The Smiling Spider
Odilon Redon didn’t paint a spider because he was interested in entomology. He painted it because the sunlit world of the 19th century had become a mechanical lie. In 1881, Paris was a fever dream of gaslight and soot. Industrial engines screamed in the streets while scientists like Darwin dismantled the old myths of creation and man’s “special place” in the eyes of Divinity. The world was being documented by the cold, unblinking eye of the camera. Like many, Redon looked at all that progress and chose to retreat into the realm of imagination, shadows and all.
This was his Noirs period. He worked exclusively in black because he felt it was the color of the soul when the lights go out. The Smiling Spider is a lithograph that pulls its power from the velvety depths of charcoal stone, not any rendering of a proper zoological specimen. For one thing, it has ten legs instead of eight, representing the human fear more than the biological reality. This is nightmare logic. It defies the visible world to reveal something more uncomfortable and more disturbing, based upon the reality of human reactions, not the reality of the natural world.
The creature wears a human face. It is a tiny, uncanny grin that bridges the gap between species. While doctors like Charcot were studying hysteria in Parisian hospitals, Redon was capturing the internal tremors of the human psyche. The spider doesn't look predatory. It looks knowing. The face of a hidden reality that exists just behind the curtain of the material world. In an era of cold facts and steam engines, Redon reminded us that the darkness inside our Darwinian animal natures still has plenty to say.
References
Gottlieb, F. The Symbolist Movement in the Fourth Dimension. New York: City University of New York. 1966.
Larson, B. L. The Theosophic Messenger. Evolution and the Symbolist Body. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. 2005.
Milner, J. The Symbolists. London: Phaidon Press. 1971.
Rapetti, R. Symbolism. Paris: Flammarion. 2005.