Fantastic Art - I

Fantastic Art

Fantastic art is a broad and loosely defined art genre. It is not restricted to a specific school of artists, geographical location or historical period. It can be characterised by subject matter – which portrays non-realistic, mystical, mythical or folkloric subjects or events – and style, which is representational and naturalistic, rather than abstract – or in the case of magazine illustrations and similar, in the style of graphic novel art such as manga.

Fantasy has been an integral part of art since its beginnings, but has been particularly important in mannerism, magic realist painting, romantic art, symbolism, surrealism and lowbrow. In French, the genre is called le fantastique, in English it is sometimes referred to as visionary art, grotesque art or mannerist art. It has had a deep and circular interaction with fantasy literature.

The subject matter of fantastic art may resemble the product of hallucinations, and Fantastic artist Richard Dadd spent much of his life in mental institutions. Salvador Dalí famously said: "the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad". Some recent fantastic art draws on the artist's experience, or purported experience, of hallucinogenic drugs.

The term fantasy art is closely related, and is applied primarily to recent art (typically 20th century on wards) inspired by, or illustrating fantasy literature.

Fantastic art has traditionally been largely confined to painting and illustration, but since the 1970s has increasingly been found also in photography. Fantastic art explores fantasy, imagination, the dream state, the grotesque, visions and the uncanny, as well as so-called "Goth" and "Dark" art.

The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism (German: Wiener Schule des Phantastischen Realismus) is a group of artists founded in Vienna in 1946. The group's name was coined in the 1950s by Johann Muskik, and the first exhibition was in 1959 at the Vienna Belvedere. This Austrian movement has similarities to Surrealism in its use of religious and esoteric symbolism and also the choice of a naturalistic style, countering the prevalence of abstract art movements at the time.

Artists include Ernst Fuchs, Maître Leherb (Helmut Leherb), Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hutter, Anton Lehmden, and Israeli artist Zeev Kun, all students of Professor Albert Paris Gütersloh at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Gütersloh's emphasis on the techniques of the Old Masters gave the "fantastic realist" painters a grounding in realism, similar to early Flemish artists such as Jan van Eyck.

Some older members of the group, including Rudolf Hausner, Kurt Regschek and Fritz Janschka, emigrated to the US in 1949, where Kurt Regschek helped organize the early exhibitions of the group in 1965. Hausner, Fuchs, Hutter, Brauer and Lehmden were referred to as "The Big Five" who subsequently held exhibitions internationally.