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Fantasy Art History
Fantasy Art Work | Van Gogh | Hieronymus Bosch | Paul Gauguin | Paul Cezanne | Auguste Rodin
 

        Fantasy art has historical roots in religion, mythology, and folklore from all over the world. It seems to be a universal language of images about the mystery of life and forces unseen. Fantasy art evolved from Greek mythology, African magic, Chinese folklore, and other sacred traditions, with our museums full of ancient fantasy art depicting angels, gods, dragons, spirits, and demons.
        Fantasy art comes from the imagination as much or more than from direct observation of the real world. Like the word implies, it can be an especially wild visionary fancy, unreal, capricious, fantastic, and dreamlike. Having evolved from ancient times, fantasy art has been practiced by dreamers and imaginative artists, while the art goes in and out of style.
        The Dutch artist Hieronomous Bosch one example of such an artist who painted like none other in his time. In 1500 he painted The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych of the Garden of Eden filled with naked people romping with giant fruit, in and out of glass domes and bird winged houses. He painted sensuous nudes enraptured by the appeal of the world of the flesh. While he was illustrating the Original Sin of Adam and Eve and those destined for Hell, there is an innocence and haunting poetic beauty in his interpretation of the garden. Bosch is included in most history of art text books, but he is treated as an exception.
        During the twentieth century, fantasy art became more diversified and accepted as a legitimate style of art making. More artists could be described as fantasy artists than at any previous time. The reason for the proliferation and development of fantasy art was due to a number of factors. First, with modernization and the invention of photography in the 1800s, realistic representational art began to lose its direction and purpose. Realistic, representational art had been championed in Western Art since classical Roman times. Artists during the renaissance developed sophisticated painting techniques to make space appear to recede into the picture frame with accurate perspective. However, with the invention of photography in the late 1800s, realism of this kind was no longer needed. There was no need to make paintings as records of portraits, ceremonies, historic events.


Hierononmous Bosch: Hell
Hell, right panel from triptych 'Garden of Earthly Delights' (1504 - 1505)

        Artists began to look for greater challenges. For the first time groups of artists went very different ways as they looked for a new role for their artwork. Artists turned to expressionism, abstraction, cubism, fantasy, and surrealism as a means to find greater meaning and purpose for art. Modern physics was an inspiration to artists as was modern psychology.

        Artists began to paint the unseen more and more, that which they had to imagine. At the turn of the century painters called Impressionists fragmented their paintings into small brush strokes or dots of color. They were inspired by the newest science theories about light particles, atoms, and other unseen elements that are part of all matter in the universe. Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne, along with the sculptor Rodin, were interested in emotion and how the paint stroke, the painting structure, and the chosen colors express itself in art. The work no longer appeared to try to look real. They aimed for something different and more meaningful. Their work was responding to the new science of psychology as well as to exposure to Asian and African artwork.
         The psychologists Sigmund Freud and later, Carl Jung made significant impact on the way artists viewed the world. They discovered the inner world, called the unconscious that is real but can't be seen. This is the topsy turvy, upside-down dream world that shows up at night in our dreams. This became the material for fantasy artists to explore images that were dreamlike, disjointed, and symbolic. Painting the inner world of thoughts and imagination took on new legitimacy with the discoveries of psychiatry. Fantasy art developed into a Surreal Art Movement with an emphasis on dream imagery. Salvador Dali, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Meret Oppenheim, Max Ernst, and Jean Arp were called surrealists. Surrealism and fantasy seem to be one in the same; another version of reality, wild and out of the ordinary. So how do we differentiate the two? The more playful the work, the more often it is associated with fantasy and less often called surreal. For example Marc Chagall and Paul Klee are artists of fantasy. Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Fini, and Kay Sage can be described as both fantasy artists and surreal artists.
For more historical examples visit our Fantasy Art Work page.
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