The Spider

Redon's human-faced arachnid exploits the potential of anthropomorphism to produce creatures that embody irrealism, a movement that countered the prevailing naturalism in literary Paris. Redon's work on his noirs was complex. He drew using various shades of black, erased, scratched out, sprayed with fixative, reworked, and manipulated the paper to produce a broad range of effects and tones despite the monochromatic media. These techniques yielded the effect of the image coalescing on the sheet--of the page as a self-contained universe. -- Exhibition Label, from "Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection" Morgan Library & Museum, 2017.