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The most remarkable feature of Redon's
work as an artist was the transition in the 1890's from nightmarish
visions, worked in monochrome, to vividly colored pastels and
oils which in theme and conception are joyful affirmations of
life. A more complete metamorphosis is hard to imagine, and yet
the two phases of Redon's work, the macabre and the optimistic,
are linked by a common concern with the inner spiritual life.
Throughout his career Redon sought to express in his work the
mysterious invisible world that exists alongside the natural
physical world. "I have placed here", he wrote, "a
little door opening on to the mysterious." It is because
of this that, even before the Symbolist movement began, Redon
was a Symbolist, using the imagery of his art to suggest and
evoke the world of the imagination. The real roots of Redon's
art lie in his most personal experience, and particularly in
the memories of his lonely childhood spent at the family estate,
Peyrelebade. He later confessed, "it was necessary there
to fill one's imagination with the unlikely, for into this exile
one had to put something." |
