A pupil of Rodolphe Bresdin and heir to his dark artistic vision, Odilon Redon worked through visionary themes of human destiny and spiritual questioning in his so-called noirs, or drawings and prints executed entirely in black and white. In the 1880s and 1890s, Redon became a leading standard-bearer of the Symbolist movement, an artistic movement that emphasized symbolic meaning over literal representation.

Yet his work also looks back to Goya’s series. In multiple lithographic series, Redon depicted humans perched at the edge of a metaphorical abyss, confronting their deepest doubts and fears.

Redon’s prints often include poetic captions that evoke the textual sources from which his images derives. Apart from those literary cues, the images owe much of their symbolic and expressive power to the balance between inky darkness and the paper’s brightness.