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History is generally not kind to weirdos, oddballs, and freaks, but every once in a while one of

these misfits is so undeniably talented that they can't be suppressed. That despite making images

that are so bizarre, so unusual, so strange, the skill of the artist is impressive enough to

outweigh the uncomfortable feelings that rise within us. Hieronymus Bosch comes to mind as the

most talented and yet most bizarre painters in history. But in this lecture, I'd like to bring

Odilon Radon for your consideration as one of history's great weirdos. While not nearly as

over-the-top or grandiose as Bosch, Radon had a special skill set that set him apart. He had a deep

understanding of color, composition, design, and a vision that forced people to take notice,

despite being confused or uncomfortable with what they were seeing. Even though he was creating

strange monsters, he also had a strong command of how to make things look beautiful, inspiring,

and mystifying, even while occasionally giving us nightmares. Bertrand Jean Radon was born in Bordeaux,

France, on April 20, 1840. He was born into a wealthy family, and by now you might have noticed

this trend amongst the Post-Impressionists. At some point, Bertrand decides that his name doesn't fit

with him and opts instead for Odilon. Odilon does sound prettier—no offense to any Bertrands out there—and

it was derived from his mother's name Odile. Odilon's mother was a French Creole woman from Louisiana.

His father, also named Bertrand, had met her in Louisiana while he was traveling there to make the

family fortune in the slave trade. Despite how cringeworthy this sounds today, it was not common

in France at the time, and what it meant was that from birth, Odilon had a richer and more diverse

family life, with parents who had perspectives and experience beyond your average Parisian. Odilon struggled with

his health as a young boy. The exact nature of his condition was never completely diagnosed,

but it did include epilepsy in addition to other problems that kept him extremely isolated. While still

a small child, he was sent to live with his uncle out in the country on the family winemaking estate.

Radon recounts being a very sad and ill child. This was a lonely time where he sought out the shadows and hid

under the curtains as he watched the clouds pass. As a young boy, when other kids his age were playing

outside, Radon was sad, scared, and alone. Despite the relative comforts his family had, we already see a dark

and melancholy outlook developing early on in Radon's life. When Odilon is 11, he's finally thought to be well

enough to move back home with his family in Bordeaux, and this is when he finally starts school for the first time.

Right away, it's clear to his teachers and family that he has an artistic talent far above his peers.

While alone at his uncle's winery, staring at the endlessly shifting clouds, he wasn't just mindlessly

daydreaming. He was paying close attention to the light and shadow, the way that the position of the sun

can change the temperature of a color, the angle of shadows. While the children he envied were having fun

and not paying attention to boring clouds, he was taking in the world, visually, on a deeper level.

Now, not only did the Radon family have a lot of money, they were also hoarding quite a bit of talent as well.

Odilon's older brother became a famous musician, and his younger brother a famous architect.

Odilon, though, had a unique ability in his drawings to conjure up the fantastic and impossible from an early age.

And after winning a prize for drawing, Odilon's parents decide to encourage his precocious skills

and sign him up for private lessons at the age of 15 with a professional artist known for his watercolors,

Stanislaus Gorin.

Though a much more conventional artist, Gorin was nonetheless a very talented painter

and a perfect match for Radon at this stage.

Ray Don says, Gorin's first words were to advise me that I was myself,

and that I should never make a single mark with a pencil, unless my feeling and my reason were in it.

There's actually a lot to unpack in that seemingly simple bumper sticker advice.

First, to be himself, which to me, that means to trust and understand himself.

Gorin's advice wasn't to understand the masters or to learn certain techniques, it was to embrace his inner weirdo.

Secondly, Gorin says that his feeling and reason should be behind every mark.

I love this. It's the balance of intuition and analysis.

I think the best artists are passionate and reasonable, emotional and analytic.

It's rare an artist to display both so well, but this was the perfect foundation for Radon's career.

One that we can see occurring over and over in his paintings and drawings, this balance of feeling and reason.

Even if most of his reasons are opaque to us.

Gorin also introduced Radon to the work of other artists that most of the post-impressionists were taking their inspiration from,

like Delacroix, Goya, and Corot.

But there was another artist who really moved Radon, Gustave Moreau.

We saw some of his influence in our discussion of symbolism.

Moreau was a huge inspiration to that movement, especially the dark and magical moods he created,

and the fantastical beasts he drew that totally transcend reality.

As much as he loves painting, Radon's father is really pushing him towards architecture.

His father deems an architect more prestigious than someone who paints pictures.

So, Odilon says, oui papa, you got it.

He shows up in Paris and applies to architecture school at, where else but the École des Beaux-Arts.

But he fails to get in.

Considering his talent and intelligence, it makes me wonder, did he sabotage his own application?

Or was he really just not good at it?

History is inconclusive.

But in Paris, he's quickly exposed to all sorts of exciting new ideas and influences,

like the symbolist writers Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarme.

Edgar Allan Poe will become another key influence, and Poe's writing really influenced his early dark aesthetic.

He's definitely interested in the spiritual side of the world, too, like many of the symbolists.

So he's reading about Hinduism and Buddhism, too.

Needing a creative outlet for all these new ideas, he signs on to study with an artist named Jean-Leon Jerome.

Unlike last time, this was not a good fit at all for Odilon.

Radon hates studying with Jerome.

Jerome was an academic painter, and he was not very cool, if you ask me.

He insisted on copying exactly what you see and focusing on only what is visible with your eyes.

And his subjects were all rooted in realistic depictions of history or traditional depictions of classical mythology.

Basically, check your imagination with your beret at the studio door.

You can imagine this was torture for Radon, his creative mind bursting with ideas far beyond the visible spectrum.

Radon's early work from this period is beautiful, detailed, and accurate, though.

He had the skills to become a salon artist had he wanted to.

He was more than capable of the realistic and academic style, but he didn't want to.

Instead, Radon's like, if this is what painting is all about, then forget it.

So he leaves and starts to make sculpture instead.

But while he's back in Bordeaux making sculptures, he ends up crossing paths with a printmaker named Rodolphe Bresden, who made etchings and engravings.

Bresden was not a successful artist.

He was actually quite impoverished.

He was another one of these eccentric oddballs, but unfortunately not born as fortunate as Radon was.

Either way, it's exciting to me that Radon would connect with this eccentric artist who taught him not only how to make etchings and engravings, but to free his mind from the tortured copying that his teacher in Paris had.

Bresden gave him the permission to get weird.

They were both eccentric visionaries, and Bresden knew it.

Building upon his first advice to trust himself, this advice was exactly what he needed.

And around 1870, Radon is finally ready to take on the world with art unlike anyone had ever seen.

But just then, his life takes a sudden detour, and he's drafted into the Franco-Prussian War.

Humiliated a year later when France is defeated, Radon returns to Paris, the city still smoldering from the ravages of Prussian bombardment and occupation,

and the turmoil wrought by the revolt of the Paris Commune just a few months afterwards.

After that, Radon begins working earnestly in charcoal.

It's here where his love affair with the color black begins.

This gothic or emo phase is not new to our time.

Artists have been getting depressed and using black for generations.

But Radon is really depressed and disturbed.

And after seeing war firsthand, who knows what trauma stayed in his mind.

At the very least, it had brought back all this childhood trauma.

But he embraces the darkness, and the color black becomes his favorite to work with.

He's completely smitten by charcoal and black ink.

If you don't believe me, listen to what he said about black.

Black should be respected. Nothing prostitutes it.

It does not please the eye and does not awaken sensuality.

It is the agent of the spirit much more than the splendid color of the palette or the prism.

Still not sure what he means here, but wow, don't come at Radon about the color black.

He called these works his noirs .

These drawings and prints are filled with floating heads, heads with big eyes, heads as the sun, heads as balloons, giant eyeballs.

Let's take a closer look at some of these early works.

In this piece, called Gnome, we see a floating head with large bat-like ears or wings.

There appears to be a caterpillar-like fuzz growing around his head,

and the gnome seems to be blissfully flying across the water.

What is it about? I don't know.

Here's another one. This is called Guardian of the Spirit Waters,

where we will see again his most common recurring theme in his drawings, floating heads.

I'm not quite sure what the spirit waters are, but he did say that black was an agent of the spirit,

much more than the colors of the rainbow, so there is that.

A few notable features are the tiny wings coming out of the back of the neck,

the tiny sailboat on the spirit waters, and the way this giant head radiates like the sun,

and also casts a shadow.

If the sun is meant to be behind the head, then what is lighting his face?

His extra-large eye is the main feature.

The smooshed nose and 5 o'clock shadow are also curious elements.

It's not all floating heads, however. There are also child-proportioned skeletons

with tree branches like antlers coming out of his head.

This is an unusual mix of symbolism, one that evokes death from the skeleton

and yet life from the sprouting branches or horns.

It also seems to have the proportions of a child. He's really digging into the mysterious.

When Radon himself talks about his work, although he is insightful,

the things he says usually raise more questions than answers.

Just as he gets going and starts making all these charcoal drawings and prints,

he faces another catastrophe. Radon's once-wealthy father has a massive

and fairly sudden change in fortune and soon dies penniless. Wow!

Suddenly, for the first time in his life, no one was paying the bills, paying rent,

keeping food on the table. He was left to fend for himself.

So this is when he really turns most of his attention to printmaking.

He had just learned the process of lithography.

He didn't have much luck at the salon with his drawings, and so he thought,

if I can reproduce my drawings and sell them to a wider audience,

I might be able to support myself. Curiously, every once in a while,

he'll paint something very pretty, nice, and normal, very much unlike his usual oeuvre.

The Village by the Sea in Brittany, painted in 1880,

is a nondescript work you'd be hard-pressed to recognize as Radon's.

But Radon likely faced this dilemma often in his life,

whether to paint the dark and discomforting images of his mind,

or whether to paint charming seascapes that would be more likely to sell.

But by this time, Radon's works are starting to get noticed by the critics,

and things are really looking up again.

His life seems to oscillate back and forth from dark and painful moments,

followed by hope and joy, as many of our lives will.

While Radon is riding this wave of new success, he meets Camille Fault,

also Creole, like his mother.

And he falls madly in love when they get married.

He says he's surer about marrying Camille than he was about being an artist.

He's extremely happy, perhaps for one of the first times in his life.

He's still making weird black and white drawings, but this strange eye-shaped balloon is worth noting.

My favorite part is the little airplane hanging by threads with the little Thomas the Tank Engine face.

How to interpret the plane, or the face, or the eye for that matter, I couldn't tell you.

But despite its weirdness, it does seem to have a more upbeat feeling to it.

Against a backdrop of fluffy light clouds, the eye and the face it's carrying aloft seem happy and contented somehow.

But we shouldn't try to read too much into them, as Radon himself said,

My works inspire and aren't meant to be defined.

They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

Here we have another iteration of the large eye, this time fully attached within a head,

but with a hair-eyelash situation that looks extremely difficult to manage.

This is the expansively titled,

The Misshapen Polyp Floated on the Shores, A Sort of Smiling and Hideous Cyclops, from 1883.

The Cyclops is a theme that other artists have used within the Greek pantheon.

Polyphemus was a man-eating kyclops, or cyclops giant,

a monster with a single orb-shaped eye in the middle of his forehead, from the Odyssey.

The Cyclops was a notable subject in ancient Greek sculpture,

but no one had made a cyclops like this before.

This cyclops also happens to be supporting a very creepy smile,

simultaneously handsome or cute, but also hideous and terrifying.

He looks like he could pop in any nightmare.

Radon's titles like this one can be evocative and interesting,

but again, usually raise more questions than they answer.

Here we have another interesting work with a great title.

They were also embryonic beings.

These faces also remind me of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Of course, there was no such thing in his day, so what are these things?

These are apparently embryonic beings, so whatever they are, they're just getting started.

Will they one day grow into full-sized floating heads,

wandering about the sky with five o'clock shadows?

As we've seen, religious themes were ever-present at this time,

so it's fascinating to see Radon's take on Jesus.

His version looks oddly similar to his other floating heads.

Doesn't seem like a powerful savior figure to me,

and the crown of thorns feels particularly violent here, flailing in all directions

and almost stabbing into his forehead and neck.

But sometimes the most mundane scenes can be moving when the artist has a certain sensitivity

to light and shadow.

Le Jour, or Day from 1891, feels surprisingly tranquil for a Radon,

despite the abundance of black and feeling of darkness that dominates the composition.

Unfortunately for Radon, and these ups and downs of feeling in his art mirror a consistent pattern

in his life.

Riding the high, following the elation of meeting the love of his life,

they would lose their firstborn son at the age of six months.

It was devastating.

Once again, he's plunged into darkness and despair, experiencing emotional whiplash

from the last tumultuous decade of his life.

He described this depression as a melancholy faintness,

which sounds to me like something a doctor would prescribe a velvet chaise lounge for.

He kept working, however, as he had no choice but to support himself and his wife.

He makes a series of illustrations and lithographs that are meant to accompany poems and stories.

Edgar Allan Poe's works had been translated into French a decade earlier.

And some of Radon's drawings will serve as fan art for his favorite Poe poems and stories.

This lithograph from 1882 recalls the Poe poem, The Bells.

Hear the tolling of the bells, iron bells.

What a world of solemn thought their monody compels.

Works like these become quite popular and are well received from critics and the public.

Then Radon gets a shout-out in a popular new novel called Against Nature.

And pretty soon, his name is the talk of the town once again.

He meets Paul Gauguin, and he starts hanging around with Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

Everyone is digging his work.

He even exhibits with the last Impressionism show in 1886.

A few years later, Odilon and Camille's son Ari is born, and we see a dramatic turning point

in the life and work of Radon.

There's a huge mood shift, an explosion of color in his work.

At this time, he's also checking out the younger artist, the Nabi, those working with

Japanism and decorative painting.

He's always absorbing everything that's going on and synthesizes it through his own unique vision.

This painting of a Breton village from 1890, with its bucolic and sunny scene,

was not necessarily his comfort zone, but you can already see a beautiful glow of warmth from the sun

with shimmering highlights that have depth and richness.

He seems to be stepping out of the shadows and feeling hopeful.

But his drawings have been getting out there, and he's starting to make a name for himself

as a dark and mysterious artist.

Could he abandon black?

Could he embrace this hopeful optimism he was now experiencing?

Before diving headfirst into the super colorful and sparkly, luscious oil paintings he will

eventually become recognized for, he worked mostly with pastels, getting more comfortable with color,

especially the new, rich, saturated colors you could buy.

After so many hundreds of black and white works over the years, the color explosion to come

could not have been predicted.

I love the subtle beauty and simplification, for example, of these two pastel portraits.

They have a spirituality to them, one that he said was reserved for black.

Rather than inherent in the color, this sense of spirit or deeper connection was in him and his vision,

not in the color itself.

Look more closely at the portrait entitled Beatrice.

Check out the yellow silhouette contrasted by a darker green behind her,

and then just a tiny touch of blue in the corner.

These images don't feel as new and exciting to us today as we've seen this type of effect hundreds of times,

but usually done with computers.

And it's design that has been inspired by artists like Ray Dawn for the last 100 years or so.

But I can imagine these would have been very provocative and eye-catching at the time.

Ray Dawn definitely wasn't like the rest of the painters in Paris.

While they were each forging their own path, he was going in a different direction.

Even as he embraced the colors and oils of the Impressionists,

more accurately, he was a symbolist somewhere in between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

But regardless of the ideas behind his art, Ray Dawn's gamble with color pays off.

People love his new style of work, and he gets more and more recognition for it.

Portrait commissions start rolling in.

Consider this one of Violet Heyman.

His approach to her is very well done.

She looks lifelike and convincing, soft, glowing, calm, and lovely.

But then comes the huge tidal wave of flowers that seem to illustrate her thoughts,

and this rather simple portrait becomes something extraordinary.

I'm not going to pick favorites, but this painting certainly is in the running for me.

I find this painting incredibly beautiful.

It's abstract, but also representational.

The palette is muted and dominated with just a few shades of yellow.

But sprinkled throughout the middle, it twinkles and sparkles with all the different colored flowers.

The flowers appear to float weightlessly in classic Ray Dawn fashion, with their stems hidden or missing.

There's also something interesting happening with the relationship between the figure and the ground.

The trees are left almost bare, and the bright yellow of the sky takes precedence.

And we get this interesting reversal of form and space, which to me adds to the dreamlike fantasy quality.

There appears to be a sun on the left, but with Ray Dawn, it could be a floating head.

I also make out a figure shape in muted tones behind the flower, but that could just be a coincidence.

I think the genius in this painting is the restraint.

Oftentimes a maximalist, Ray Dawn held back this time and created a very warm, soothing, sparkling, and magical painting.

For whatever reason, flowers belonged in the sky for Ray Dawn.

He was always looking for excuses to paint flowers or flower-like bursts of color flying throughout the canvas.

This one is kind of funny to me, almost like he's revealing his hand.

Like, fine, yes, there's a bouquet of flowers in the sky. Deal with it.

Who knows, maybe were we to look at this scene with the right electromagnetic frequency, we perhaps could see them too.

It makes sense that Ray Dawn would also be into butterflies.

They're basically flying flowers.

In this painting, called The Evocation of Butterflies, I love the way the background is built up.

It has a very organic feel.

And you can see layers and layers of other colors, creating an atmosphere around the butterflies.

The orange appears to be impacted by the flapping of the butterfly wings.

It's like he's showing us the air currents or subtle heat waves.

There's something deeper going on than pretty butterflies.

It's referencing the much wider world going on around us, beyond our senses,

the things that scientific instruments can now detect and show us the deeper nature of the world.

This painting of Pandora also ranks among my top Radon pieces.

While staying within Academy-approved Greek mythology,

his interpretations go far beyond the typical Academy subject.

Look at the way this painting is composed.

It's vertical, with the heavy, dense colors at the bottom.

A veritable psychedelic orgy of color that begins to break up in plumes of atmosphere,

moving between very light shades of green, blue, and pink.

The landscape seems to dissipate right before our eyes.

The bright blue, saturated robe of Pandora is the anchor that keeps this painting from floating away.

Although, the front hem looks like it might be getting pulled into the flow.

Finally, there's the Cyclops, Radon's most famed painting.

Bringing all his skills together, we get a beautifully lush landscape with every type of plant you could find.

The sheer variety of colors and marks and shapes is stunning.

With the stability of a two-thirds horizontal landscape, he cuts in with a Cyclops that is cuter than it is scary.

It's massive compared to the woman's body you see in the foreground.

But somehow, he doesn't look terribly menacing, but more inquisitive, as if he's gazing upon the human form for the first time.

All the elements of Radon's career come together in this work and are combined in a beautiful and unsettling dreamlike trance that is as interesting today as when it was painted.

Thankfully, unlike several others who passed away before they were able to see how much their work was appreciated, Radon received the Legion of Honor from the French government in 1903.

In 1913, he was included in the Armory Show in New York.

And in fact, he exhibited more work in that show than any other artist.

The fact that Radon was so well accepted by the end of his life, despite his highly idiosyncratic style, just reinforces just what a broad church post-impressionism is.

Radon died tragically while his son Ari was fighting in World War I, his anxiety over his son perhaps contributing to his death in 1916.

He was 76.

The Impressionists loved him.

The Post-Impressionists loved him.

The Nabi loved him.

The Fauves loved him.

The Symbolists loved him.

Eventually, the Surrealists would really love him.

Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, André Breton were all big admirers.

Even the father of conceptualism, Marcel Duchamp, credits Radon for helping him break free from traditional art and to break new ground.

So, despite being one of art's great oddballs and a loner for much of his early life, there are very few artists who were actually as influential and well admired by so many different groups of artists during their lifetime as was Radon.

Unlike many of the artists around this time, and despite the tragedies in his life, he was at least able to see the fruit of his work and the appreciation and influence it had while he was still alive.

Radon, the consummate weirdo, had made good.

You're rich and grateful.

All your kids will enjoy this weekend.

Oh, yes.