Art History Guide

Here is some information on several well-known fantasy art genres:

Surrealism

A movement in art and literature that flourished in the early twentieth century. Surrealism aimed at expressing fantastic imaginative dreams and visions free from conscious rational control.

Click on these links to see complete information –> Surrealism (Reference.com) and Surrealism (Wikipedia)

Neosurrealism

A revival of surrealism mixed with pop art in the late 1970s and the 1980s, marked by an attempt to illustrate the bizarre imagery of dreams or the subconscious mind in painting and photography.

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Neo-romanticism

The term neo-romanticism covers a variety of movements in music and painting. It has been used with reference to very late 19th century and early 20th century composers such as Gustav Mahler particularly by Dalhaus who uses it as synonymous with late Romanticism. It has been applied to contemporary composers who rejected or abandoned the use of the devices of avant-garde modernism.

Click on these links to see complete information –> Neo-Romanticism (Reference.com) and Neo-Romanticism (Wikipedia)

High Culture/Art

High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the Arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture.

Although it has a longer history in Continental Europe, the term was introduced into English largely with the publication in 1869 of Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, although he most often uses just “culture”. Arnold defined culture as “the disinterested endeavour after man’s perfection” (Preface) and most famously wrote that having culture meant to “know the best that has been said and thought in the world” - a specifically literary definition, also embracing Philosophy, which is now rather less likely to be considered an essential component of High Culture, at least in the English-speaking cultures. Arnold saw high culture as a force for moral and political good, and in various forms this view remains widespread, though far from uncontested. The term is contrasted with Popular culture or Mass culture and also with Traditional cultures, but by no means implies hostility to these.
T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) was an influential work which saw high culture and popular culture as necessary parts of a complete culture. The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (1957) was an influential work along somewhat the same lines, concerned with the cultural experience of those, like himself, who had come from a working-class background before university. In America, Harold Bloom has taken a more exclusive line in a number of works, as did F.R. Leavis earlier - both, like Arnold, being mainly concerned with literature, and unafraid to champion vociferously the literature of the Western canon.

Click on these links to see complete information –> High Culture/Art (Reference.com) and High Culture/Art (Wikipedia)

Magic realism

Magic Realism, primarily Latin American literary movement that arose in the 1960s. The term has been attributed to the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who first applied it to Latin-American fiction in 1949. Works of magic realism mingle realistic portrayals of ordinary events and characters with elements of fantasy and myth, creating a rich, frequently disquieting world that is at once familiar and dreamlike. The movement’s best-known proponent is the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who has used the technique many times, most famously in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Other magic realist writers include Guatemala’s Miguel Ã?ngel Asturias, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, and Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. Non-Latin American writers whose fiction often employs magic realism include Italo Calvino and Salman Rushdie.

Click on these links to see complete information –> Magic Realism (Reference.com) and Magic Realism (Wikipedia)

Visionary Art

Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences.
Both trained and self-taught (or outsider) artists have, and continue to create visionary works. Many visionary artists are actively engaged in spiritual practices, and some have drawn inspiration from psychedelic drug experiences.
Walter Schurian, professor at the University of Munster, is quick to point out the difficulties in describing visionary art as if it were a discrete genre, since “it is difficult to know where to start and where to stop. Recognized trends have all had their fantastic component, so demarcation is apt to be fuzzy.” 

Despite this ambiguity, there does seem to be emerging some definition to what constitutes the contemporary visionary art ’scene’ and which artists can be considered especially influential. Contemporary visionary artists count Hieronymous Bosch, William Blake, Morris Graves (of the Pacific Northwest School of Visionary Art), Emil Bisttram, and Gustave Moreau amongst their antecedents. Symbolism, Surrealism and Psychedelic art are also direct precursors to contemporary visionary art.
The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, which includes Ernst Fuchs and Arik Brauer, is also to be considered an important technical and philosophical catalyst in its strong influence upon the contemporary visionary culture.

Click on these links to see complete information –> Visionary Art (Reference.com) and Visionary Art (Wikipedia)