Fantastic art  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli

Come unto These Yellow Sands (1842) by Richard Dadd. Images of nude and semi-nude fairies dancing in rings became popular during the Victorian era.

Two Bodyheads (2003) by Paul Rumsey

Antichita Romanae (1748) by Piranesi

Anonymous Flemish print, end of the 16th century, from The Waking Dream book.

Drawing by Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728 - 1799)

From the Bizzarie di varie figure (1624) by Giovanni Battista Braccelli

Artforms of Nature (1904) by Ernst Haeckel

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Wikipedia Wiktionary Tumblr Wikisource YouTube Shop Featured visual Cenotaph for Newton (1784) by French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée.

Fantastic art is a loosely defined art genre. The first "fantastic" artist is generally believed to be Hieronymus Bosch.

Other artists who have been labeled fantastic include Brueghel, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Matthias Grünewald, Hans Baldung Grien, Francisco de Goya, Gustave Moreau, Henry Fuseli, Odilon Redon, Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, William Blake, Gustave Doré, Giovanni Piranesi, Salvador Dalí, and Odd Nerdrum.

Fantasy has been an integral part of art since its beginnings, but has been particularly important in mannerism, romantic art, symbolism and surrealism. fantastic art celebrates fantasy, imagination, dreamworlds, the grotesque, visions and other-worldliness. With symbolism, it shares its choice of themes such as mythology, occultism and mysticism.

In French, the genre is called le fantastique, in English it is sometimes referred to as visionary art, grotesque art or mannerist art.

Fantastic art should not be confused with fantasy art, which is the domain of science-fiction and fantasy illustrators such as Boris Vallejo and others.

Contemporary Artists

• Ernst Fuchs
• H. R. Giger
• Paul Rumsey

Bibliography

• L'art fantastique (1961) - Marcel Brion
• Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s (1969) - Philippe Jullian
• Quatre siècles de Surréalisme (1973) by Pierre Belfond
• The Occult in Art (1990) - Owen S. Rachleff
• Les peintres du fantastique (1996) - André Barret

See also

• Dream art
• Surrealism
• Neosurrealism
• Fantastic Art Centre
• Society for the Art of Imagination

Further reading

• Coleman, A.D. (1977). The Grotesque in Photography. New York: Summit, Ridge Press.
• Watney, Simon (1977). Fantastic Painters. London: Thames & Hudson.
• Colombo, Attilio (1979). Fantastic Photographs. London: Gordon Fraser.
• Johnson, Diana L. (1979). Fantastic illustration and design in Britain, 1850-1930. Rhode Island School of Design.
• Krichbaum, Jorg & Zondergeld. R.A. (Eds.) (1985). Dictionary of Fantastic Art. Barron's Educational Series.
• Menton, Seymour (1983). Magic Realism Rediscovered 1918-1981. Philadelphia, The Art Alliance Press.
• Day, Holliday T. & Sturges, Hollister (1989). Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920-1987. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art.
• Clair, Jean (1995). Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
• Palumbo, Donald (Ed.) (1986). Eros in the Mind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film (Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy). Greenwood Press.
• Stathatos, John (2001). A Vindication of Tlon: Photography and the Fantastic. Greece: Thessaloniki Museum of Photography
• Schurian, Prof. Dr. Walter (2005). Fantastic Art. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-2954-7 (English edition)
• beinArt collective (2007). Metamorphosis. beinArt. ISBN 978-0-9803231-0-8