Coeur Sacré de Jésus
Odilon Redon
1910
pastel on paper
60 x 46.5 cm
credit: Musée d'Orsay / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

BEYOND THE VISIBLE

In 1913, Redon wrote about the Impressionists, whose dominance of European art was waning:

All that surpasses, illuminates, or amplifies the object and elevates the mind into the realm of mystery, to the confusion of the irresolute and of its delicious restlessness, has been totally closed to them. They kept away, they feared everything pertaining to the symbolic, all that our art contains of the unexpected, the imprecise, the undefinable, and that gives it an appearance bordering on enigma. True parasites of the object, they cultivated art on a uniquely visual field, and in a certain way closed it off from that which goes beyond it.

Christened Bertrand-Jean Redon (1840–1916), Odilon, the first name by which he is generally known, was a nickname derived from his mother, Marie-Odile Guérin (1820–1908). His father, Bernard Redon (1799-1874) had made a fortune in New Orleans before returning to Bordeaux, France where Redon was born and spent his childhood. From an early age he exhibited artistic talent and at fifteen began formal study of drawing. At the insistence of his father, however, he switched to architecture, but in 1862 failed to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts.

He continued to reside in Paris where he experienced modest success with his lithographs and oils until he was drafted at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War. After France’s defeat he resettled in Paris and embarked on Les Noirs (The Blacks), a series of charcoals and lithographs inhabited with smiling spiders, primeval organisms, winged floating heads, and disembodied eye balls. These dark black-and-white images gained a cult status with the 1884 publication of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ notorious novel À rebours (Against Nature), whose protagonist is a decadent aristocrat who collects Redon's drawings. Critical acceptance finally came in the mid-1890s with favorable mainstream reviews and major exhibitions, but just at that juncture Redon decided to abandon charcoal and take up pastels. The first five of these had religious subjects, one of which, Coeur Sacré de Jésus, is seen here.

A leading light of the Symbolist movement, Redon stated his intention was always to "place the visible at the service of the invisible." Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) thought the Symbolist paintings of Redon and others were “analogous to those periodic or chronic dreams with which our sleep is regularly besieged.”

When Redon wrote about “an illumination that seizes our spirit and escapes all analysis,” he might well have been describing the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Is not the Sacred Heart of Jesus a phantasmagoric symbol that makes visible the invisible, gives body to the spiritual, and does so with disquieting effect?

Click here to return to illustration