Arthur Symons

“ The design is black upon black, and it is only slowly that a huge and solemn, almost a maternal face, looms out upon one: Satan, placid, monstrous, and winged, who cradles softly the little vague huddled figures of the seven deadly sins, holding them in his large hands, under the shadow of his wings. And there is another Satan, valiantly insurgent against the light that strikes him, a figure of superb power in revolt. ”

“ His imagination seizes on a word, a chance phrase, and transforms it into a picture which goes far beyond and away from the author's intention—as in the design which has for legend the casual words of Poe: "L'œil, comme un ballon bizarre, se dirige vers l'infini." We see an actual eye and an actual balloon: the thing is grotesque.
The sensation produced by the work of Odilon Redon is, above all, a sensation of infinitude, of a world beyond the visible. Every picture is a little corner of space, where no eye has ever pierced. Vision succeeds vision, dizzily. ”

“ Odilon Redon is a creator of nightmares. His sense for pure beauty is but slight, or rather for normal beauty; for he begets upon horror and mystery a new and strange kind of beauty, which astonishes, which terrifies, but which is yet, in his finest work, beauty all the same. Often the work is not beautiful at all: it can be hideous, never ineffective. He is a genuine visionary: he paints what he sees, and he sees through a window which looks out upon a night without stars. ”

“ Here and there the finer and more alert instinct of some man who has himself brought new gifts to his art—Huysmans, Mallarmé, Charles Morice, Emile Hennequin—has divined what there is of vision and creation in this strange, grotesque world which surges only half out of chaos—the world of an artist who has seen day and night. ”

“ A cunning arrangement of lines gives one the sense of something without beginning or end: spiral coils, or floating tresses, which seem to reach out, winding or unwinding for ever. And as all this has to be done by black and white, Redon has come to express more by mere shadow than one could have conceived possible. ”

“ The abyss swarms—toutes sortes d'effroyable bêtes surgtssent—animal and vegetable life, the germs of things, a creation of the uncreated. The world and men become spectral under his gaze, become transformed into symbols, into apparitions, for which he can give no account often enough. ”

“ It is scarcely likely that many of the people, or indeed any of the English people who saw the picture, knew that it was also the portrait of a poet, the poet of the bats, Les Chauves-Souris, an enormous volume of five hundred closely printed pages.
The Comte de Montesquiou, though living, and a personage, and of late a fait divers in the papers for purely mundane reasons, is none the less a legendary being, of whom all the stories that are told may very likely be true, of whom at all events nothing can be told more fantastic than the truth. ”

“ There is another landscape, a primeval forest, vague and disquieting, and a solitary figure, the figure of a man who is half a tree, like some forgotten deity of a lost race: the forest and the man are at one, and hold converse. ”

“ The name of Odilon Redon is known to but few people in France, and to still fewer people in England. Artistic Paris has never had time to think of the artist who lives so quietly in her midst, working patiently at the record of his visions, by no means discouraged by lack of appreciation, but probably tired of expecting it. ”

“ There is not a spontaneous verse in it, from beginning to end few would seem to have required thought, but none could have failed to demand labour. At its best it has that funambulesque air of the Whistler portrait; when it is not playing tricks it is ambling along stolidly ”

“ He certainly at one time possessed an incredible wardrobe, from which he would select and combine, with infinite labour, the costume of the day; apologising, on a certain misty afternoon, for not employing the Scotch symphony which had once before so perfectly suited a similar day: "but it takes my servant so long to prepare it!" On one occasion a distinguished French writer, one of the most recent of Academicians, was astonished, on opening a letter from the Comte de Montesquiou, to find along with the letter a manuscript copy of Balzac's Curé de Tours, written in an illiterate hand. ”