Redon 1840 - 1916

Pastels, de Millet à Redon - Âmes et chimères
© Sophie Crepy / musée d'Orsay / Sophie Crépy

The exhibition "Pastels, from Millet to Redon" is presented until July 2, 2023 in the Seine gallery of the Musée d'Orsay. Through a hundred or so works, it explores an incomparable collection of drawings and paintings made with this fragile medium by Millet, Degas, Manet, Cassatt, Redon, Lévy-Dhurmer and many others. Discover below how Odilon Redon made the best of pastel in his works.

Redon first distinguished himself with his “noirs”, piercing phantasmagorical charcoals, before firmly turning to colour from 1890. He always favoured matteness, notably achieved with pastel, which shared the powdery aspect of charcoal, “a powder that is volatile, impalpable and fleeting in your hand”, whose capacity to absorb light creates a similar effect of depth.

Redon often used mixed media. In his works, the transition from black to colour occurred gradually, and charcoal often remained present in his pastels. He also frequently used pastel to enhance his paintings, as well as Conté pencils and pastel pencils to create layered effects. He used parallel lines and hatching to create vibration and energy in colour at its most intense. After 1912, Redon stopped using a fixative, which often affected colour and flattened the pigments’ bloom. However he paid great attention to the framing of his pastels to preserve them.

Images
Odilon Redon
Le Char d'Apollon, vers 1910
Musée d'Orsay
Dation, 1978
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
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Odilon Redon
Vision sous-marine, vers 1900
Musée d'Orsay
Legs Mme Arï Redon en exécution des volontés de son mari, fils d'Odilon Redon, 1982
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
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Odilon Redon
La coquille, en 1912
Musée d'Orsay
Legs Mme Arï Redon en exécution des volontés de son mari, fils d'Odilon Redon, 1982
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
See the notice of the artwork