Profil de lumière (Profile of light)

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was an innovative French printmaker, draughtsman and Symbolist painter. In the 1860s he formed a close friendship with the printmaker Rodolphe Bresdin and from him learned the craft of engraving and etching. Redon was noted for his large, highly original charcoal drawings, which he called his Noirs (black works). They evoke a mysterious world of subjective, often melancholic fantasy. In 1879 he published his first album of lithographs, Dans le Rêve (In the dream).  In the 1890s he increasingly used pastels and oils, and in 1899 he exhibited at Paul Durand-Ruel's avant-garde gallery with the Nabis, a well-known turn of the century school of symbolist and self-consciously 'primitive' artists. In the decade preceding his death, Redon's work attracted increasing recognition and appreciation.

This eerie, charismatic, glowing lithograph, Profile of light, is based on a drawing by Redon of about 1875, now in the Petit Palais, Paris, and this impression is from the second state. The drawing was shown at the Impressionist exhibition that year where the famous, progressive art critic Gustave Geffroy admired it:

'There is a woman's head draped with no specific clothes; a clasp of a lustrous brightness adorns her throat. The eyes are lowered, allowing her to pass an acute gaze beneath inert eyelids; the bitter mouth expresses silence; the fair nose; the firm cheek bespeaks a wounded soul. And the charm of this enigma, as beautiful as a woman by Da Vinci, has a manner without cruelty - there is a fall of light which renders this profile transparent, there is a dazzling headband which gives the forehead the outspokenness of a star, there is the sudden illumination of this pallid face of death.' 

As we can see, Geffroy's admiration is tinged with uncertainty and unease. Redon makes us respond remarkably similarly almost 150 years later.

See:

Stephen Eisenman, The Temptation of Saint Redon: Biography, Ideology, and Style in the Noirs of Odilon Redon (Chicago, 1992)

National Galleries Scotland, 'Odilon Redon (1840-1916), https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/odilon-redon

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   May 2018