Fantastic art

Universe Fantastic Art

The objective of this text and its illustrations is to recognize the main themes in which the entry of the strange one appears, of shifted, and to follow the advance of it since the first times until today.

Without them being aware of it, probably, our contemporaries are quite as accessible to fantastic as the men from the naive times and the obscure centuries. Because the fantastic one is all at the same time the durable one and perpetually changing, which is due most narrowly to the roots of the human thought, and what reflects best the evolution and the metamorphoses of this thought.

Various topics

nature
death
architecture
Magic spells and demons
the metamorphoses
possible worlds
the interior world
With the crossing of the dream and the technique

Nature

The topic of the forest and the plants that it is found there, of the animals that one meeting is present there since prehistory. More close to us, it was represented by Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer, painters German of the beginning of the 16th century.

Rodolphe Bresdin and Gustave Gilded, both French (19th century) perpetuated it in their work. In the kingdom without limits of strange, all the meetings are acceptable because faculties of imagination are unlimited. Jerome Bosch can then show the width of its creative genius. It is joined in this creativity by Tiepolo, Goya and astonishing a Victor Hugo.

Death

Death with often met painting, that this one is encouraged by Christianity to appear the fugacity of the life (vanities) or although it gives death in spectacle (dances and carnival). Hokusai and Dali excelled there. Japanese Hokusaï - the Master of the phantoms - was one of the painters of beyond.

Architecture

Fantastic architectures, geometrical imaginations and weightlessness, cities baroques, statues and characters tormented or of calm strange, curious meetings of beings or objects, or frankly trompe-l'oeil, all this takes part of a composition of space, movement, perception and feelings in margin, then - with the wire of time - beside a more academic expression. Of Antoine Charon (France 16th century), Monsù Desiderio (Italy 17th century) until Paul Klee, max Ernst, Edward Munch (20th century) there are a line of artists, a some seulements being quoted here, a line of creators of an obligation for those which look at works being projected and to interpret.

Magic spells and demons

If it is a universal topic it is that of the Devil, the magic spells and the demons. Universal topic in time and space: in testify the book to dead (Egypt), Pazuzu and Lamasthu (Mésopotamie), Tukulka and Charum of the Etruscans, the Temptation of Mara of Buddhism and the démoniaques representations, inspired by Christianity, in the tables of Jerome Bosch, John Martin (England, beginning 19th), Goya, Dali.

Metamorphoses

The metamorphoses are a technique multiséculaire of fantastic art. They consist in counterfeiting the alive figures and giving them movement. Since the Colossus of Rhodes to Salvador Dali, one finds these metamorphoses, just like in works of Arcimboldo - famous made characters of fruits, animals, plants, of rocks, inspired by Eastern miniatures - and in that of Léonard de Vinci.

Possible worlds

Beside the fantastic one which transposes or reverses the shapes of the known world, there is another whose resources are infinitely vaster: the fantastic one which, not being contained to reorganize the world, creates of all parts of the beings which do not have any reference to the visible world. There is not true creation of " worlds possibles" that as from the moment when the resemblance to the terrestrial objects and beings is unobtrusive. It is interesting to note that the creation of these possible worlds occurs at the same time when the abstract art develops in parallel. One finds this simultaneity in works of Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro and Paul Klee.

The interior world

To explain why the " this world là" of the artist is that one and appears under this aspect is even vainer than any attempt to clarify the gasoline of any work of Article If it is allowed to suppose that the influence of the medium - the Toscane of the 15th century, Holland of the 18th century - could play a part in the formation of the esthetics of Paolo Uccello and Rembrandt, the appearance of a work as that of Tanguy around 1920 is not defined by the surrealist climate which reigned then, though the reading of the songs of Maldoror and meets it André Breton were not negligible. In the same way, a voyage in Africa, made in 1930, could give rise to a stylistic evolution at Klee but it is especially its interior voyage which is dominating.

If one continues the topic of the interior voyage, it is necessary to approach the difference between the indicator and the visionary. The first receives and undergoes its vision like a phenomenon completely independent of him, whereas the visionary is the man who requests the vision in what it predisposes so that it acquires its maximum of effectiveness. It is thus of two painters. The first, William Blake (England, beginning) had a great familiarity with the world of the spirits. As for the second, Gustave Moreau, it marked its work of the power of its dreams. To the crossing of the dream and technique, Surrealism - at the beginning of - gave in honor the subject to one time when, since impressionism especially, the only concern of much of artists was for the pictorial values and the plastic values of the work of Article the majority of research relating on the form and the color excluded the subject. The surrealist ones rehabilitated it until making of it a recurring subject like the bird at max Ernst.

With the crossing of the dream and technique

This fantastic art remains faithful to the reality of forms, by playing their proportions and with their juxtaposition, with the exactitude of the details but at the same time it saturates this reality with all the mystery which it contains, marvellous intrinsic the or explicit one expresses some. One finds these features at Bosch, Bruegel, and to Dali by going up time. This same filiation underlies works of Boris Vallejo, Rowena Morrill, Di-maccio, John Howe, Peter Gric, Yerka, Siudmak and Michele Vincent.

All perpetuate what with truly begun at the 16th century:

" Though Savery (Flemish painter of the 16th century) is usually arranged among the objective and anecdotic animalists, it arrives to him, in particular in its " Noah in prayers before the déluge" museum of Warsaw, to create a surreal and supernatural atmosphere which gives to its tables a value very other that documentaire" Marcel Brion.

Document carried out starting from " Art Fantastique" by Marcel Brion.

External bonds

site officile of association art off imagination
the fantastic universe of Michele Vincent
fantastic Art gallery, of reality to imaginary the
Archives of the artists of A to Z
Exposition CastleDream, Musée of imaginary, Château of Tool bags, 77

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