Kröller-Müller Museum sheds new light on the work of French artist Odilon Redon
In Odilon Redon. La littérature et la musique, the Kröller-Müller Museum sheds new light on the oeuvre of French artist Odilon Redon (Bordeaux 1840-Paris 1916). With a large number of paintings, pastels, drawings and lithographs, the exhibition shows the important role that literature and music play in Redon’s life and work. Redon is a painter, pastelist, draughtsman and lithographer, but he also learns to play violin and piano and acquires a love of literature at an early age. He has close friendships with writers and composers, is himself active as a writer and gives music recitals. For him, music, literary themes and visual art are inextricably linked. In his own time, he was already highly praised for his entirely unique way of combining these different expressive powers in his work. More than anyone, Redon thus embodies the popular late nineteenth-century concept of synaesthesia: the idea that a more intense experience c