Noirs

While art shows to East and West of it volleyed and thundered in and around both World's Fairs, Chicago's Art Institute last week rummaged around and quietly put on nine first-rate shows of its own. The best show: 46 of its 329 lithographs by the late great French Artist Odilon Redon. The Art Institute's collection of Redon prints, purchased from the artist's widow when Redon prices were low, is the world's best: it includes all of the first impressions.

Long considered an isolated figure in art, an independent who withdrew from the life and thought of his time to paint creepy, imaginary worlds, Odilon Redon (1840-1916) is often classed by critics with the 19th-Century romantics; surrealists claim him as a pre-surrealist. In his melancholy youth Redon had tried architecture, sculpture, studying the old masters, imitating the Barbizon landscapists, copying the romantics. As far as he was concerned, nothing seemed to click. Then, one day, in 1875, he found that charcoal was his meat. From charcoal drawings he went on to lithography. It had taken him 25 years to discover the proper medium for what he saw, and he scarcely dipped a brush in oils for another 20 years.

"Black," wrote Redon, "is the most important color; nothing can prostitute it." Although he liked to call them his noirs, Redon lithographs run the gamut of neutral tones from rich black to glaring white, rely upon contrasts for their emotional effect. Typical of Redon's noirs were the Chicago show's mythical Pegasus, The Winged One, a Child's Head with Flowers, and unearthly chimeras ranging all the way from The Head of the Infinite Suspended in a Dim, Precarious Light to a shocking confrontation that anyone who has ever had a hangover could understand at a glance, a boiled egg glaring out of its cup.

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