The French artist Odilon Redon, afflicted with epilepsy, spent his childhood in the Medoc region of France, cared for by his uncle. As a weak young boy, he passed many hours alone in the vineyards, under the magical brightness of sky and clouds. He began to draw. Redon’s art studies were interrupted in 1870, when he was drafted into the Franco-Prussian War. It ended in 1871 and he returned to Paris, where melancholy tinted his paintings, which often began in shades of black, works he called noirs. Once dubbed “the prince of mysterious dreams,” Redon is now seen as foreshadowing Dada and Surrealism. The Cleveland Art Museum, an early collector of Redon, celebrates the artist in an exhibition that displays loans from other museums along with its own holdings. —E.C.