“I paint fictions” said Odilon Redon (1840-1916), who was born in Bordeaux, France. His mother, Odile, was a fourteen-year-old from New-Orleans who eloped with Frenchman Bertrand Redon, a self-described “explorer and forest trailblazer”.

One can hear that Symbolism, who peaked in the 1890s, has been due for a revival for more than a century. But too much of Symbolism has passed into the culture for a revival to be really necessary, with its avoidance of naturalistic realism, its love of the weird, its extravagant use of color and sexual themes, of dreamscapes, of esoteric gloomy landscapes, the Occult, the Sacred, and Death.

The word “Symbolism” is used in a very large sense. The “symbol” can be a replacing of a naturalistic color with an unusual one. The image then stops being “realistic” to become a “Symbolist” one. As in “Red Boat” below.

Par Guy et Mockel (Pierre Mockel) — Publié dans Michael Gibson Redon, Taschen, 2011. ISBN 9783836530026, Domaine public, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102575716