"Night" (despite its name) has light but much less profusion of color, resurrecting Redon's "blacks" to star in the show.
Meanwhile, the Bohemian engraver Rodolphe Bresdin placed Redon on his initial trajectory as an artist, teaching him etching and printmaking.
His father pushed architecture as the practical application of an artistic temperament, but Redon was unenthusiastic and failed his Paris entrance examinations.
His good friend Armand Clavaud, a botanist, became Redon's informal tutor.
Clavaud's microscope illuminated what Redon called the "intermediary life between animal and plant, " and his bookshelf introduced the artist to Gustave Flaubert and Edgar Allan Poe.
Collected as "To Myself: Notes on Life, Art, and Artists, " Redon's journal entries nevertheless do not serve as a guide to the significance of his own work.
"Day" centers on a barely visible Apollo and the horses of his Quadriga a frequent subject throughout Redon's career but otherwise is devoid of human figures and their noise.
Many do not even open their eyes, though disembodied eyes often float through Redon's early works either as deep pools of introspection or as agents of discomfort.
Few major artists left behind more extensive or thoughtful writings than Redon on the process of creation, the purpose of art or their own artistic comings of age.
Two individuals, above all, shaped Redon's life as an artist.
In pastel, beginning around 1890, Redon produced florals that across a room appear natural but on closer inspection are glimpses into Clavaud's microscope: the botany of a different world.
But at the same moment Frenchman Laurent Redon and 1996 winner Buddy Lazier became entangled half a lap behind and crashed into the wall, bringing out the yellow flag.
On a visit to the abbey in 1910, Redon accepted a commission from Fayet to create decorative panels for his library at the site, with no restriction on the subjects.
For the first 20 years of his active career, Redon worked almost entirely in black, using charcoal and grease pencil and eventually producing lithographs of images as dark as their media.
Redon had accepted other room-decoration commissions beginning in 1900, but the setting and freedom of the Fontfroide opportunity allowed him to reunite his two artistic personas and a lifetime of cherished subjects to spectacular effect.
Born in Bordeaux, Redon later described himself as a "sad and weak" child, though the resulting isolation and inactivity left him with much time to stare at clouds and nurture the stunning imagination that seemingly grew in him as a muscle.
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