ARTS For centuries the production of prints was a secondary art, a way for artists to reproduce and publish their primary work. The invention of photography made mechanical prints of this sort obsolete, yet printmaking did not die. Several prominent artists throughout the 19th century – Blake, Palmer, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec – saw prints, whether etched, cut, scraped or lithographed, as having their own artistic quality. But it was Whistler who pioneered a method of adding real value to them. By rationing their quantity, he was able to maintain the rarity prized by art collectors. The limited edition, proofed, signed and numbered by the artist, had arrived.
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| ‘La mort: c’est moi qui te rends sérieuse; enlaçonsnous!’ (1896) |
This was probably not unwelcome to Redon. A shy man who believed that drawing and painting were solitary activities, he found the notion of public art repugnant. Yet the “inwardness” he advocated resulted in a remarkable body of work, not only highly individual in the context of the 19th century but, by engaging with the hidden workings of the human psyche, anticipated one of the great obsessions of the 20th. The current exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, of 38 lithographs from the museum’s collection, all of superfine quality, makes this artist look startlingly like a prophet of the ideas of Carl Jung.
Redon’s shadowy themes, dream figures from fable and myth and from the obsessions of his own imagination, come across as the ever-ambiguous emanations of the unconscious mind, brought forth years before the unconscious entered the common discourse of intellectuals – though it was a word he knew and referred to in his writings.
If inner fires warmed Redon’s imagination, they were often fuelled by his reading. A typical Redon scene is Baudelairean and crepuscular. He also loved Poe and Flaubert, from whose eccentric novel The Temptations of St Anthony he published three sets of prints in limited edition albums. These lithographs, far from being literal illustrations, approach the visions and hallucinations that torment the saint merely as starting points for the artist’s own fantasies: angels and winged horses, biomorphic forms, grotesques and chimeras. His humans are lonely, often haunted by nameless emanations that hover in the shadows around them. In one of his few portrayals of a group of people, they are shrouded figures cast into a gloomy cellar with a single, gaping window far out of their reach – damned souls more like lepers than sinners.
The notion of hell as a place of exclusion rather than punishment reappears in a print of “The Fallen Angel”, where the angel is all baffled innocence. That mood is derived from romantic heresy, but the print also strikes a more original note that lifts Redon clear of his reading. The wings that sprout from the angel’s shoulders will never lift him, being made from slabs of stone, so that the print strikes a surreal note almost 40 years before the first Surrealist Manifesto. Again and again, Redon’s imagery has this surreal ring. His disembodied eyes, deep-sea biomorphs and jarring juxtapositions make him look a major influence on Dali, Miró and Magritte. He certainly interested an important forerunner of surrealism, Marc Chagall, who named his son Odilon in tribute.
Most of Redon’s “black” lithographs are done by the transfer technique whereby, instead of working with the lithographic pencil directly on to the stone, the artist draws or paints with greasy lithographic ink on paper, which is then rolled on to the stone. Not only did this allow more scope for his draughtsmanship – for example, in shading and hatching – but the texture of the paper also comes into play to modify the black. Redon found great satisfaction in these effects. “In the final analysis,” he wrote, “black is the most essential colour.”
‘Lumière: Lithographs by Odilon Redon’, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until January 10; www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
