Fear

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

Odilon Redon’s fantastically dark sensibility is in full evidence in Fear. A rider protecting a child in his arms gallops past desolate plunging ravines, driven by an unseen threat. Redon’s dramatic etching may refer to the Elfking (Der Erlkönig), a tragic 1782 poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In that work, a father tries to reassure his anxious, dangerously ill son that the hostile elements that beset them are not elves trying to spirit him away. Though the child dies, the poem remains open to interpretation. Indeed, Redon’s forbidding landscape strongly suggests the presence of supernatural forces only the doomed son could sense.

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