Spider

For the next five weeks every Saturday we will present late 19th and early 20th century prints  from the collection of the National Museum of Krakow (Poland). Today we present one of the weirdest print I have ever seen in my live. But it’s a bit charming as well, isn’t it?

In this print, the French Symbolist, Odilon Redon, returns to a motif he’d created six years earlier in his charcoal drawing, Smiling Spider. That spider, along with the in the presented lithograph, also wears a hint of a smile, its cheerful eyes are playfully looking up, and its flared nostrils seem to happily inhale the air. When we look at Redon's prints everything seems credible –  that spiders smile, have merry little noses, and that they have ten legs instead of eight. The presence of spiders, insects and plants in Redon's work stems from his long friendship with botanist Armaund Clavaud, who introduced a young Redon to the fascinating world of the smallest living organisms. With the development of Redon’s detailed knowledge of the creatures' builds and appearances, he could depict believable hybrids, processed through the forces of his imagination: flower stems bent under the weight of human heads, cacti with human faces, and spiders that smile and cry. Nicknamed “the prince of dreams” by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Redon portrays symbolic visions hidden in dreams. Works from the years 1875-1889, however, tend to resemble scenes from nightmares.

Both the aesthetics of these drawings and prints, and the black-and-white colour scheme of his works, may trigger surprise or even fear; a result of his applied techniques. Odilon Redon juxtaposes elements both observed and unobserved in nature, but he does so in a very credible manner, perhaps paving the way for the Surrealists. His works were eagerly referred to not only by writers (the protagonist of Huysmans' decadent novel titled “Against the Grain” was a collector of Redon's works), but also poets whose poems he illustrated: Baudelaire, Poe. Thus, including Redon in the Symbolists' trend, although the artist himself did not share all the ideals of their programme. Recognized and extremely popular during his lifetime, he became an inspiration for subsequent generations: the Nabis, the Fauves, Paul Gauguin and Marcel Duchamp.