Richard Meier's travertine and white-metal pavilions of the Getty Center under a clear blue sky, with Los Angeles in the distance

Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions

Ended14 July 2026 – 18 October 2026Free

This exhibition has ended.

Charcoal drawings, lithographs and pastels from Getty's collection trace Odilon Redon's dreamlike, symbolist imagery drawn from mythology, religion, literature and science.

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On now All of November 2026

Two skeletons are still fighting after they're dead. One is knocked flat, the other cut in two, and both keep their arms raised. Around 1881 Redon made the bones out of bare tan paper by laying black charcoal around them, and scans for this show found he first drew them whole, then broke them apart and buried the evidence under more black.

You walk into darkness: the first room is his noirs, charcoal drawings full of floating heads and loose eyeballs. Then come the lithographs and print portfolios, including a set on Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony, and finally colour, after Redon dropped black in the late 1890s for pastel flowers. The curator says he is "sometimes funny, even if the humor is pointedly dark."

It closes 18 October. Entry is free with a timed reservation; parking is paid. It's in the Museum West Pavilion, Plaza Level, with labels in English and Spanish and a bilingual audio tour on the GettyGuide app. Saturdays run to 9pm.

Look for

The Battle of the Bones, about 1881
Look for two skeletons made of untouched tan paper against solid black, one on the ground, one cut in half, both still swinging.
Light, 1893
Two small figures look through a window at the brightly lit profile of an enormous face.
The man-headed fish
From the first Flaubert portfolio, a creature with a human head on a fish's body floats in an empty, undefined space.
Baronne de Domecy, about 1900
The baroness's pale, monochrome face gazes outward while a field of bright flowers seems to float across the surface of the pastel.
Orpheus, about 1905
The musician's head is a simple outline above a field of rainbow pastel flowers that read more like fireworks than blooms.