Odilon Redon, The Mystic Barc, U.D., Pastel on paper, 51 x 63,5 cm. Andrea Woodner, New York.

Odilon Redon, Flowers, 1909, Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. Private Collection.

FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents today As in a Dream – Odilon Redon, on view through April 29, 2007. Although Odilon Redon (1840–1916) as a visual artist was one of the most important forerunners of modernism, and above all Surrealism, his work has not been seen in Germany for decades. This exhibition provides a survey of the French Symbolist’s oeuvre with more than 200 drawings, lithographs, pastels, and paintings from international museums and private collections. During his early period, which was influenced by the contradictory movements of Romanticism and the Naturalism of the Barbizon school, he developed, in contrast to the Impressionists, a pictorial world that was predominantly black-and-white, deriving entirely from inner experience. Toward the end of the nineteenth century Redon turned to extensive use of color, and his figures and objects exude a mysterious, mystic aura. His coming to terms with the sciences, psychology, and literature of his time and an open conception of religion defined Odilon Redon’s visual cosmos, and his work retains even today an undiminished suggestive power. (courtesy www.Artdaily.org)