Visionary Noir

Haunted-Odilon Redon 1896

From 1870 to the turn of the century the French Symbolist artist Odilon Redon worked almost exclusively in the medium of charcoal drawing and lithographs. Redon called this extraordinary body of work his noirs. Throughout his career Redon’s expressed intent was to place ‘the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible’,  an aesthetic doctrine that strongly resonated with the Surrealists. Straddling that perilous hinterland between dream, hallucination and otherworldly visions, the noirs present a haunting, nocturnal world that is forever sliding into nightmare.

It was the publication of the bible of Decadence A Rebours by JK Huysmans  in 1884 that Redon found fame. The archetypal world-weary Decadent Des Esseintes collects and describes in great detail Redon’s lithographs. After 1900 Redon turned to pastels and oils in paintings that reflected his interest in Buddhism and Japanese art and that became increasingly abstract in his latter years.

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The Captives of Longjumeau

Introduction

One of the most glaring omissions from Breton’s Anthologie de l’ humour noir is of  the symbolist writer Leon Bloy. Bloy’s scathing, vitriolic assaults on the bourgeoisie are certainly fine examples of black humour. His highly idiosyncratic, reactionary Catholicism is diametrically opposed to the Surrealist militant left-wing atheism, however the similarly politically inclined decadent writers J.K Huysmans and Villers de L’isle-Adam are both included. Maybe the absence of Bloy has more to do with his personality, he had an enormous talent  for making enemies. By the end of his impoverished life he had managed to fall out with everyone in the Parisian literary world, former friends especially, and had earned the nickname The Ungrateful Beggar for his constant written requests for money.

The following story by Leon Bloy was much admired by Borges who positions it as one of the few precedents of Kafka. Translation is my own.

Dreams of Desire 22 (The Apparition)

L’Apparition-Gustav Moreau 1874-1876

In this gorgeous opiated phantasmagoria of a painting Gustav Moreau places the ultimate femme fatale Salome in the Byzantine opulence of Herod’s palace, the seven veils in the process of being parted, before the hallucinated head  of John the Baptist. The painting was mentioned in the breviary of Decadence J.K Huysmans A Rebours and Oscar Wilde caused a sensation with the staging of his opalescent and fantastic rendition of the biblical tale, Salome in Paris (the play was originally written in French). The painting and Moreau’s work in general was a favourite of the Surrealists as his brand of avant-garde Symbolism was a clear antecedent for the part that the unconscious plays in the creative process.