Editing Odilon Redon (section)

==Reception and interpretations of his work==
[[File:Odilon Redon 006.jpg|thumb|''Butterflies'', around 1910 ([[Museum of Modern Art]])]]
During his early years as an artist, Redon's works were described as "a synthesis of nightmares and dreams", as they contained dark, fantastical figures from the artist's own imagination.<ref>Redon, Odilon, and Raphaël Bouvier (2014). ''Odilon Redon''. p. 2.</ref> His work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. Redon  wanted to place "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible".<ref>Redon, Odilon (1988). ''Odilon Redon: the Woodner Collection''. Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collection. unpaginated. {{OCLC|20763694}}.</ref> A telling source of Redon's inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal ''A Soi-même'' (''To Myself''). Of his process he wrote:<ref name="Redon 1989 p. ">{{cite book | last=Redon | first=Odilon | title=A soi-même journal, 1867–1915 : notes sur la vie, l'art et les artistes | publisher=J. Corti |url=https://archive.org/details/soimmejourna00redouoft/page/12/mode/2up | publication-place=Paris | date=1989 | isbn=2-7143-0357-9 | oclc=496052158 | language=fr | page=}}</ref>

{{blockquote|I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.|source=}}

Redon's drawings are characterized as mysterious and evocative by [[Joris-Karl Huysmans]] in the following passage from the novel ''[[À rebours]]'' (1884):

{{blockquote|Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance—heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top—recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.<ref name="Huysmans">{{cite book |author=Joris-Karl Huysmans |author-link=Joris-Karl Huysmans |translator=Margaret Mauldon |title=[[À rebours|Against Nature]] |year=1998 |publisher=Oxford University Press |pages=[https://archive.org/details/againstnature00huys/page/52 52–53] |isbn=0-14-044086-0 }}</ref>}}

The art historian [[Michael Francis Gibson|Michael Gibson]] says that Redon began to want his works, even the ones darker in colour and subject matter, to portray "the triumph of light over darkness."<ref>Gibson, Michael, and Odilon Redon (2011). ''Odilon Redon, 1840–1916: The Prince of Dreams''. Los Angeles, Calif: Taschen America. p. 97. {{ISBN|978-3-8365-3003-3}}.</ref>

Redon described his work as ambiguous and undefinable:

{{blockquote|My drawings ''inspire'', and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.<ref name="Goldwater">{{cite book | title = Artists on Art | first1 = Robert | last1 = Goldwater | first2 = Marco |last2 = Treves | publisher = Pantheon | year = 1945 | isbn = 0-394-70900-4}}</ref>}}