Beyond the Visible

Caught between description and dream, the felt and the imagined, French artist Odilon Redon, whose career bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, transformed the natural world into nightmarish visions and bizarre fantasies. Closely allied with the Symbolist movement, Redon offered his own interpretations of literary, biblical, and mythological subjects; created a universe of strange hybrid creatures; and presented landscape in a singular way: we see grinning disembodied teeth, smiling spiders, melancholic floating faces, winged chariots, unfamiliar plant life, and velvety black or colored swirls of atmosphere. With a recent gift from the Ian Woodner family, The Museum of Modern Art is now the site of the most significant body of the artist's work outside France, and this book will showcase the full range of Redon's varied oeuvre--charcoal "noirs," luminous pastels, richly textured canvases, literary collaborations, and experiments in printmaking--and will illuminate the hold his particular kind of modernism has had on both 20th-century and contemporary artists. Essay by Jodi Hauptman. Hardcover, 9.25 x 11 in./256 pgs / 142 color and 160 duotones.