OBJECT LESSON
When the Moon Hits Your Eye
Symbolism and Meaning in the Work of Odilon Redon
Sarah Mirseyedi
FIG. 1
Odilon Redon
French, 1840–1916
Á l’horizon, l’Ange des Certitudes, et dans le ciel somber, un regard nterrogateur (On the horizon the angel of certitude,and in the somber heaven,
a questioning regard), from the portfolio Á Edgar Poe, 1882
Lithograph and chine collé on paper
Plate: 29 × 20.8 cm (11 × 8 in.)
Gift of Murray S. Danforth, Jr. 50.372.4
1
Humans have perhaps always looked to the sky for answers. In his print On the horizon the angel of certitude, and in the somber heaven, a questioning regard [Fig. 1], French Symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) repositions our role by imagining a cosmos that gazes back, questioning us as much as we question it. He depicts this gaze through a combination of two recognizable forms: a full moon and a human eye. At the same time, this celestial gaze is made to compete with that of another figure in the composition—an angel that appears incongruously at the intersection of sky and sea.
Odilon Redon created this work as part of a portfolio of six lithographs published in 1882. The portfolio was conceived as an homage to the American poet Edgar Allan Poe, whose popularity among avant-garde artists in France soared in the 1850s, when Charles Baudelaire translated many of Poe’s short stories into French. For decades to come, avant-garde writers and artists in France found inspiration in Poe’s aesthetic theory, as exemplified by his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition.” In it, Poe describes his own method of literary creation as a highly controlled process almost mathematical in its precise attention to rhythmic meter and word choice. Paradigmatic of this approach was Poe’s claim that a parrot could have easily served the same purpose as the raven in his eponymous poem, but a raven was clearly the more suitable choice from the standpoint of setting a particularly ominous mood. Whether or not this was actually how Poe went about the composition of his poem mattered little to burgeoning Symbolists like the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who championed the self-reflexivity of such an approach to language and its internal structures.1
Emulating this approach to language, Redon composed poetically suggestive titles for each of the works in his À Edgar Poe (To Edgar Poe) portfolio for its publication in 1882.2 The title he gave to this particular work, On the horizon the angel of certitude, and in the somber heaven, a questioning regard, operates alongside the image to produce a Poe-like air of mystery. But the title is not entirely opaque; it offers clues as to how the various elements in the print are to be read both figuratively and symbolically. Redon’s descriptive title prompts the viewer to see the angel figure as a representation of certainty and to find, in contrast, “a questioning regard” in the hybrid symbol of the eye-moon that occupies the center of the image.
A common misconception about Symbolist artists is that they aimed to confuse or disorient their viewers through their inclusion of visual signs meant to stand for something else. On the contrary, Redon cared deeply about making his work intelligible for a wider audience. As he explained, “I think I have offered . . . in drawings and lithographs, varied human expressions; I have even, by permissible fantasy, placed them in a world of unlikelihood, in imaginary beings that I have tried to make logical with the logic of the structure of visible beings.”3 For Redon, invoking the structure and logic of symbols was at least as important as rendering the visual appearance of an object or scene in nature.
Of course, visual representation and formal composition still had key roles to play in Redon’s art. In this print, for example, he carefully divided the sheet into three formal zones, each circumscribed within a simple geometric shape. A rectangular expanse stretches across the lower quarter of the page, replete with lines that signal the rippling of ocean waves. Above this, we see a night sky dotted with stars; nestled just above the moon is a tangle of atmospheric haze. This celestial expanse occupies the majority of the printed page, and would come together with imposing rectangular heft if not for the abrupt secession of a triangular form from its lower right corner. Occupying this space is our timid-looking angel with his single insect-like wing. In stark contrast to the inky uniformity of the sky and sea, the space surrounding the angel has been carefully modeled to suggest three-dimensionality and spatial illusion. At the same time, however, the space he occupies is impossible to locate [Fig. 2]. Is he in the sky? Behind it? In another dimension or realm? We are left wondering what exactly this angel could be so certain about, given how out of place he appears within the formal and symbolic logic of the rest of the scene.
2
FIG. 2
Odilon Redon, Á l’horizon, l’Ange des Certitudes, et dans le ciel somber, un regard interrogateur (On the horizon the angel of certitude, and in the somber heaven, a questioning regard) (detail), from the portfolio Á Edgar Poe, 1882.
Gift of Murray S. Danforth, Jr.
In juxtaposing the angel as a symbol of certainty with the visual uncertainty of the space he occupies, and in juxtaposing the eye, as a symbol of the power of human visual observation, with one of the most common objects of that observation, the highly visible form of the moon, Redon encapsulates in this print the uncertainty felt in late nineteenth-century European culture about the place of human beings in the larger cosmos. This was a time of unprecedented scientific discovery in the burgeoning field of astrophysics, spurred by technical advances in the construction of long-range telescopes and the development of spectral analysis for studying the elemental composition and age of celestial bodies. As these methods for scientific study became more sophisticated, laypeople were left to grapple with the intellectual and spiritual consequences of a new understanding of the physical universe that was much bigger, older, and less predictable than originally thought.4
In the midst of all of this scientific discovery, fierce political and cultural battles over the place of religious teachings in the educational system also raged. Up to this point in time, the Catholic church and its leaders were the main arbiters of primary education in France, but this system was quickly falling out of favor in the rapidly modernizing country. In 1881 and 1882, the republican government led by Jules Ferry passed laws establishing free and mandatory lay education for all schoolchildren.5 Given how soon after these changes Redon would publish this print, we can begin to understand why Redon’s angel of certitude looks so uncertain. Redon appears to be questioning, along with the rest of his country, whether the study of science could ever really replace the certainty of religious faith for those who still sought some form of spiritual guidance in the modern world.
Many folks during this period of time certainly believed so. Experimental sciences such as chemistry and biology flourished throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century, thanks to a widespread commitment to empiricism as the model for investigating life’s biggest questions. From the Enlightenment onwards, scientific inquiry was driven by direct observation of natural phenomena, and it was widely accepted that no conclusions about these phenomena could be drawn unless induced directly from observation or experimental data. In other words, seeing was more than just believing; it was knowing. And many hoped that given enough scientific rigor, it would soon be possible to see and know everything about the natural world.6
One major challenge to this all-encompassing belief in empiricism came about through the study of vision itself and, more specifically, the psychology of visual perception. Using the same experimental toolkit as the natural sciences, scientists sought to explain and codify the perceptual limitations that had long been suspected to be at the core of human visual understanding. In short, they determined that our eyes can—and constantly do—play tricks on us. Vision could only ever be subjective, and just how much stock we should place in our powers of visual observation came into question. In consequence, the faith that the scientific community had placed in the truthfulness of direct visual observation suffered a major blow to its credibility.7
This recognition of the limitations of the experimental sciences captured the attention of the burgeoning Symbolist movement. As the art critic Gabriel-Albert Aurier highlighted in an article from 1890:
A great many scientists and scholars today have come to a halt discouraged. They realize that this experimental science, of which they were so proud, is a thousand times less certain than the most bizarre theogony, the maddest metaphysical reverie, the least acceptable poet’s dream, and they have a presentiment that this haughty science which they proudly used to call “positive” may perhaps be only a science of what is relative, of appearances, of “shadows” as Plato said, and that they themselves have nothing to put on old Olympus, from which they have removed the deities and unhinged the constellations.8
Using recognizable symbols and illusionistic forms, Redon evokes the uncertainty felt across French culture and society during this period of time. At the same time, in true Symbolist fashion, he juxtaposes skepticism in both religion and the sciences with an alternative kind of faith: faith in the ability of human beings to communicate these concerns with one another through the shared language of artistic expression.
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So far we have focused on the symbolic and formal registers of meaning that Redon carefully orchestrated in this work. But there is another register through which meaning is produced in this work: the materiality of lithography itself.
In the medium of lithography, the artist draws with an oil-based crayon onto a stone surface that has been treated chemically to absorb that oil and repel water. Rolling a layer of greasy printer’s ink onto the wetted stone creates a printing surface from which multiple copies of the artist’s original drawing can be produced. Though lithography is often valued for its ability to faithfully reproduce the tone and texture of drawing media, many artists also find in lithography new possibilities of mark-making. Rather than draw in a linear fashion onto the stone, for example, Redon blackened the surface almost completely with the lithographic crayon and then scratched lines out from this blackened ground with a sharp tool. One can see this especially clearly in the lines that make up the ocean waves across the bottom of this picture. Redon worked similarly to produce the stars and atmospheric cloud in his depiction of the night sky.
FIG. 3
Printmaker Christopher Wallace demonstrates the use of a levigator to grain a lithographic stone. Lithography workshop, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, January 2020. Photo by Sarah Mirseyedi.
There are also many other marks left visible in the finished print. These were not made intentionally, but are instead artifacts of how the lithographic stone surface was prepared. An important early step in the process of lithography, graining involves sanding away the surface with a heavy circular tool called a levigator [Fig. 3]. The levigator spins across the stone in circular patterns, distributing grit in an even layer and removing any vestiges of drawing that remain from past printing sessions. Over the course of this process, finer and finer particles of grit are used to create a smooth and uniform working surface.
In Redon’s print, circular graining patterns that would have typically been removed during subsequent sanding treatments remain visible [Fig. 4]. These marks cut across the distinct formal zones that Redon has laid out for his composition, revealing a sameness of surface between areas that are otherwise worked pictorially to suggest distinct three dimensional spaces. Here the artist’s labor of pictorial illusion rubs up against the printer’s labor of preparing the working surface of the picture. The result is a mixing and muddling of creative agencies. Redon’s mark-making and the levigator’s mechanical circular motion can be difficult to tell apart in the final print. In most lithographs, marks made by the levigator, even when visible, do not compete with the work of the artist. But here, especially in the area immediately surrounding the moon, he applies scratches so delicately that they could almost be mistaken for the fine and almost imperceptible striations left behind when graining the stone.
FIG. 4
Odilon Redon, Á l’horizon, l’Ange des Certitudes, et dans le ciel somber, un regard interrogateur (On the horizon the angel of certitude, and in the somber heaven, a questioning regard) (detail), from the portfolio Á Edgar Poe, 1882.
Gift of Murray S. Danforth, Jr.
As was the case with most artists working in the medium during this period, Redon’s experience creating lithographs would not have included graining the stone or operating the printing press. In some instances, he did not even draw his compositions directly on the stone but used transfer paper instead. His attitude toward the medium over the course of his career was complicated: later in life he would insist that he utilized lithography for portfolios like À Edgar Poe simply as a way to reproduce and disseminate his drawings and not because of any particular attraction he had to the process itself. As he explained in a letter to his friend Edmond Picard from 1894:
I was never concerned with catering to the stone, only to transmitting myself through the medium. Apart from two or three plates [ . . . ] all my plates are hardly more than transposed and multiplied drawings, with the stone the humble agent of transmission. And then one is not alone. There is the proofing printer. He prepares, he manipulates the greasy material, sometimes he spoils it, especially when he has to work, against his habits, for an artist who is experimental or original.9
Redon’s discomfort with lithography stemmed from the difficulty he found in having to manage multiple creative agencies at once. Not only did Redon have to learn how to work with master printers who each brought their own specific ideas, skills, and tastes—he also had to acclimate to the creative will of the various materials involved in the process, which he likewise described as “agents who accompany and collaborate with the artist, offering something of their own to the fiction he creates.”10
Despite the difficulties he faced in the lithography studio, or perhaps even because of them, Redon found himself later in life wondering why other like-minded artists of his generation did not experiment more with the medium that he found so frustrating and so compelling at the same time: “The times in which I lived must have been so preoccupied with imitation and direct naturalism that this process did not more often tempt those with inventive spirits to let themselves be carried away by its suggestive richness. It provokes and brings out the unexpected.”11 In this way, Redon makes clear on which side of the late-nineteenth century debate between science and religion, and between knowledge and uncertainty, he sees lithography falling. Lithography was an instrument for discovery for Redon, even if its workings were not always as passive or predictable as he would have liked.
Redon’s complicated feelings toward lithography mirror in many ways the complexity of the relationship between late-nineteenth-century scientists and the new tools and technologies developed during this period to aid them in their work. The development of self-inscribing scientific instruments for measuring the effects of natural phenomena, along with the use of photographic technologies to capture images of those phenomena, led to a widespread faith and belief in mechanical objectivity in the sciences.12 Human judgment was considered far too subjective next to the transparency and accuracy of mechanical tools. This was especially the case when it came to the study of stars and distant planets. Powerful optical instruments such as the telescope allowed the observation of phenomena beyond the capability of natural human vision. Capturing the light observed through these telescopes onto photosensitive plates enabled scientists for the first time to measure the relative age and distance of celestial bodies.13 There was a general enthusiasm during this era for mechanisms that appeared to operate independently of human judgment and, perhaps even more importantly, that did so passively–without exerting any bias or influence on the outcome.
While Redon may have initially hoped that lithography would function similarly as a passive tool enabling him to disseminate his work, what he found in this medium was instead a universe of operations as unpredictable and complex as any other. And not only that—he also found a populated universe. Redon was not alone, could not be alone, when working in lithography. There were always other creative agencies involved, from the stone grainer to the proofing printer.
This potential for encounter with other intelligences was at the center of both the new astronomy of the late nineteenth century and the search for new methods of making meaning in the visual arts as pursued by artists in the Symbolist movement. Popular science writing in Redon’s time was full of debates concerning the possibility of life on other planets, fueled by the huge advances taking place in the scientific understanding of the size and age of the cosmos. Redon was an avid reader and great admirer of one of the major advocates for the argument for extraterrestrial life, popular science writer Camille Flammarion [Fig. 5]. Flammarion’s description of the psychological and emotional impact of contemplating the possibility of other worlds reads in many ways as an apt summary of the scene Redon depicts in On the horizon, the angel of certitude, and in the night sky, a questioning regard: “The admiration we experience in this moving scene of nature soon transforms itself into an undefinable sadness because we believe ourselves to be strangers to these worlds where an apparent solitude reigns. . . . In these deserted and silent shores we look for regards that answer our own.”14
FIG. 5
Camille Flammarion in his Juvisy observatory, mid-1880s. Bonhams, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Throughout his career, Redon’s approach to artmaking remained fiercely independent, and his modes of expression deeply personal and individualized. Unlike Flammarion’s stargazer, whose encounter with infinitude provokes anxiety and sorrow, Redon rarely expresses worry about stepping into the unknown when describing his own artistic process. At the same time, however, we have seen how his encounter with the unfamiliar medium of lithography complicated this self-perception by introducing other creative forces into the process of making. In the end, Redon’s print offers us a multitude of answers to our own searching gaze, not only in the hybrid symbolisms of the eye, moon, angel, and ocean, but also through the lithographic medium itself, with its multitude of possibilities for creative expression and its many opportunities for encountering points of view outside of one’s own.
- For more on the significance of Poe (and particularly of his “The Philosophy of Composition” essay) for Symbolist poets and writers in late nineteenth-century France, see Andrei Pop, “Crises of Sense: The French Take on Edgar Allan Poe,” in A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Zone Books, 2019), 51–97.
- Dario Gamboni, The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 119–23.
- Pop, A Forest of Symbols, 14.
- Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).
- Evelyn M. Acomb, The French Laic Laws (1879–1889): The First Anti-Clerical Campaign of the Third French Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).
- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–128.
- Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
- Gabriel-Albert Aurier, “Les Peintres symbolistes,” Revue encyclopédique (April 1, 1892): 474–86. Translation from H. R. Rookmaaker, Synthetist Art Theories: Genesis and Nature of the Ideas on Art of Gauguin and His Circle (Amsterdam: Swets en Zeitlinger, 1959): 1. Cited in Pop, A Forest of Symbols, 40.
- André Mellerio, “Etude sur Redon (1913),” in Odilon Redon: Les estampes; The Graphic Work: Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Alan Hyman (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 2001), xviii. The original reads: “Je n’ai jamais le souci de faire donner à la pierre ce qu’elle a en soi, mais de me transmettre moi-même. A part deux ou trois planches . . . toutes mes planches ne sont guère qu’un dessin transposé et multiplié, avec la pierre pour humble agent de transmission. Et puis on n’est pas seul. Il y a l’imprimeur essayant. Il prépare, il triture la matière grasse, quelquefois il l’abîme, surtout quand il opère, contre ses habitudes, pour un artiste varié dans la recherche, ou original.”
- Mellerio, xl. The full quote reads: “Outre les dispositions reçues sous l’influence du monde et du lieu qui l’entourent, l’artiste cède aussi, dans une certaine mesure, aux exigeants pouvoirs de la matière qu’il emploie : crayon, charbon, pastel, pâte huileuse, noirs d’estampe, marbre, bronze, terre ou bois, tous ces produits sonts des agents qui l’accompagnent, collaborent avec lui, et disent aussi quelque chose dans la fiction qu’il va fournir.”
- Ibid, xlii. The original reads: “Il faut que le temps où j’ai vécu ait été bien préoccupé d’imitation et de naturalisme directs, pour que ce procédé n’ai pas tenté plus souvent les esprits inventifs de fictions de se laisser conduire par lui à déployer les richesses suggestives qu’il réserve. Il provoque et fait apparaître l’inattendu.”
- Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity.”
- Aud Sissel Hoel, “Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography,” History of Photography 40, no. 1 (February 2016): 49–66. For more on spectroscopy and its developments within Redon’s lifetime, see Larson, The Dark Side of Nature, 108–9.
- Camille Flammarion, La pluralité des mondes habités (Paris, 1864). Cited in Larson, The Dark Side of Nature, 128.
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