One way to interpret a work of art like a painting, is to think of it as dream made manifest in the physical world. Though Freud’s theories have been questioned by many thinkers, we will use his method of dream interpretation as an approach to analyzing a painting.

In the first of twelve, long chapters of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso retells the story of the abduction of Europa by Zeus and repeatedly poses the question: “But how did it all begin?” Ostensibly this question refers to the mythical history leading up to the abduction but more generally to the philosophical question: how did our world and everything in it begin.

Redon was born into a prosperous Bordeaux family and began drawing at the age of ten. As a young child he suffered from epilepsy and was sent away to live with his Uncle on the family vineyard at Peyrelebade in the Medoc, where he experienced the “full solitude of the countryside”. It was perhaps here that he formed the fusion of the natural and the fantastic that characterised his work as a graphic artist.

If they’d just left the poor bastard alone. If he’d just been allowed to shoot off guns, take mescaline while lounging naked in public areas, blow up the occasional jeep with gasoline and dynamite . . . everything would have been fine. To all of those crew-cut wearing cops and their higher-ups in Chicago and New York and Washington D.C. . . . you blew it, man. Never piss off a writer. At least . . . not the wrong writer.

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