Below an article on Redon preserved in the Andries Bonger Archive in the Rijksmuseum there is an anonymous note written in pen and ink, and signed (or decorated) with an ‘X’: ‘The secret of Redon is his mind’ (). This enigmatic observation has been confirmed in recent years during the search for ‘the secret of Redon’. In an effort to gain a better understanding of his artworks, every aspect of his artistry has been explored: his life and milieu, his tastes, his materials, his working process, the books he owned, and the ideas prevalent in his day. But are we any closer to unravelling the enigma of Redon’s art? This is doubtful. The key to unlocking Redon’s secret lies, in fact, in the impenetrable recesses of his mind. It was not for nothing that he gave his autobiographical writings the title ‘To Myself’ and began with the phrase: ‘I have made an art according to myself’.
Redon had the sensitivity and the capacity to let his innermost being speak through his art, and the result is an oeuvre in a unique and utterly idiosyncratic idiom. This process of creation began with his receptiveness to apparitions that emanated from his subconscious and appeared in his mind’s eye. They simply came to him, generally when he was out walking in – or merely observing – unspoilt nature. A youthful memory recounted by Redon is telling: ‘My father often used to say to me: “Look at those clouds, can you see as I can, the changing shapes in them?” And then he would show me strange beings, fantastic and marvelous visions, in the changing sky.’
Detail of an article on Redon preserved in the Andries Bonger Archive in the Rijksmuseum with an anonymous note written in pen and ink, and signed (or decorated) with an ‘X’: ‘The secret of Redon is his mind’
This summoning up of ‘fantastic and marvelous visions’ was by no means a passive gift, such as that of a medium who serves only as an intermediary between two worlds, but an active process that he could control ‘with imperturbable clear-sightedness’. By giving his visions – which proceeded from his exploration of elements of nature and his knowledge of science, including the theory of evolution, osteology and microbiology – a physical shape that complied with the laws of nature, he succeeded in endowing fluid matter with a fixed and convincing form.
The other element Redon deployed to capture his dreams was his artist’s materials. A piece of white paper or a blank canvas gave him ‘artist’s block’; only after he applied a layer of material to such supports could his powers of imagination come to life. For Redon, moreover, each medium could cause different aspects of his mind to surface by virtue of its own particular character: he described the transfer paper he used for his lithographs as ‘responsive’, his charcoal was ‘serious and unpleasant’, his chalk pastels were ‘pleasant’ and ‘rejuvenating’, oil paint was ‘enthralling’ and ‘stubborn’, and quick-drying distemper lent itself to improvisation. In all of these media, Redon’s manner of working was emphatically associative: the compositions were born, as it were, of the materials themselves, such as the powder of the charcoal and later the pastel chalk.
The artist wrote compellingly: ‘The material reveals secrets, it has its genius, it is through it that the oracle will speak.’ Since the mystery of Redon’s art is bound up with matter – that is to say, his artistic materials, into which he breathed life in his own inimitable way – these entries pay considerable attention to the technical descriptions of the works and the suggestive qualities that the artist was able to evoke with light and darkness, arabesque and contour, colour and harmony.
Redon’s lucid visualizations of his subconscious are in stark contrast to the neutral or even vague descriptions he gave his works in his account books. In 1895 he described a charcoal drawing he had made in 1881 as follows: ‘And The Nightmare (drawing), a kind of bony monk holding by the hand, suspended by a thread, a kind of being (a round face), then in the sky a head in profile on the black ().’ From Redon’s hesitant formulation, one is scarcely able to make out that he is the author of the works, which lends strength to his assertion that he did not begin working with a preconceived idea. Furthermore, he wished to protect this source – a source that lay deep inside him and that he referred to as the sacred fount of his work – because it was too personal and too vulnerable.
This reticence in referring to himself and his art has frustrated every collector and critic who has had anything to do with Redon. In 1886 Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) published a harsh critique of Redon’s noirs, which in his eyes were not precise enough. He articulated, moreover, the uncontrollable tendency of every viewer (and scholar) to interpret the artist’s dream images: ‘Thus M. Redon draws for you an eye which floats, at the end of a stem, in an amorphous landscape. And the commentators assemble. Some will tell you that this eye exactly represents the eye of Conscience, others the eye of Incertitude; some will explain that this eye synthesizes a setting sun over hyperborean seas, others that it symbolizes universal sorrow, a bizarre water lily about to blossom on the black waters of invisible Acherons. A supreme exegete arrives and concludes: “This eye at the end of a stem is simply a necktie pin.” The very essence of the ideal is that it evokes nothing but vague forms which might just as well be magic lakes as sacred elephants, extraterrestrial flowers as well as necktie pins, unless they are nothing at all. Yet, we demand today that whatever is represented be precise, we want the figures that emanate from an artist’s brain to move and think and live.’
Although Redon did think it essential that his creatures, no matter how bizarre, had substance and were plausibly conceived, it is true that he kept his art deliberately vague, which demands a receptive attitude on the part of the viewer. When his critic friend André Mellerio sent Redon a list of questions in preparation for the oeuvre catalogue of his lithographs, the artist replied: ‘I would like to convince you that all this was but a bit of liquid oily black, transmitted by the greasy body of the stone, onto a white paper, for the sole purpose of producing in the spectator a certain diffuse yet domineering attraction to the obscure world of indetermination. And predisposed to thought.’
The intention, therefore, was to carry viewers away and set them thinking, but preferably not interpreting. After all, as soon as one interpretation presents itself, the doors to other ways of seeing close. The artist preferred to leave a whole row of doors open a crack, doors that could never be pushed fully open. In these entries the later interpretations of Redon are addressed only selectively, bearing in mind Redon’s exclamation: ‘Every pen wishes to use me for its theses, for its beliefs. It is wrong to ascribe all kinds of intentions to me. I only make art. Art of expansion.’
Like every viewer, Bonger sought meaning in Redon’s work, but he was exceptional in the restraint and respect he showed for the untouchable in Redon’s art – an art that, in Bonger’s eyes, was not only infinitely profound but also addressed the existential questions of humanity. Bonger wrote that the artist afforded us a ‘glimpse of the universe with its ever recoiling mystery’. He compared the effect of Redon’s art on his mood with that of music, which he considered an inexhaustible source of contemplation and rapture. In addition, Bonger, like the writer of the enigmatic note in the archive, saw the works as the direct expression of Redon’s ‘deepest nature’, and he was honoured to commune with this extraordinary soul. No doubt he experienced this as a great privilege.
Even when there was no personal contact between artist and admirer, the appreciation of Redon’s art has always entailed a certain amount of elitist self-satisfaction, since an affinity for these works presupposes the possession of certain qualities: a sensitive nature, broad erudition and a deep intellect. The works by Redon in the Van Gogh Museum were initially and intentionally committed by the artist to the protective interior of a sensitive admirer whom he knew personally. For him, too, ‘communion’ with a kindred spirit was essential. Now his works are exposed to the daily gaze of hundreds, if not thousands, of museum visitors, who can explore for themselves ‘the secret of Redon’. As the artist himself wrote: ‘I have put in [my works] a little door opening onto a mystery. I have made fictions. It is up to them [the people] to go further.’