Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was a maker of utterly individual masterpieces. In his pictures, disembodied eyes stare out at us from velvety black fields. A head of Christ, as mystical as a Buddha and as pure as a Cycladic idol, fuses with serpents, a starry night, and a thicket of thorns. Stained glass windows explode into a colored profusion of butterflies, sea life, flames, flowers, or clouds. Redon cleared painting of its traditional drama. He dissolved the stage into a fertile field of dreams, a mysterious soil rich and ripe for abstraction.

“Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon,” which opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is a dense, delicious, and intoxicating exhibition. Arranged chronologically in four intimate galleries, the show presents a beautiful grouping of more than 130 of Redon’s prints, drawings, pastels, illustrated books, and paintings.

Many of the pictures are part of a gift of more than 100 Redon works made to the museum in 2000 by the Ian Woodner Family Collection – most of these are on view at MoMA for the first time in “Beyond the Visible.” The exhibition highlights an artist whose masterful and elusive voice has rarely been showcased at MoMA (despite the fact that the museum owns the largest body of Redon’s art outside of France).

Often referred to merely as a Symbolist or a precursor of Surrealism, Redon is one of the greatest artists of fin-de-siecle Paris. He is also one of the most misunderstood and enigmatic. Crowned the “Prince of Dreams,” he took the Realist mysticism of Corot (an artist who mythologized trees) and fused it with the Romantic color of Delacroix, the dark grotesqueries of Rembrandt and Goya, the swirling tumults of Turner, the Neoclassicism of Ingres and Puvis, and the visionary light of Leonardo. Redon was central to the liberation of color as an emotive rather than descriptive force – as essential as Gauguin and van Gogh. He was also instrumental in turning art toward an inward realm in which fantasy, reverie, and mythology merge.

Redon’s career can be divided into two distinct phases: the period before 1895, when he worked almost exclusively in black and white (charcoal, graphite, lithography, etching, and chalk), and the period after 1895, when he worked almost exclusively in color. MoMA’s exhibition begins with a small gallery of early works, including rarely seen paintings that were done before 1900.

In the first room we see the delicately rendered and spare graphite drawing “Trees” (c. 1865-68), which reveals Redon’s love of Corot, and the equally tender graphite “Portrait of a Young Man (after Holbein)” (c. 1866) showing an admiration and understanding of Holbein and Ingres. The very dense, Uccello-esque “The Battle” (1865), a rich, crowded charcoal landscape, is as telling for its contrast from the other works in the room as it is for its rearing horses and chariot – an image that would recur in the artist’s oeuvre. Among the drawings are a half dozen accomplished, straight-ahead landscape paintings, which show Redon’s range of interests – from Courbet to Turner to Corot. Still, they are infused with a dormant Romanticism, and they clearly establish where his art would travel from.

The next two galleries, filled with prints, drawings, and illustrations, give a fairly full presentation of Redon’s 25-year-long Noir period, which began in the 1870s. He was as talented a draftsman as Rembrandt. His drawing feels as natural as breathing, and he could get black to read in as many variations of quality and color as is humanly possible. The forms are as elusive and changing as clouds. Nothing stays put. His world is made up not of objects (even when his pictures are full of trees, flowers, figures, and monsters) but of fluid energies that are always in transition.

The metaphoric subjects are the window, angels, apparitions, chimeras, Christ, Death, Orpheus, butterflies, Apollo, but the pictures convey states of feeling and of becoming. Redon depicted the nature of descent and rebirth – of germination, gestation, and transformation. In these pictures, man, myth, and nature are all one and the same. The body and the tree, the moon and the eye, the face and the flower, light and lust, root and vein are all interchangeable. We are aware of growth and movement and emotion.

Experiencing the noirs in the MoMA show is like a slow immersion; darkness becomes more and more visible. In “Child’s Head With Flowers” (1897), the face is whispered on and feels like the first spring flowering of innocence. In “The Dream Is Realized by Death” (c. 1886), a charcoal drawing on cream wove paper, black shifts the drawing into states of sand, earth, smoke, solid rock, and miasma. With a veiled light, he achieves sunset and sunrise in golden hues that sparkle like fireflies or flame. Light in his pictures reveals not only qualities but also sensations or realms.

The last gallery is devoted to Redon’s works in color. It is an explosion. In the oil painting “Silence” (c. 1911), a sepia head wavers in a cameo, which is held against a scumbled and watery blue. The vibration of color (not the fingers held to the lips) conveys the sensation of silence. In the pastel “Vase of Flowers” (c. 1912-14), the invented flowers, a cacophony of hues, speak as much about the sensations felt before a bouquet (or an annunciation), as they do about the movements and dreams of butterflies and bees.

In “Roger and Angelica” (c. 1910), a swirling tumult of dark violet, brown, and blue pastel, the hero swoops in on a hippogriff to rescue Angelica, who is chained to, or budding within, the flowers among the rocks. A white plume erupts from out of the waves. It is dangerous like the sea monster and it gleams like the dazzling shield Roger uses to distract it, or like the ring he places on Angelica’s finger. The picture’s movement and light convey the rush of sensations produced by her rescue, their reunion, and their flight.

Redon went deep. He fused elements of every art movement of the 19th century (Romanticism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Realism), and rose again with an entirely new universe at his fingertips, one that was strangely ahead of and also strangely behind his time. His oeuvre is as mystical and otherworldly as that of the Byzantine artists or of Paul Klee – who is Redon’s great heir. In taking us away from the natural world, Redon took us further into ourselves.

October 30 to January 23 (53 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400).