FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents today As in a Dream – Odilon Redon, on view through April 29, 2007. Although Odilon Redon (1840–1916) as a visual artist was one of the most important forerunners of modernism, and above all Surrealism, his work has not been seen in Germany for decades. This exhibition provides a survey of the French Symbolist’s oeuvre with more than 200 drawings, lithographs, pastels, and paintings from international museums and private collections. During his early period, which was influenced by the contradictory movements of Romanticism and the Naturalism of the Barbizon school, he developed, in contrast to the Impressionists, a pictorial world that was predominantly black-and-white, deriving entirely from inner experience. Toward the end of the nineteenth century Redon turned to extensive use of color, and his figures and objects exude a mysterious, mystic aura. His coming to terms with the sciences, psychology, and literature of his time and an open conception of religion defined Odilon Redon’s visual cosmos, and his work retains even today an undiminished suggestive power.

The exhibition As in a Dream. Odilon Redon is supported by the KPMG Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft Aktiengesellschaft Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft and the Hessische Kulturstiftung.

Max Hollein, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt: “It is only our current approach to the reception of art, which increasingly draws in and challenges the viewer, that has enabled us to recognize Odilon Redon’s significance for modernism. Where his contemporary and counterpart Paul Cézanne was already celebrated a century ago as the father of modernism by the Cubists, this recognition is lacking, particularly in Germany, for the individualist Odilon Redon, who was just as modern.”

Margret Stuffmann, curator of the exhibition: “Redon was one of the great artists in black and later just as all-embracing as a colorist. He was an extraordinary draftsman, a virtuoso lithographer, one of the most impressive artists in pastels of his time, and last but not least a painter who set off on unconventional paths. The autonomy of color, the strategy of the indeterminate, the cosmic effect of removing the boundaries of the pictorial space, and finally the modern experience that truth lies in ambiguity - all these things are the basis of the continuing relevance of Redon’s oeuvre.”

Born in Bordeaux in 1840, raised in rural isolation far from his family, in the care of a nurse and his uncle, of weak physical constitution but many talents, Redon’s life was predestined to be that of an outsider. From the 1870s onward he lived primarily in Paris, interrupted only by regular stays at his family’s vineyard in the Médoc, where he had spent his childhood, and a few trips to the Netherlands, London, and Venice. Redon’s artistic education was correspondingly unusual: his attempts at the art academy in Paris, the beginnings of studies in architecture, and several months in the class of a respected history all ended in failure. Instead, Redon chose models from the tradition that were unusual for his time: Delacroix rather than David and Ingres, Dürer, Rembrandt, and Goya rather than Raphael, not so much Michelangelo as Leonardo da Vinci, who remained his idol until the end of his life.

Redon found the crucial impetus for his art in Bordeaux, from two utterly different personalities: the then all but unknown and now internationally esteemed graphic artist Rodolphe Bresdin (1822–85) and the scientist Armand Clavaud (1828–90). His friendship with the botanist proved perhaps the more decisive of the two; he was a specialist in algae and deeply involved in the discussion of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which was highly topical at the time. Redon was indebted to Clavaud and the view through his microscope not only for a new formal vocabulary but also for the experience of the contradiction between two worlds: the authentic but invisible world of science and visible reality. This tension became the essential point of departure for Redon’s art. Redon was also indebted to Clavaud for access to philosophy, literature, and above all contemporary poetry, especially that of Charles Baudelaire. The latter’s catchword, “imagination”, can rightly be considered the key to understanding Redon’s work.

Other scientific influences included the new directions in medicine and hence the early stages of psychiatry and dream research prior to Sigmund Freud. Redon’s early works, both his black charcoal drawings and the series of lithographs titled Dans le rêve (In a dream), 1879; À Edgar Poe, 1881; and Les origines, 1883, like the later works, testify to the extent that Redon lived, processed, and illustrated these experiences. Sheets like The Misshapen Polyp Floats above the Banks, a Kind of Smiling, Ugly Cyclops, from Les origines enable the viewer to enter a world of fantastic creatures. Forms and facts from the new discoveries of evolution are united with figures from classical mythology and dreams. A raven as messenger of death, a terrifying spider with a human face in the middle of its body, an eye rising in the sky like a strange balloon with a head instead of a basket, winged faces, a mask ringing the death knell, the angel of certainty on the horizon. Redon’s “noirs” make the viewer an accessory without ultimately revealing their secrets. The exhibition’s title varies that of the series In a Dream to emphasize that for Odilon Redon, whom his contemporaries stylized as the “prince of dreams,” represented the imagination and dreaming as a unity. He deliberately approached the imagination as a kind of artistic strategy.

Beginning in 1890 Redon turned to color and began to depict elements from antiquity, Christianity, Eastern religions, and nature in luminous colors. Venus, Apollo, Christ and the Buddha, a shell, a bouquet, or a mysterious bark obtain an evocative quality and are a vexing presence without being materially tangible. The Virgin’s halo glimmers golden from the luminous blue of the night, which has a spiritual quality that anticipates the pure colors spaces of Yves Klein. Redon’s finds in point of departure in visual perception. It is immediate, not naturalistically descriptive but rather determined by emotion. His colorist work is based primarily on translating black into shades, into color. Hence one can already spot in his “noirs” a development that leads from planar beginnings in nearly opaque black to increasing differentiation of tonal and spatial values and greater brightness. Thus his path was not one from black to color but primarily a development from darkness to light and from plane to space.

Redon’s own texts have now been published, and they represent an essential source alongside the scholarly literature. They prove that, as an intense reader, he was naturally inclined to the word and hence to friendships with poets and writers. His connections to the circle of literary Symbolism around Stéphane Mallarmé, which included Joris-Karl Huysmans, became particularly influential, as they would for Paul Claudel and André Gide later. The same is true of music. Redon performed as a violinist with the composer Ernest Chausson and was familiar with Claude Débussy. Thus he lived in the interplay of the arts, as was fitting for the Symbolist program. His personality as a loner did not keep Redon from being open to younger artists. He recognized the significance of Gauguin early on, and was a close friend of the Nabi artists, including Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Maurice Denis. Like them, he was fascinated by Far Eastern culture and also shared with them an interest in decorative paintings, as is clear from his late work, especially the murals for the abbey of Fontforide, near