Odilon Redon Worked Almost Entirely in Black for Decades, Insisting It Was the Most Essential Color of All

9 min read

Odilon Redon, the French Symbolist born in Bordeaux on 20 April 1840, worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography from the early 1870s until the 1890s. He called these works his noirs, French for "blacks," and defended black as the most essential color of all. Only after 1900 did he abandon them completely for pastel and oil.

Imagine the discipline that took. While the Impressionists were dissolving Paris into violet shadows and orange light, Redon sat in his studio with sticks of charcoal, a lithographic crayon, and paper. No blue. No red. For roughly twenty years. In June 1894 the Brussels magazine L'Art Moderne published his explanation under the heading "Confidences d'Artiste," where he wrote that "charcoal does not allow kindness; it is sober, and only with real emotion can you draw results from it." That sentence is the key to his entire first career.

Bordeaux, 1840: The Architect Who Never Was

He was born Bertrand-Jean Redon into a prosperous Bordeaux family whose fortune came from his father's ventures in Louisiana. The boy drew constantly. By age ten he had already won a school prize for his art, and at fifteen he began studying drawing in earnest.

His father had other plans. Architecture was respectable; art was not. Redon sat the entrance examinations and failed them, and that failure quietly redirected the history of Symbolism. Freed from blueprints, he apprenticed himself to Rodolphe Bresdin, a poor and eccentric printmaker who taught him etching and lithography. Bresdin spent his whole life inside black ink, conjuring swarming forests and hermits from crosshatching alone. The lesson took root.

The Franco-Prussian War interrupted everything in 1870. Redon served, came home, and moved to Paris. There, past the age of thirty, he committed himself to the two mediums that would define his next two decades: charcoal drawing and lithography. The charcoal drawings that resulted have almost no equivalent in nineteenth-century art.

The Noirs: Twenty Years Inside Charcoal and Stone

The meaning of Redon's noirs is often misread as simple morbidity. It was closer to method. Black, for Redon, was not the color of despair but the medium of the mind: strip away hue and what remains is pure imagination, tone, and suggestion. Floating eyes, winged heads, spiders with human faces, all of it rendered in velvety charcoal or printed from lithographic stone so that a single drawing could reach dozens of collectors.

The Skeleton, Odilon Redon, 1880. View print options

The Skeleton (1880) shows the noir temperament exactly. Death appears, but without theatrics. Redon treats the subject with the sober draftsmanship he demanded of himself, letting the charcoal's matte depths do the emotional work that other artists assigned to gore or gesture. It's mortality observed by a mind, not screamed by a stage.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds a deep collection of these noirs, and standing before them confirms what reproductions of lesser quality lose: Redon's blacks are not one black. They are dozens, layered, rubbed, lifted with bread erasers, scraped back to the paper's light.

"Black Is the Most Essential Color": The 1894 Confession

Why insist on black when every fashionable current in French painting ran toward color? Redon's 1894 text in L'Art Moderne answers plainly. Charcoal permits no charm, no easy prettiness. It is sober. It forces the artist back onto real emotion, because nothing else will make the medium respond. Black, in his account, is the agent of the mind, the color of thought itself, and every other color depends on it for meaning.

Light, Odilon Redon, 1893. View print options

Light (1893) is the theory made visible. The work's entire radiance is built from black alone, luminosity carved out of darkness rather than added to it. No painting demonstrates his argument better: you only see light because black defines it.

This stubbornness about identity has good company in art history. El Greco spent nearly four decades painting in Spain yet signed every canvas in Greek letters with his real name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos. Redon's decades of black were the same kind of signature: a refusal to be anyone else.

1884: A Decadent Novel Turns an Unknown Into a Cult

Until 1884 Redon was, by his own admission, obscure. Then Joris-Karl Huysmans published À rebours (Against Nature), the bible of the Decadent movement, and made its hero Des Esseintes a collector of Redon's drawings. Suddenly the noirs were literary property. Poets quoted them. Collectors wanted them.

Demand shaping dark art is an old story. Antwerp collectors were still commissioning Bosch-style demons from Pieter Huys decades after Bosch died, because the market could not get enough of the uncanny. Huysmans did for Redon what those collectors did for Huys: he turned private strangeness into public appetite.

Symbolic Head, Odilon Redon, 1890. View print options

Symbolic Head (1890) comes from this peak of his Symbolist fame, when the disembodied head had become his signature motif: consciousness itself, detached from the body, drifting through Redon's interior world. It is the image the Decadents fell in love with.

Closed Eyes, Odilon Redon, 1890. View print options

The same year produced Closed Eyes, the hinge of his entire career, now held by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The meaning of Closed Eyes follows directly from the noirs: a face with lowered lids, sight turned inward, vision as something that happens behind the eyes rather than in front of them. It is the noir philosophy stated one last time, just as color began seeping into his work.

After 1900: The Colorist Hidden Inside the Noirs

During the 1890s Redon picked up pastel and oil. They quickly became his favorite mediums, and after 1900 he abandoned the noirs entirely. The transformation startled his contemporaries. Here was the priest of black producing some of the most saturated color of the new century, dreamscapes touched by Japanese art and by his growing interest in Hindu and Buddhist thought.

Muse on Pegasus, Odilon Redon, 1907. View print options

Muse on Pegasus (1907) shows what the change unleashed in him. Pegasus had haunted his lithographs for years as a creature of ink; now the myth returns bathed in color, weightless where the noirs were dense. Compare Redon's black-and-white works with his color period and one thing stays constant: the dream logic. Only the temperature changed.

Violette Heymann, Odilon Redon, 1910. View print options

The pastel portrait of Violette Heymann (1910), now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, proves the decades of charcoal were never wasted. Underneath its blossoming color sits the tonal control of a man who spent twenty years learning what black could hold. He died on 6 July 1916, at seventy-six, and the Surrealists would later claim him as a forefather.

Art history keeps re-examining figures like this. Reputations shift, evidence surfaces, verdicts reverse, as when 2014 research authenticated a Van Gogh that experts had doubted for decades. Redon's own reversal came in his lifetime: the obscure draftsman of 1880 became, by 1910, one of the most admired colorists in France.

Living With Black: Redon in a Modern Room

Redon's blacks behave differently from almost any other nineteenth-century art. They read as calm rather than gloomy: works such as The Skeleton and Closed Eyes carry a quiet depth, their charcoal textures rewarding close, unhurried attention, while the late color pastels such as Muse on Pegasus open into something lighter and more expansive.

If this story moved you, three works belong in the same room: Light for the argument, Closed Eyes for the turning point, Violette Heymann for the resolution. And if Redon's inward blacks feel like the shadow side of the same era, our collection of Impressionist art prints holds the sunlit half he defined himself against.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Odilon Redon's noirs?

The noirs, French for "blacks," are the charcoal drawings and lithographs Redon made almost exclusively from the early 1870s to the 1890s. They depict dreamlike, imaginary subjects and gave Symbolism some of its defining images.

Why did Odilon Redon work only in black for so long?

Redon believed black was the most essential color, the medium of pure imagination. In an 1894 text in L'Art Moderne he explained that charcoal "does not allow kindness; it is sober," demanding real emotion from the artist rather than decorative charm.

Where can you see Odilon Redon's original works?

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds Closed Eyes (1890), the Cleveland Museum of Art holds the pastel portrait of Violette Heymann (1910), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York holds an important collection of his noirs.

How did Joris-Karl Huysmans make Redon famous?

Huysmans's 1884 novel À rebours (Against Nature) featured a hero who collects Redon's drawings. The book was a sensation among the Decadents and Symbolists, and it lifted Redon from obscurity to cult status almost overnight.

How did Odilon Redon influence later art?

Redon's dreamlike imagery, in both the noirs and the late color works, is considered a direct precursor to Surrealism. His post-1900 pastels and oils, influenced by Japanese art, also leaned toward abstraction before abstraction had a name.