Pathological fear of the swamp4/10/2023 ![]() Of Redon's anatomical hybrids, his original biographer André Mellerio would note, "It was at the museum that he grasped Cuvier's great law regarding the correspondence of being." 3 Despite the scientist's formidable legacy, the great debate over evolutionary theory had overtaken the museum's staff by the mid-seventies. While Cuvier upheld the theory of successive deluges and believed in the separation and fixity of species, his classifications demonstrated the relationship of skeletal structures through time as well as a principle of correlation of parts to the whole that established the unity and harmony of a single animal. Cuvier was the first to systematically reconstruct fossil vertebrates and founded the field of vertebrate paleontology at the end of the eighteenth century. 2 The Museum of Natural History had long been entrenched in the reputation of the anti-evolutionist Georges Cuvier whose hall of comparative anatomy remained largely untouched when Redon was frequenting it. He noted the importance of time spent at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris and the lectures on osteology he attended there, as well as his investigations into comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History, an institution that sponsored a range of public courses in the natural sciences. Redon's hybrid forms, which he fondly referred to as his "monsters" emerged out of the debate around evolutionary theory.ĭuring the mid-1870s, Redon took advantage of the many free lectures offered to the public by scientific institutions. The community was further fragmented, of course, between supporters and opponents of evolution. Yet the scientific community was divided between diverging models of evolution: while many remained devoted followers of the earlier theories of French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, others supported the more recent writings of Darwin. "Evolution" and all that it suggested about man's place in the natural scheme of things was the unifying concept under which new research was undertaken: man's biological past, the origins of his thought, and the adaptive purposes behind his skeletal and nervous system were all analyzed under the authority of evolutionary theory. The study of the material aspects of man's nature emerged as one of the principal focuses of scientific investigation of the post-war period. By the 1880s, when many of Redon's biological noirs were produced, Paris was credited with being the most active center of biology in the world. Redon's interest in evolution and degeneration developed against the backdrop of the anti-clerical early Third Republic, which promoted progressive science as the way out for a defeated nation. This powerful, circulating discourse played on national anxieties in a country that had recently lost the Franco-Prussian War only to face the bloody internal conflict of the Commune which followed. The macabre universe he evokes in his early works is also related to a dark philosophical specter that emerged in the shadow of evolutionary theory, the possibility of decline or degeneration. In order to better understand his hybrid imagery, the complex scientific climate of late nineteenth-century France needs to be elaborated, and the various strands of evolutionism untangled. 1 While Redon's primary influence came from Darwin, there are several strains of evolutionism and related biological theories referred to in his work. 1) His lithographic series Origins, 1883, deals explicitly with evolutionary theory, exploring the theme of man's development from single cells and an embryological fish-animal-humanoid form which skims the ocean floor in the first print to a lumbering human figure in the final print. Odilon Redon's graphic work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century includes many examples of mutating or hybrid forms that are informed by transformisme: fish-men, plants with human faces, and ape-men among them. Evolution and Degeneration in the Early Work of Odilon Redonįig.
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