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 quit. 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, and Catholic ambivalence. The Battle of the Bones is a technical tour de force, a symphony of dark shadows in charcoal and white bones in reserve. The subject is a poem by Maurice Bouchor, a poet, sculptor, and maker of religious marionettes. There is something marionette-like in his verse and Redon's picture, which imagine a Ray Harryhausen battle to the death of two skeletons. 

Odilon Redon, Battle of the Bones and The Tell-Tale Heart (1883, Santa Barbara Museum of Art)

No less creepy is The Tell-Tale Heart, inspired by Poe's story. Departing somewhat from the text, Redon imagines a peeping eye between planks. 

Odilon Redon, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1888. Getty Research Institute

Redon made his reputation with charcoal drawings such as these, called noirs. His vision transmitted easily to lithographs. Redon made 11 print portfolios, no less than three of them treating Gustave Flaubert's novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

Odilon Redon, Everywhere Eyeballs Are Aflame, 1888. Getty Research Institute

Redon based this "surreal" image of a flaming eyeball on Flaubert's text. In turn it may have been a point of departure for eye motifs by Magritte, Dalí, Man Ray, and Schiaparelli—and Von Dutch and Ken Griffin.

Odilon Redon, Day, 1891. Getty Research Institute

Day seems normalcore for Redon, being a view of a tree outside a window. It was part of the 1891 portfolio, Dreams, dedicated to botanist friend Armand Clavaud after his suicide the previous year. The small floating objects in the room seem to be skulls or heads of St. John the Baptist.

Odilon Redon, Baronne de Domecy, about 1900. Getty Museum

Redon reinvented his art as the 20th century loomed. He substituted color for black and white, finding ways to make color itself as weird as any subject matter. Baronne de Domecy was the wife of one of Redon's patrons. Her placid likeness against a psychedelic backdrop invites comparisons to van Gogh and Signac.

Odilon Redon, Orpheus, about 1905. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Odilon Redon, Vase of Flowers—Large Composition, 1913. LACMA

LACMA has lent an amazing pastel that it almost never shows. The colors are outside the gamut of our screens—you have to see it in person. It was a gift of discerning Hollywood collector George Gard DeSylva.

"Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions" is at the Getty Center through Oct. 18, 2026, and is accompanied by a publication.

Installation view, "Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions"