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Dream of Butterflies

Dreamed 1910-15 by Odilon Redon

Here's a Surrealist painting done before Surrealism existed. Odilon Redon was a throw-away kid, afflicted with epilepsy at a time when this was considered insanity, and deeply stigmatized. Hidden in a house in the country, he grew up largely alone and melancholy. He made dreamlike visionary art all his life, from nightmarish early charcoal drawings of gigantic staring eyes and spiders with grins, to joyful, colorful, mythical pastels and paintings as he matured. This, though, is one of just two artpieces I know that he explicitly labeled as a dream.

Dream of Butterflies, pastel by Odilon Redon, 1910-15
But it may not be his dream; Redon may be referring to Zhuangzi's famous dream of being a butterfly, some 2250 years earlier.

SOURCE: bio: Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams by the Art Institute of Chicago, 1994; prologue. Image: New Orleans Museum of Art.


LISTS AND LINKS: moths & butterflies - bugs in general - color - flying - surrealism - Redon in his early dark period: In Dreams - Zhuangzi's dream of being a Butterfly - crayon & pastels - oil & acrylic

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