Odilon Redon at the Getty
Odilon Redon, Battle of the Bones , about 1881. Getty Museum A couple of generations before André Breton, Odilon Redon (1840–1916) devised an anti-rational art of dreams and monstrous apparitions. Redon's work became a crucial precedent for the first Surrealist artists of the 1920s, and Surrealism became the movement that bourgeois culture can't give up. In 1977 Susan Sontag declared that "Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise." It remains the go-to sensibility for much popular film and TV. Redon's art remains accessible because the strange is always familiar. The Getty Museum is presenting a two-room show of Redon's works on paper. "Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions" displays the Getty's six charcoal and pastel drawings by Redon alongside loans from other California museums and print series from the Getty Research Institute. Redon was rooted in Symbolism, the fin-de-siecle movement that drew on Poe, the French Decadents...
