Exhibitions
Odilon Redon 1840 – 1916: Dreams and Visions (Royal Academy, till 21 May)
Ghastly gestations
Giles Auty
he four subjects which should be banned permanently from polite dinner
party conversation are money, operations, relationships and dreams. If anything, I favour an emphasis on the last.
The exhibition at the Royal Academy of work by Odilon Redon thoroughly rein- forces my prejudice. Was the artist's cheese intake of an evening a little too high? Would the counselling of a friendly G.P. `Pas de camembert apres huit heures, Odilon' — have made a difference? If I sound frivolous and unsympathetic, it is as a necessary antidote to the mawkish and introspective values this show enshrines. Why people are so fascinated by art founded in dream and fantasy remains a mystery to me. My closest stab at an answer is that those with defective imagina- tions attempt to make up this shortfall by living through the imaginations of others. Thus the dullest and most inadequate peo- ple at any party are likely to be those most interested in the surreal or occult; often a beautiful world exists outside their windows which they cannot bother to see. Once, when living in a remote country village, I had as a neighbour a man whose notion of light conversation was to discuss the pre- cise colour of everyone's auras; he was not a great hit with the hoydons of nearby Tiverton, either. Hereabouts, I cannot improve on the comments of Arthur Little S.J. in his little-known but incisive book, The Nature of Art (Longmans 1946): 'Surre- alism, for example, holds that man reveals the inmost truth of his nature, not while he is in a condition of alert rationality, but when the lawless subconscious is liberated in dreams . . . . It is incredible that it is better for a man to be lawless than to be disciplined, to dream than to think to a purpose, to yearn vaguely than to resolve definitely and for good reasons.' Art exists in such a debased intellectual climate now that such shining sense needs re-stating daily.
Odilon Redon was born near Bordeaux of a privileged family which had fallen on hard times, but whose fortunes had been revived by his father in America. Odilon was conceived in that country and liked to represent himself always as the misunder- stood outsider of French society and art. But it was towards his unfortunate family that much of his bitterness was directed. Writing of an artist's life, i.e. his own, Redon proclaimed: 'He is born completely naked on straw without a mother to pre- pare his swaddling clothes. As soon as he exhibits the flower of originality . . . this flower's unfamiliar perfume disturbs peo- ple and causes them to turn away.' The whole exhibition is infused with schoolgirl- ish self-pity. Art historians such as R.H. Wilenski, who have tried to present Redon as a kind of French William Blake, would have that great figure writhing in his grave. Redon was interested in himself far more than in society, from which he shrank like one of the wilting flowers he drew.
Redon's art paddled along the once fash- ionable tidelines of mysticism, the occult and even satanism, and was inhibited by the artist's fear of madness yet spurred by his ability to titillate a growing audience. Para- doxically, the best test of imaginative art might be said to be that of its credibility. It is in this area that an artist of real force such as Goya seems so powerful; his fantasies seem torn from Spain's ancient and often tragic past, embedded in a national or even universal root. Goya's myths come from credible pre-history, whereas Redon's use of imagination gener- ally tells us more about the artist than about any archetype. This inner weakness brings frequent lapses into a sentimentality which must be more palatable to others than to me — to the historians who pro-
duced a massive and erudite catalogue, for instance.
But I fear my objections to this show do not stop at the personality of the artist but extend to his practice. While Redon's black and white works on paper use tone and contrast to telling effect, his colour can often set the teeth on edge, Some of his drawing is equally painful. A late painting of excruciating ineptitude features an almost formless 'Pandora' 1914 whose anatomy more closely resembles that of a bolster than any other likely inhabitant of a bed. But his difficulties with the female form — and perhaps with any real idea of womanhood — go back at least 39 years to `Angel in Chains' 1875. Sensibly the artist's apologists stick to the symbolism of this. Redon was never comfortable with his academic training and this show tells us why. Credible fantasy requires not just imagination but artistry of the first rank. Redon rarely demonstrated either.
Sir Roger de Grey, former President of the Royal Academy, died on 15 February. He was a man of passionate, but what sometimes seemed contradictory, enthusi- asms in art. He held a profound belief in the proper teaching of craft skills yet allied this with an enthusiastic advocacy of youth and the avant-garde. His own tonal oil paintings, often of France, reflected the diplomat and aesthete in him rather than the radical. Few have worked harder for their causes both within the Royal Academy and without.
Detail from 'Beatrice' by Odilon Redon, pastel over charcoal, 1885
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