Odilon redon: When night becomes colour

Redon did not always paint like this. For years, he worked in the shadows—literally—with charcoal and ink, creating worlds where smiling spiders mingled with flowers that had human faces. Then, one day, something shifted. Colour entered his work, first tentatively, then triumphantly, as if night itself had decided to dress in light. This metamorphosis, this passage from black to pastel, was not merely a matter of technique. It was the story of a man who chose to transform his nightmares into poetry, his monsters into gods, and his darkness into a symphony of colour.

01The dreamer of Peyrelebade

To understand Redon, one must return to his childhood in the moors of the Gironde. Born in 1840 in Bordeaux, Bertrand-Jean Redon—Odilon was a childhood nickname, taken from his mother’s name, Odile—grew up far from the bustle of Paris, on the family estate of Peyrelebade. A secluded place, almost wild, where maritime pines whispered in the wind and the marshes exhaled mysterious mists. His father, a wealthy landowner, was also a botany enthusiast; his mother, a Creole from New Orleans, passed on to him a taste for exotic tales and distant legends.

It was in this setting that young Odilon developed an overflowing imagination. Often bedridden with illness, he spent hours observing insects, flowers, and the clouds drifting above the ponds. He drew relentlessly, though his early attempts bore little resemblance to the nightmares that would later make him famous. At the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he briefly studied architecture before turning to painting, he clashed with the rigid academicism of his teachers. "They taught me to draw feet, hands, noses… but never how to see," he would later write. The Prix de Rome, which he attempted without success in 1864, finally convinced him: official art was not for him.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 marked a turning point. Enlisted in the National Guard, Redon witnessed the horrors of combat. Upon returning to Bordeaux, he sank into depression. It was then that he began to draw strange things: severed heads floating in the air, spiders with human eyes, landscapes where reality warped like a broken mirror. These works, which he called his noirs, were initially met with suspicion. Who, after all, would want to hang on their wall a weeping spider or a Cyclops with bloodshot eyes?

02The noirs: when art becomes nightmare

Redon’s noirs were not mere drawings. They were windows into the unconscious, fragments of waking dreams. To create them, he used charcoal, a capricious medium that allowed for plays of light and shadow, erasures, revisions. He often worked at night by candlelight, as if he feared that daylight might dissolve his visions.

Take The Weeping Spider (1881). At first glance, it appears to be a simple sketch: a spider, suspended in emptiness, seems to shed tears. But look closer. The creature’s legs are too long, too slender, almost human. Its body, a deep black, merges with the surrounding darkness. And those tears—are they not also eyes? Redon plays with ambiguity, blurring the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead. "I have only ever made portraits," he once said. Portraits of what? Of his fears, his desires, of everything reason refuses to see.

His lithographs, like those in the series In the Dream (1879), pushed the experiment further. On stone, he etched scenes where logic had no place: a man with a bird’s head plays a lyre, a flower transforms into a face, a giant eye watches the viewer as if it could read their thoughts. These images, both grotesque and poetic, captivated the Symbolist writers. Joris-Karl Huysmans, in Against Nature (1884), made them the companions of his protagonist, Des Esseintes, a decadent aesthete who collected the strangest works. "These drawings," Huysmans wrote, "are nightmares made flesh, hallucinations made visible."

Yet Redon was not merely an illustrator of macabre fantasies. His noirs were also reflections on science, religion, and death. The Microbe (1883), for instance, depicts a hybrid creature, half-insect, half-human, as if plucked from a microbiology treatise. At a time when Pasteur was revolutionising medicine and Darwin was upending our understanding of humanity, Redon explored the shadowy zones of knowledge. His monsters were not just products of the imagination; they were metaphors for the invisible, for what science was only just beginning to glimpse.

03The revelation of colour

Then, around 1890, something changed. Redon, who had spent twenty years plumbing the depths of black, discovered colour. Not just any colour: pastels, those sticks of pure pigment that allowed for unparalleled effects of light and transparency. At first, he used them cautiously, as if taming a wild beast. In The Chariot of Apollo (1905–1910), the horses of the sun god are still sketched in light, almost timid strokes, as if afraid to shatter the darkness around them. But gradually, colour gained ground, invaded the canvas, transforming his visions into true visual poems.

Why this change? The reasons were many. There was a practical one: pastels sold better than noirs. Collectors, weary of nightmares, preferred mythological scenes or flower bouquets. But there was also a deeper reason. Redon, who had long explored darkness, now seemed to yearn for light. His pastels became hymns to beauty, to spirituality, to life. Orpheus (1903–1910), for example, shows the legendary poet, his severed head floating on the water like a flower. The scene, almost mystical in its serenity, contrasts sharply with the noirs of his youth. Here, death is no longer an end but a metamorphosis.

His bouquets, like Vase of Flowers (1900–1910), are just as revealing. In these works, petals seem made of light, leaves tremble as if stirred by an invisible breeze. Redon did not paint flowers; he captured their essence, their soul. "The flower is a living being," he wrote. "It breathes, it suffers, it loves." This almost animist approach recalls the Japanese prints he collected, as well as the theories of Theosophy, the esoteric philosophy that saw nature as a manifestation of the divine.

04The mystic and the scientist

Redon was a man of contradictions. On one hand, he was fascinated by science, by the discoveries of his time. He read Darwin, took an interest in microbiology, drew fossils and microscopic organisms. On the other, he was drawn to mysticism, to biblical stories, to Eastern legends. How to reconcile these two worlds? By merging them, quite simply.

Take The Buddha (1904). The figure of the sage, seated in lotus position, radiates a golden light. Around him, lotus flowers bloom, symbols of purity and rebirth. But look closer: the Buddha’s contours are blurred, as if dissolving into the light. Redon did not paint a god; he painted the idea of spiritual awakening, that illumination which transcends form.

Even his mythological scenes, like The Cyclops (1914), blend science and poetry. The one-eyed giant, often depicted as a brutal monster, becomes in Redon’s hands a tender creature, gazing melancholically at the sleeping nymph Galatea. The Cyclops’s body is covered in shades of pink and blue, as if his flesh were made of clouds. Here, mythology is no longer a story but an allegory of solitude, of impossible love, of beauty that eludes.

This duality between science and spirituality is also present in his technique. For his pastels, Redon used rare pigments—cobalt blue, emerald green—which he layered in thin strokes to create effects of transparency. His colours were not applied at random; they followed an almost alchemical logic, where each hue had to harmonise with the others to evoke emotion. "Colour," he said, "is a vibration of the soul."

05The legacy of a dreamer

When Redon died in 1916, the art world was in upheaval. Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism were shattering conventions. Yet his influence was everywhere. The Surrealists, in particular, saw him as a precursor. André Breton, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), cited him as one of the few artists to have explored the unconscious before Freud. Salvador Dalí, fascinated by his hybrid creatures, drew inspiration from them for his own nightmares. Even the Abstract Expressionists, like Mark Rothko, recognised him as a master of colour and pure emotion.

But Redon was not just an artist for artists. His work speaks to anyone who has ever dreamed, feared, hoped. His noirs remind us that beauty can emerge from shadow, that horror and poetry are sometimes only a matter of perspective. His pastels invite us to see the world differently, to seek light even in the darkest corners.

Today, his works are displayed in the world’s greatest museums, from the Musée d’Orsay to the MoMA. Yet Redon remains a discreet artist, almost secretive. He never sought glory, only the truth of his visions. Perhaps that is why he still moves us, more than a century after his death. Because he dared to look where others turned away. Because he transformed his nightmares into art, and his darkness into light.

And if, the next time you see a flower bloom or a shadow stretch across a wall, you think of him? Maybe then you will understand what he meant when he wrote: "I have only ever made art according to my own nature, and I made it with love."