The recent retrospectives of drawings by Vincent van Gogh (1853–90), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Odilon Redon (1840–1916), at the Museum of Modern Art, reflect different visionary strains of modernism. Van Gogh began his art studies at the ripe age of twenty-eight in the foreboding darkness of the coal mines and slag heaps of the Borinage in the Netherlands, where he languished as a failed Dutch Reformed minister. Through Herculean effort, his work evolved into the furiously beautiful, sun-drenched colorful landscapes by which the world knows him best today. Redon, on the other hand, was a child prodigy nurtured in the cloistered embrace of French provincial life. He was attracted to the comforting darkness of small rooms, musty alcoves, solitary stunted trees, edges of beach where mollusks, shells and polyps glistened in the brine and misshapen rocks embedded in the night sand resembled decayed corpses. These two contemporary artists, in very different ways, had an uncanny ability to dramatize a world beyond the visible one we inhabit.

Neither van Gogh nor Redon employed the process of drawing in the traditional manner, to outline a painting. They regarded their drawings as finished works, a more direct mode of communication from their interior worlds. In his letters, van Gogh speaks of his drawings as works to be exhibited or marketed. Almost all Redon’s prints and many of his paintings are essentially drawings. Both drew incessantly from nature…