MONTREAL, CANADA.- Odilon Redon (1840-1916), the supreme artist of French Symbolism, was also a masterful and highly influential lithographer. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts acquired its first Redon, the painting The Bather (1905) in 1999. The recent acquisition of his remarkable complete suite "To Gustave Flaubert" (1889), published in an edition of only sixty, provides a highly representative look at this other aspect of his production. These lithographs are presented through January 14, 2007, in the Museum’s Gallery of Prints and Drawings. This show features also some spectacular prints by the artist on loan from the National Gallery of Canada.

It was on his own initiative that Redon began executing prints inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s works in the 1880s. In fact, three of Redon’s most famous lithographic suites, created in 1888, 1889 and 1896, were derived from that writer’s Temptation of Saint Anthony [La Tentation de saint Antoine] (1874). In all, the forty lithographs devoted to this subject account for one quarter of Redon’s lithographic works.

In the first series of prints (1888), figures, captions and dialogues appear together on the pages, the imagery deriving from the last sections of the text and Redon’s own repertoire of Symbolist themes like his famous image of the hovering eye. The prints were received positively but with certain reservations by Redon’s friends and admirers. The second series, "To Gustave Flaubert", executed between 1888 and 1889, was begun immediately after the completion of the first. It was to be the most successful, admired and influential of the artist’s three series. Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Gauguin were enthusiastic. A third, larger suite was undertaken in 1896, at the encouragement of Ambroise Vollard, but the results were less satisfactory, perhaps because Redon chose to liberate himself from the literary content rather than work in relation with it.

The second series (1889) is a consummate _expression of Redon’s graphic work at its most inspired. It consists of six lithographs bearing poetic titles and a frontispiece entitled: À Gustave Flaubert / Six dessins pour / La Tentation de saint Antoine / Par Odilon Redon. Plate 3, Death: My Irony Surpasses All Others! remains an icon of the artist’s work.

The prints abound in the artist’s cryptic and haunting Symbolist imagery, including sphinxes and biomorphic and death fantasies. Flaubert’s rich vocabulary and imagery and the evocative subject matter, filled with religion, mystery, heresy and superstition, inspired Redon.

Redon was anxious to liberate his prints from being mere accompaniments to text and wrote to André Mellerio, his friend and biographer, of his avoidance of the term "illustration". His thoughts are remarkably pertinent to studying the Temptation of Saint Anthony:

I have never used the defective word "illustration". You will not find it in my catalogues. The right term has not yet been coined. I can only think of "transmission", of "interpretation". Still these are not sufficiently precise to completely express the [process] by which one of my readings [prompts] me to go through my organised noirs.

Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Associated Chief Curator, Curator of Old Masters and Curator of the Prints and Drawings Gallery at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is in charge of this presentation.