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Parsifal / Druidess: unfolding a lithographic metamorphosis by Odilon Redon
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2007 by Dario Gamboni
In 1879, with an album of ten prints and one frontispiece entitled Dans le reve ("In the Dream" or "Dreaming"), Odilon Redon started publishing lithographs. The album format proved congenial and successful: three more followed until, in 1886, the artist began issuing individual sheets with Profile of Light (Fig. 18). In April 1891, a first catalog of Redon's lithographs was published by the Belgian lawyer, writer, and critic Jules Destree. He made a clear distinction between the isolated plates, which he introduced under the generic title Pieces modernes but regarded as "not linked by any special relationship," and the albums, which, "in the author's mind, form wholes, groupings that cannot be broken down without betraying his thought." (1) By then, these "Modern Pieces" numbered eight lithographs. Redon continued to produce albums, as well as prints for journals and frontispieces for books. In fact, his reputation as a lithographer continued to rest mainly on his albums, so much so that in 1898, while preparing a new catalog of his prints, the critic Andre Mellerio asked him why he had produced isolated pieces. Redon replied somewhat angrily that he had made them like "every other artist from the present and the past." (2) Mellerio's question signaled that the sequential character of the albums, the echoes and contrasts organized by Redon between the individual prints within them, were crucial to his appreciation. Despite Redon's irritation, the insight provided by such an approach remains valuable. The 1885 album Homage to Goya, for instance, opens and closes with two images that frame the series and are clearly conceived as opposed and complementary: the first one (Fig. 20) shows a male head, seen from the front on a dark background, with a melancholic and searching expression, while a female profile (Fig. 21), described by the caption as "severe and hard," detaches itself from the white sheet in the second one. (3)
We may, however, also disagree with Destree's contention that Redon's individual prints are mutually unrelated. On October 11, 1891, the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, who had organized the promotion of Homage to Goya and had become Redon's critical champion, received mail from the artist, which he answered with a note of thanks written on the same day: "My janitor brought me up this morning a pretty roll that, once unfolded, confronted me with the troubling figures you created. Ah! But they are perfect Redons, the one so strange and gentle and suffering with his arrow, the other so terribly animal with her crude profile and her shiny eye. And the two pale mystics!" (4) This description identifies three prints, which, according to Mellerio's catalog, were editioned in 1892: Parsifal (Fig. 1), Druidess (Fig. 2), and a linear depiction of two standing women entitled Mystical Conversation. (5) Given the fact that Huysmans received the three lithographs in one roll, it is only logical that he should have discussed them together, but his treatment of Parsifal and Druidess in the same sentence clearly considers them as a pair on a formal and semantic level, the gentleness of the former building a counterpart to the hardness of the latter.
This intuition of an intimate link between the two images was confirmed in an unexpected way when, in 1976, Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Inge Christine Swenson, two art historians working at the Art Institute of Chicago, discovered a version of Parsifal (Fig. 3) unmentioned in Mellerio's catalog, and of which only three proofs have been preserved. (6) A minute comparison of this unknown version (which I will henceforward call Parsifal I) with the impressions of Mellerio 116 (henceforward Parsifal II) in the Art Institute collection led them to conclude that it was not an undescribed state of the latter but had been "printed from a different stone and must therefore be a first, rejected version of the Parsifal subject." They supposed that the reason for this rejection must have been a flaw in the stone, "which created a horizontal black line through the entire composition, just above Parsifal's brow," and they argued for the equal quality but divergent "conception and emotional impact" of the two versions: whereas a harsh, broken light accents forms dramatically in Parsifal I and makes the hero appear "tormented by his fate," he seems merely "pensive" in the soft, even illumination of Parsifal II.
Extending the comparison to other Redon lithographs of the same period, McCullagh and Swenson made a second, even more remarkable discovery: that elements of Parsifal I recur in Druidess, as can easily be seen when one of the two compositions is turned upside down (Fig. 4). McCullagh and Swenson observed that the "apparently fortuitous assemblage of lines on Parsifal's white collar is found inverted on the Druidess's white headband." They proposed the following reconstruction of the passage from one lithograph to the other: "The priestess's profile is developed from the lighted area of Parsifal's neck and chin, the shaft of light beside him defines her veil, and the side of his helmet is transformed into her elegant earring." They added that in some impressions of Druidess, "remnants of Parsifal's right eye can be discerned at the bottom edge of the print," which now corresponds to the horizontal black line observed in Parsifal I. In other words, they suggested that after rejecting Parsifal I, Redon turned the stone upside down and, leaving out the smaller part of the lithograph divided by the aberrant line, transformed the larger part into a new image, Druidess, before returning to his initial composition and creating an entirely new version of it, Parsifal II, on a new stone.
