Beauty is always inexplicable, whether the beauty of a metaphor the beauty of a drawing. What made Redon a precursor of so much of what happened to art in the next century is that he understood the part imagination and accident play in creating a work of art. The enduring mystery of his images fits one of the Baudelaire’s definitions of beauty, “something slightly vague, giving rein to conjecture.”
— Charles Simic, in the essay “The Powers of Invention” on the artist, Odilon Redon, 1840-1916