1874). Redon produced three separate lithographic albums (1888, 1889, 1896) responding to Flaubert's hallucinatory prose drama, in which the hermit saint is assailed by chimeras, heresies and the figure of Death. Flaubert's parade of monsters and the line 'Death and Error grin and simper' supplied Redon with captions, creatures and the structure of the suite — literature functioning less as subject than as license for invention.2
• Peer · L'Apparition by Gustave Moreau (1876). Moreau and Redon were the twin idols of literary Symbolism, both singled out by Joris-Karl Huysmans — Moreau's Salome watercolors and Redon's drawings share chapters of enthusiasm in 'À rebours' (1884), the novel that made Redon's reputation. Working in Paris in the same decades, they pursued jeweled mythological reverie and charcoal nightmare as parallel refusals of Impressionist daylight.
• From the Canon · Dans le rêve by Odilon Redon (1879). Redon's first lithographic album, ten plates issued at his own expense, establishes the vocabulary of the noirs: germinating heads, luminous spheres, a figure contemplating infinity. It announces the program of a lifetime — the image as autonomous dream rather than illustration — and its titles function as poetry. Everything in the later Poe, Flaubert and Goya suites grows out of the devices invented here.
• Key Collaborator · Un atelier aux Batignolles by Henri Fantin-Latour (1870). Fantin-Latour taught Redon the technique of lithographic transfer paper, the procedure that let him draw with charcoal-like freedom and multiply his noirs into albums — arguably the single most consequential technical gift of his career. Fantin's own group portrait of the Batignolles circle shows the Parisian milieu both men moved through, and his lithographs confirm the shared taste for dreamlike tonal printing.
• Legacy · Une semaine de bonté by Max Ernst (1934). Ernst's collage novel of bird-headed men and domestic catastrophe descends directly from the nineteenth-century lithographic album of monsters that Redon perfected. The Surrealists, assembling their genealogy of the dream image, repeatedly named Redon among the precursors who had made the unconscious visible before psychoanalysis; Ernst's hybrid creatures and sequential plates are the clearest formal inheritance.

What influenced Odilon Redon

• La Mort de Sardanapale by Eugène Delacroix (1827). La Mort de Sardanapale (Eugène Delacroix) — titan for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• Un Autre Monde by J. J. Grandville (1844). Un Autre Monde (J. J. Grandville) — ghost for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• Los Caprichos by Francisco Goya (1799). Los Caprichos (Francisco Goya) — titan for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire (1857). Les Fleurs du mal (Charles Baudelaire) — culture for Odilon Redon (openlibrary.org)
• La Tentation de saint Antoine by Gustave Flaubert (1874). La Tentation de saint Antoine (Gustave Flaubert) — culture for Odilon Redon (openlibrary.org)
• The Three Crosses by Rembrandt van Rijn (1653). The Three Crosses (Rembrandt van Rijn) — titan for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• La Comédie de la Mort by Rodolphe Bresdin (1854). La Comédie de la Mort (Rodolphe Bresdin) — ghost for Odilon Redon “(His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.) Back in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpting, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• The Raven and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (1845). The Raven and Other Poems (Edgar Allan Poe) — culture for Odilon Redon

Peers and kindred spirits

• À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884). À rebours (Joris-Karl Huysmans) — collaborator for Odilon Redon “He gained recognition after his drawings were mentioned in the 1884 novel À rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• L'Apparition by Gustave Moreau (1876). L'Apparition (Gustave Moreau) — peer for Odilon Redon “Clement, Four French Symbolists: A Sourcebook on Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Maurice Denis, Greenwood Press, 1996, ISBN 0-313-29752-5 & ISBN 978-0-313-29752-6 Jodi Hauptman and Marina Van Zuylen, Beyond t…” (en.wikipedia.org)
• The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur (1853). The Horse Fair (Rosa Bonheur) — geography for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• L'Après-midi d'un faune by Stéphane Mallarmé (1876). L'Après-midi d'un faune (Stéphane Mallarmé) — collaborator for Odilon Redon (openlibrary.org)
• Un atelier aux Batignolles by Henri Fantin-Latour (1870). Un atelier aux Batignolles (Henri Fantin-Latour) — collaborator for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889 by James Ensor (1888). Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889 (James Ensor) — peer for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• Les Caresses by Fernand Khnopff (1896). Les Caresses (Fernand Khnopff) — peer for Odilon Redon
• Le Pont-Neuf by Albert Marquet (1906). Le Pont-Neuf (Albert Marquet) — geography for Odilon Redon
• Rugby by André Lhote (1917). Rugby (André Lhote) — geography for Odilon Redon
• French and American contemporary art exhibit. Odilon Redon's work is included in the exhibit collection.
• Gustave Fayet. Le Jour et la Nuit (Abbaye de Fontfroide) (Odilon Redon) — collaborator for Gustave Fayet (via Le Jour et la Nuit (Abbaye de Fontfroide))
• Paul Gauguin. Les Origines (Odilon Redon) — peer for Paul Gauguin (via Les Origines)

Who Odilon Redon influenced

• Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 by Marcel Duchamp (1912). Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 (Marcel Duchamp) — legacy for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• Une Semaine de Bonté by Max Ernst (1934). Une semaine de bonté (Max Ernst) — legacy for Odilon Redon (wikidata.org)
• Mama, Papa Is Wounded! by Yves Tanguy (1927). Mama, Papa Is Wounded! (Yves Tanguy) — legacy for Odilon Redon