NEW YORK.-The Museum of Modern Art presents Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon, on view through January 23, 2006. The exhibition was organized by Jodi Hauptman, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art. Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon explores the career of Odilon Redon (1840–1916), a French artist who identified with Symbolism and Decadence, a pair of artistic and literary movements that emerged in France in the late nineteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe.

Rejecting the industrialized world and its faith in scientific progress as well as the naturalism that pervaded art and literature of the time, Symbolist and Decadent writers, poets, and artists embraced fantasy and dream. In this context, Redon established his own pictorial vocabulary—smiling spiders, winged floating heads, disembodied eyeballs, primeval organisms—transforming the natural world into dark visions and bizarre fantasies. Many of his works are also based on literary, biblical, and mythological subjects.

In 2000, The Ian Woodner Family Collection donated more than 100 paintings, pastels, watercolors, drawings, prints, and illustrated books to MoMA, increasing the Museum’s Redon holdings to almost 300 in total. MoMA now has the most significant body of Redon’s work outside of France. Comprised of highlights from the Woodner gift, along with selections from the Museum’s already-rich holdings, Beyond the Visible presents approximately 100 works that show the full range of the artist’s achievements, including mysterious charcoal noirs (the artist’s term for his charcoal drawings), luminous pastels, richly textured paintings, and dramatically shaded lithographs. The artist’s career can be roughly divided into work made before and after about 1900. The exhibition addresses both halves: in the first, the artist explores the limits of blackness (through varieties of black charcoal, black chalk, and black pastel); in the second, he turns to spectacular color (using the bright hues of oil paint, pastel, and watercolor). The exhibition is on view in the special exhibitions gallery on the third floor of the Museum from October 30, 2005, through January 23, 2006.

Beyond the Visible illuminates Redon’s role within a broader and extraordinarily productive cultural milieu in and around Paris in the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, focusing in particular on the artist’s links to writers and poets. The exhibition includes his collaborations with literary figures (Edmond Picard and Émile Verhaeren, for example) and work that was inspired by others (including Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Flaubert). Redon’s great achievements as a printmaker will also be highlighted, notably his interest in the portfolio form, examples of which will be shown in their entirety.

Jodi Hauptman, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, organized Drawing from the Modern, 1880–1945, the first installment in a three-part exhibition in MoMA’s Drawings Galleries, marking the opening of the new building. Ms. Hauptman is the author of Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (Yale University Press, 1999; winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Charles Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art). She has taught at Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of Delaware. She received her B.A. from Princeton University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University.

The accompanying publication presents the scope of Redon’s career through essays on the artist’s unique pictorial strategies (by Jodi Hauptman), the multiple meanings of his monsters (by Bard College professor Marina van Zuylen) and his achievements in printmaking, particularly his attention to the portfolio form (by Starr Figura, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, MoMA); over 100 color plates; and a catalogue of every Redon work in the Museum’s collection. The book is published by The Museum of Modern Art and will be sold in the MoMA Stores beginning in October. The book will also be available to the trade through Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.) in the United States and through Thames & Hudson internationally. Price: $55.00.