(APR 20) Odilon Redon and Edgar Allan Poe

Image: Odilon Redon, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Fair Use)

Odilon Redon was born on 20 April 1840, a French artist inspired particularly by the written works of Gustave Flaubert and Edgar Allan Poe. Believing in the superiority of the imagination over observation of nature he rejected Realism and Impressionism in favour of a more personal artistic vision, and his L'Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l'infini (‘The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Floats Toward Infinity’), a lithograph from 1882, was directly inspired by Poe. It has graced the cover of Penguin Books’ The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe since 1976, and the original hangs in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.