Art History Guide

In eighteenth-century America, a girl was expected to grow up, get married, have children, and take care of a home. Because of the limits of her sphere, a girl received a very different education from that available to a boy. Indeed, before the advent of public education in the mid-nineteenth century, in order to receive any education at all a boy or a girl had to be born into the middle or upper classes and have parents who valued education enough to pay for it. Usually, a boy would be taught traditional academic subjects, while a girl might be tutored in the barest rudiments of reading and arithmetic. Instead of academic studies, girls were usually sent to schools that taught an assortment of skills considered “female accomplishments”–music, watercolor painting, comportment, manners, and sewing.

For More Information:
American Needlework in the Eighteenth Century
American Embroidery as Art
Case 1 Introduction: Early American Needlework

Totem Poles a indigenous to the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes. These monumental sculptures are usually made of Western Redcedar. The word “totem” is derived from the word Ojibwe word odoodem, which means “his totem, his kinship group”.

History of the Totem Pole

The beginning of totem pole construction started in North America. Being made of wood, they decay easily in the rain forest environment of the Northwest Coast, so no examples of poles carved before 1800 exist. However 18th century accounts of European explorers along the coast indicate that poles certainly existed at that time, although small and few in number. In all likelihood, the freestanding poles seen by the first European explorers were preceded by a long history of monumental carving, particularly interior house posts. Eddie Malin (1986) has proposed a theory of totem pole development which describes totem poles as progressing from house posts, funerary containers, and memorial markers into symbols of clan and family wealth and prestige. He argues that the center of pole construction was centered around the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands, from whence it spread outward to the Tsimshian and Tlingit and then down the coast to the tribes of British Columbia and northern Washington. The regional stylistic differences between poles would then be due not to a change in style over time, but instead to application of existing regional artistic styles to a new medium. Early-20th-century theories, such as those of the anthropologist Marius Barbeau who considered the poles an entirely postcontact phenomenon made possible by the introduction of metal tools, were treated with skepticism at the time and are now discredited.

Totem poles in front of houses in Alert Bay, British Columbia in the 1900s.
The disruptions following Euro-American trade and settlement first led to a florescence and then to a decline in the cultures and totem pole carving. The widespread importation of Euro-American iron and steel tools led to much more rapid and accurate production of carved wooden goods, including poles. It is not certain whether iron tools were actually introduced by Europeans, or whether iron tools were already produced aboriginally from drift iron recovered from shipwrecks; nevertheless Europeans simplified the acquisition of iron tools whose use greatly enhanced totem pole construction. The fur trade gave rise to a tremendous accumulation of wealth among the coastal peoples, and much of this wealth was spent and distributed in lavish potlatches frequently associated with the construction and erection of totem poles. Poles were commissioned by many wealthy leaders to represent their social status and the importance of their families and clans. As the fur trade declined the incidence of poverty on the coast increased. Christian missionaries reviled the totem pole as an object of heathen worship and urged converts to cease production and destroy existing poles.[citation needed]
Totem pole construction underwent a dramatic decline at the end of the 19th century due to American and Canadian urges towards Euro-American enculturation and assimilation. Fortunately, in the mid-twentieth century a combination of cultural, linguistic, and artistic revival along with intense scholarly scrutiny and the continuing fascination and and support of an educated and empathetic public led to a renewal and extension of this moribund artistic tradition. Freshly-carved totem poles are being erected up and down the coast. Related artistic production is pouring forth in many new and traditional media, ranging from tourist trinkets to masterful works in wood, stone, blown and etched glass, and many other traditional and non-traditional media..
Today a number of successful native artists carve totem poles on commission, usually taking the opportunity to educate apprentices in the demanding art of traditional carving and its concomitant joinery. Such modern poles are almost always executed in traditional styles, although some artists have felt free to include modern subject matter or use nontraditional styles in their execution. The commission for a modern pole ranges in the tens of thousands of dollars; the time spent carving after initial designs are completed usually lasts about a year, so the commission essentially functions as the artist’s primary means of income during the period.

The Purpose and Meaning of Totum Poles

The meanings of the designs on totem poles are as varied as the cultures which produce them. Totem poles may recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events. Some poles are erected to celebrate cultural beliefs, but others are intended mostly as artistic presentations. Certain types of totem pole are part of mortuary structures incorporating grave boxes with carved supporting poles, or recessed backs in which grave boxes were placed. Poles are also carved to illustrate stories, to commemorate historic persons, to represent shamanic powers, and to provide objects of public ridicule. “Some of the figures on the poles constitute symbolic reminders of quarrels, murders, debts, and other unpleasant occurrences about which the Indians prefer to remain silent… The most widely known tales, like those of the exploits of Raven and of Kats who married the bear woman, are familiar to almost every native of the area. Carvings which symbolize these tales are sufficiently conventionalized to be readily recognizable even by persons whose lineage did not recount them as their own legendary history.” (Reed 2003).
Totem poles were never objects of worship; the association with “idol worship” was an idea from local Christian missionaries. The same assumption was made by very early European explorers, but later explorers such as Jean-François de La Pérouse noted that totem poles were never treated reverently; they seemed only occasionally to generate allusions or illustrate stories and were usually left to rot in place when people abandoned a village.

Totem poles at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
Vertical order of images is widely believed to be a significant representation of importance. This idea is so pervasive that it has entered into common parlance with the phrase “low man on the totem pole”. This phrase is indicative of the most common belief of ordering importance, that the higher figures on the pole are more important or prestigious. A counterargument frequently heard is that figures are arranged in a “reverse hierarchy” style, with the most important representations being on the bottom, and the least important being on top. Actually there have never been any restrictions on vertical order, many poles have significant figures on the top, others on the bottom, and some in the middle. Other poles have no vertical arrangement at all, consisting of a lone figure atop an undecorated column.

Reference Links:
American Indian Totem Poles
Totem Poles - Wikipedia
Totem Poles - Crystalinks

The Navajo are one of the largest tribes in North America. They inhabit the four corners area of the United States (Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico).

Sandpainting was used as a spiritual healing system by the Navajo rather than as an artistic expression. Traditional healing incorporates ritualism, prayer, ceremonies, and herbology to increase wellness and promote harmony with the universe. Sandpaintings are part of religious chants in which “Earth People and Holy People come into harmony, giving healing and protection.”

Many of the sandpaintings include yéi figures, which are Navajo spiritual beings. The healing ceremonies involve medicine men chanting particular songs and simultaneously creating a sandpainting on the ground.
The medicine man asks for the yéis to come into the painting and help to heal the patient by restoring balance and harmony.

The sandpainters can create intricate paintings made with various natural materials/resources. Creating their master pieces on a smoothed bed of sand, the Navajo used crushed gypsum (white — Note: Gypsum is used to make drywall also known as sheetrock), yellow ochre, red sandstone, charcoal, a mixture of charcoal and gypsum to make blue, mixture of red sandstone and charcoal to make brown, mixture of red sand stone and gypsum to make pink. Also, sandpainters use pollen, cornmeal, crushed wildflower petals to attain a great more variety of colors.

When the healing ceremony is complete the sandpaintings are destroyed. The sandpaintings seen in gift shops and on the internet are commercially done, as the actual ceremony of sandpainting is considered sacred and not for the eyes of outsiders.

Reference Links:
Navajo Sandpainting (The Art of Healing)
Penfield Gallery of Indian Arts
Sand Paintings
Navajo Sandpainting Textiles
There are many more internet references to sandpainting. Just Google on “Navajo Sandpainting”.

The Fantastic Realism art of Robert Venosa has been exhibited worldwide and is represented in major collections, including those of noted museums, rock stars and European aristocracy. In addition to painting, sculpting and film design (pre-sketches and conceptual design for the movie Dune, and Fire in the Sky for Paramount Pictures, and the upcoming Race for Atlantis for IMAX), he has recently added computer art to his creative menu. His work has been the subject of three books, as well as being featured in numerous publications - most notably OMNI magazine - and on a number of CD covers, including those of Santana and Kitaro.

For more details see.
Rober Venosa Website

Art of the ancient civilizations that grew up in the area around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, now in Iraq. Mesopotamian art was largely used to glorify powerful dynasties, and often reflected the belief that kingship and the divine were closely interlocked.

This is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which roughly comprises modern Iraq and part of Syria. The most ancient civilizations known to man first developed there writing, schools, libraries, written law codes, agriculture, irrigation, farming and moved us from prehistory to history. It’s giving Mesopotamia the reputation of being the cradle of civilization. The name does not refer to any particular civilization using that name. It includs non-Semitic Sumerians, followed by the Semitic Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Over the course of 4000 years, the art of Mesopotamia reveals a tradition that appears, homogeneous in style and iconography.
Art became decorative, stylized and conventionalized at different times and places. Gods took on human forms and humans were combined with animals to make fantastic creatures. Large temples and imposing palaces dotted the landscape. History and poetry for the first time was recorded and set down to music. Lyres, pipes, harps and drums accompanied their songs and dances.
The soil of Mesopotamia yielded the civilization’s major building material - mud brick. Stone was rare, and certain types had to be imported for sculpture. Variety of metals, as well as shells and precious stones, were used for the finest sculpture and inlays.

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Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (February 20, 1897 – November 18, 1983) was a magic realist painter and artist, most renowned for his self-portraits, character studies, and still lifes.
Ivan Albright and his identical twin Malvin were born near Chicago in North Harvey, Illinois, to Adam Emory Albright and Clara Wilson Albright. Their father was a landscape painter, and came from a family of master gunsmiths, whose original name was “Albrecht”. The brothers were inseparable during childhood, and throughout much of their young adulthood. Both enrolled in The Art Institute of Chicago, a coin-flip deciding that Ivan would study painting and Malvin sculpture. Ivan particularly admired the work of El Greco and Rembrandt, but was quick to develop a style all his own.
Albright attended Northwestern University, but dropped out and took up studies in architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During World War I he did medical drawings for a hospital in Nantes, France, morbid work that probably influenced his later style. After working in architecture and advertising briefly he was pushed away by commercialism and took seriously to painting. After living in Philadelphia through most of 1925 and 1926, he returned to Illinois, where he began to achieve some substantial success, having his first show in 1930.
Among Albright’s typically dark, mysterious works are some of the most meticulously executed paintings ever made, often requiring years to complete. Lace curtains or splintered wood would be recreated using brushes of a single hair. The amount of effort that went into his paintings made him quite possessive of them. Even during the Great Depression he charged 30 to 60 times what comparable artists were charging, with the result that sales were infrequent. In order to survive he relied on the support of his father, and took odd carpentering jobs. An early painting of his, The Lineman won an award and made the cover of Electric Light and Power, a trade magazine. However his stooped and forlorn portrayal caused controversy among the readership, who did not consider such an image representative. The editors later distanced themselves from Albright’s work.
Albright focused on a few themes through most of his works, particularly death, life, the material and the spirit, and the effects of time. He painted very complex works, and their titles matched their complexity. He would not name a painting until it was complete, at which time he would come up with several possibilities, more poetic than descriptive, before deciding on one. Such an example is Poor Room - There is No Time, No End, No Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever and Forever Without End (The Window), the last two words actually describing the painting (it was as such the painting is generally referred). Another painting, And Man Created God in His Own Image, was called God Created Man in His Own Image when it toured the South. One of his most famous paintings, which took him some ten years to complete, was titled That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door), which won top prize at three major exhibitions in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia in 1941. The prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earned him a $3,500 purchase award and a place in the permanent collection, but, not willing to part with the work for less than $125,000, Albright took the First medal instead, allowing him to keep the painting.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Ivan Albright (1943)

In 1943 he was commissioned to create the title painting for Albert Lewinz’s film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. His realistic, but exaggerated, depictions of decay and corruption made him very well suited to undertake such a project. His brother was chosen to do the original uncorrupted painting of Gray, but another artist’s was used in the film. Ivan’s was a great success, and made him somewhat of an instant celebrity.
Albright was a prolific artist throughout his life, working as a printer and engraver as well as a painter. He made his own paints and charcoal, and carved his own elaborate frames. He was a stickler for detail, creating elaborate setups for paintings before starting work. He was obsessive about lighting to the point that he painted his studio black, and wore black clothing to cut out potential glare.
Later in life he lived in Woodstock, Vermont. Despite much time spent travelling the world, he never stopped working. Albright made over twenty self-portraits in his last three years, even on his deathbed, drawing the final ones after a stroke. He died in 1983.

References to dreams in art are as old as literature itself: the story of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Iliad all describe dreams of major characters such as Callum and the meanings thereof. However, dreams as art, without a “real” frame story, appear to be a later development—though there is no way to know whether many premodern works were dream-based.
In European literature, the Romantic movement emphasized the value of emotion and irrational inspiration. “Visions”, whether from dreams or intoxication, served as raw material and were taken to represent the artist’s highest creative potential.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Symbolism and Expressionism introduced dream imagery into visual art. Expressionism was also a literary movement, and included the later work of the playwright August Strindberg, who coined the term “dream play” for a style of narrative that did not distinguish between fantasy and reality.
At the same time, discussion of dreams reached a new level of public awareness in the Western world due to the work of Sigmund Freud, who introduced the notion of the subconscious mind as a field of scientific inquiry. Freud greatly influenced the 20th-century Surrealists, who combined the visionary impulses of Romantics and Expressionists with a focus on the unconscious as a creative tool, and an assumption that apparently irrational content could contain significant meaning, perhaps more so than rational content.
The invention of film and animation brought new possibilities for vivid depiction of nonrealistic events, but films consisting entirely of dream imagery have remained an avant-garde rarity. Comic books and comic strips have explored dreams somewhat more often, starting with Winsor McCay’s popular newspaper strips; the trend toward confessional works in alternative comics of the 1980s saw a proliferation of artists drawing their own dreams.
Dream material continues to be used by a wide range of contemporary artists for various purposes. This practice is considered by some to be of psychological value for the artist—independent of the artistic value of the results—as part of the discipline of “dream work”.

About William Blake–>

Today, I’m featuring an amateur fantasy artist and good friend, Samantha J. Aura. Sammy, is an aspiring fantasy artist oozing with talent. I find her skill and talent for creating people, characters and landscape awesome in one so young.

Interview with Samantha J. Aura

For readers to get to know Sammy I have setup some interview questions that she answered. I want to thank Samantha for allowing me to feature her on my blog. Thank you, Sammy!

Also, she has a gallery of her works at Deviant Art, Sammy J. Aura. If you are a writer of scifi/fantasy in need of fantasy and cover art for your work. I recommend that you check out Sammy’s work.

Zdzislaw Beksinski - About the artist

A few sentences are all that is required to present the biography of Zdzislaw Beksinski. He was born on 24th February 1929 in Sanok (now South-Eastern Poland), with which his family had been connected ever since the times of his grandfather Mateusz Beksinski. In 1947, on finishing grammar school in Sanok, Beksinski enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology. After graduation in 1952, in compliance with the regulations for the employment of graduates then in force, he lived first in Cracow and later in Rzeszów, and finally, in 1955, returned with his wife to Sanok.
He initiated his work as a photographer, and in 1958 presented some excellent work at several exhibitions in Warsaw, Gliwice, and Poznan. However it was his work in drawing and painting, and partly also in sculpture, that brought him his first successes. In 1964 Janusz Bogucki put on an exhibition of his work in the Stara Pomaranczarnia in Warsaw, which turned out to be his first major success, since all the exhibits were sold. The exhibition Bogucki organised in 1972 presented a new trend in Beksinski’s work, which years later he would call his ‘fantasy period’, which continued in his biography until the 1980’s. In the summer of 1977, following a decision by the authorities of Sanok to demolish Beksinski’s family house, the artist and his wife and son moved to Warsaw. In February 1984 he became associated with the Parisian marchand Piotr Dmochowski. In 1997 Beksinski started his computer photographic montages.

Beksinski’s numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad, and also the substantial number of publications by him, including catalogues and albums, and the innumerable interviews with him and films about him have put him into the narrow group of the most talked about and best known Polish artists. He once made the following ironic remark about his own life, ‘Writing your own biography is a sign of even greater vainglory than making declarations like the ones I have written at the request of the makers of this catalogue. But whereas occasionally it might seem to me that I know what it is I’m thinking about, and that I’m. thinking what I’m. thinking, which makes me feel right to tell someone else about what I think I’ve been thinking about; I’m. certain that I don’t know anything about my own past except everything, but everything is about as much as nothing. Presumably the most important fact from my life is that when I was ten I got an air-gun for my name-day, and that later I shot at chickens with it, but is this fact of interest to anyone besides myself? Apart from that, presumably I was born, and I shall be doing my best not to die, but I’m. sure I won’t manage it.’ Beksinski does not participate in what’s known as the life of the arts, preferring the seclusion of his studio; he doesn’t even attend the vernissages of his own exhibitions. That’s why in his case it’s not the official biography, which has no sensational events in it, is the most interesting thing, but his artistic life, which is associated with all the changes that have taken place and are taking place in his work all the time.
Finishing film school and making films was the young Zdzislaw Beksinski’s dream of a career. However, his father persuaded him to study a more practical subject, and in a war-devastated Poland architecture seemed a practical option. He made up for his unaccomplished dreams by turning to art photography. His work in photography shows him as an exceptionally dynamic artist in search of his own, strong mode of expression. He moved from mocking the Socialist Realism, through quasi-reportage, a variety of experiments with form, a quest for interesting and diversified textures, to works which were close to Surrealism or Expressionism. The confrontation of the face of a child with that of an old woman, the portrait of a girl with a torn-out face, a head covered in gauze, nudes tied up in string, or montage consisting of a couple of photographs (usually reproductions) and a completely unconnected text stuck onto a slab make the viewer anxious and provoke questions about the sense of the associations that arise.
However, the unusual power of the artist’s imagination could not find its full expression in photography owing to the technical limitations, but it was freely expressed in his drawings, paintings, and partly also sculptures. Nothing has survived of his juvenilia sketches, except for a school tableau. Beksinski created an artistic workshop for himself and arrived at his own form of expression by sheer hard work, in a solitary manner, with no corrections from tutors of friends. His early pictures were Expressionist in character: ‘Figures crying out in the wilderness,’ he recalls, ‘people with heads of stone, women in childbirth, people in the act of copulation, defecation, dying, people being executed by firing squad or by hanging, prisons, windowless cities etcetera etcetera. In terms of style it had something of Cwenarski or Wróblewski about it; I could even do five large-size paintings in a day; I was absolutely uncritical; I got impatient quickly, so I could see no sense in polishing off or touching up what had been rapidly painted in tempera or sketched in charcoal onto a huge sheet of cardboard. Nevertheless I think that was the only time I was really sincere. Or maybe just naive?’ We know this period only from what Beksinski has told us about it, since he destroyed all that he did in the period, judging it too exhibitionistic and naive.
The explosion of abstract art that occurred around 1956 turned out to be particularly fascinating not only for the young generation. It was in this trend that the idiosyncrasy of Zdzislaw Beksinski’s talent manifested itself, allowing him to achieve his characteristic individual climate using his own means. His black or white reliefs in diverse textures suggested destruction. By piling layers of plaster and paint on top of each other he was hoping time would intensify this process, slowly and irregularly revealing new layers.
However the drawings and sculptures he was creating were distancing him off from pure abstraction. In his sculpture, in which he applied the negative form he had borrowed from the works of Henry Moore, there were two dominant motifs: the head, and the human figure. On the other hand his drawings revealed vast ranges of an aggressive and sombre vision, and the dominant theme in them was eroticism. Some of these drawings later acquired titles which the artist made up post factum on the basis of a game of loose associations. He would apply a diversity of techniques on diversified formats: pencil, pen, crayon or charcoal drawings, monotypes, heliographs. That was when a whole spectrum of his seeking after form revealed itself: from his ‘classic’, symmetrical arrangements, to his dislodged compositions, or ones which contradicted the basic principles of composition. In some of his works the lines were delicate, fine, almost invisible; in others the drawing would become virtually a monochromatic painting, spacious and with a play of light and shade. The eruption of subjects, the drastic way in which they would be presented, and the freedom in approach to form and composition revealed an artist unboundable by any barriers, aesthetic or customary. Beksinski opened up to the sub-conscious, not afraid of what he would encounter in it, and it was from these experiences of drawing that the paintings of his ‘fantasy period’ developed. That was when a technique to which the artist has remained loyal to the present day was confirmed and stabilised: his painting in oils, less frequently in acrylics, on hardboard. Using the smooth side of the board, he would paint in such a manner so as to hide all the brush-strokes, to conceal the entire process of painting. The picture was to be a mirror image of an inner vision, and an observer looking at it was to become oblivious of the technique of painting, and of the very nature of the painting as ‘painting’. He said at the time, ‘I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams. This is an apparent reality, which nevertheless contains an enormous amount of fantasy details. Perhaps other people’s dreams and imagination work in some other way, but with me they’re always images which tend to be realistic in terms of the play of light and shade and perspective.’ When he put these works on exhibition in Warsaw in 1972, he split the recipients into intransigent opponents, who regarded what he was doing as a reality that was not art, or that it was simply kitsch, and into whole-hearted enthusiasts, who acknowledged his work as the most exciting occurrence in the contemporary arts. He also achieved something absolutely unheard of: he aroused the interest of the mass recipients, who are, after all, quite indifferent to what is the most exciting occurrence in the recent arts. It seems that he filled a vacuum with his painting, which in world art had been partially filled by Salvador Dali, but had no counterpart in Poland, though Dali had nothing in common with Beksinski, except for the mimetic technique and the surrealist atmosphere, but with an entirely different poetics. The public, which had become tired of experiments with form, and perhaps also of the monotony of the alienated artistic language of the Avant Garde, turned with curiosity to painting which applied traditional means to dramatically express the anxieties of the age. In his scrutiny of the sub-conscious, Beksinski addressed the same needs of his public, which had been aroused by psycho-analysis and existentialism. His visionariness and its dark mysteriousness transferred the dimension of the observer’s experience from aesthetic and intellectual contemplation to the psychological sphere. But a great deal of misunderstanding arose over the reception of this art. On account of their apparently literary quality, Beksinski’s pictures called for some sort of key for their deciphering. Brought up on Romanticism and especially on the symbolism of Mloda Polska (Art Nouveau), more and more often the Polish observer wanted to have their content and symbols explained, particularly by their creator, who refused to give any explanations at all, and even declined to give the most elementary explanation of all, titles for his pictures. ‘I never ask myself, “what does it mean?” either with respect to my own pictures, or anyone else’s. Meaning is absolutely meaningless to me. It’s worth as much as the taste of chocolate in a literary description. I can’t understand how the question of meaning can be so important to people as regards their relationship with art. . . .However, what I encounter most frequently is a semantic reception based on a description of the objects in the picture. From my point of view and as regards my own paintings, nothing could be further from the truth. . . . A semantic and semiotic analysis of vision is as absurd as a schoolbook criticism of Konrad’s Great Improvisation speech in Mickiewicz’s Dziady [Forefathers' Eve - the greatest classic of Polish Romantic literature]. What’s important is not what is visible but what is hidden… Or in other words, what is revealed to the soul, not what the eyes can see and what can be named.’ But not only the question of interpretation evoked controversy. Beksinski was accused of a range of formal inconsistencies and of having departed from the Post-Impressionist concept of the picture as a pictorial plane filled up in a particular order. The order in Beksinski’s pictures was purely psychological in character. The play of colours, the meaning of colour, texture, compositional relations etc. seemed irrelevant to him, or even obstacles in the achievement of his aim, which was the manifestation of a sub-conscious vision. In the categories of this kind of aesthetics his pictures appeared absolutely worthless, bereft of all problems belonging strictly to painting. Beksinski evaded this kind of evaluation, defending the right to apply his imagination freely. The exhibitions held by Teatr Stu of Cracow in 1977 was deliberately entitled ‘Pictures by Zdzislaw Beksinski’, instead of ‘The Paintings of …’.The artist wanted to definitively dissociate himself off from traditional aesthetic evaluation. The brush was only a vicarious instrument for the formulation of his visions, just as nowadays the computer is becoming something of the sort. ‘I prefer to be observed from the point of view of psychology, or even psychiatry, rather than of that artsy-fartsy Art with a capital A,’ he said in one of his interviews.
His most spectacular of group of pictures from the 1967-1983 ‘fantasy period’ is in the collection of the Muzeum Historyczne of Sanok. It is an extraordinary witness to a vision full of drama, anxiety, and destruction not so much of the outside world but rather of a spiritual or psychological world. In a winter landscape with a repulsive emptiness and deadness, a blind boy leads a cadaverous figure made up of junk. Somewhere in the distance a rider with the head of a bird is moving in the same direction. The boy is pointing with his finger at something we don’t see in the picture, something neither he nor the corpse-like figure can see. Where is this strange crusade heading for? In the centre of a metaphysical landscape of 1978 there are some ivy-covered ruins of an edifice. Each of its apertures leads into a different space, into a different light and time. Is it real? ‘There’s an old Chinese paradox which says that we don’t know when we wake up whether it’s evening or morning. It sounds far more likely that we awake in the evening, and that all through the day when we are asleep we try to understand the world of the night, which is so splendid and enormous that it eludes our miserable powers of reasoning and ordering completely. We stand like a small child, bedazzled by an avalanche of incomprehensible details, and when we have finally fallen asleep and in our sleep go to work and build those stereotypical settlements in which we think we live, in the morning when we are asleep we arrange all those marvellous details and endow them with an order of meanings, so as to make them perceptible to our not very bright intellects.’ In another of his pictures, a small figure moves holding a torch moves through a ravine of monks’ corpses. Is there some outcome of this voyage through Beksinski’s pictures? Do we experience this half-waking dream in the same way as he does, or in some other way, each of us weighing up his own anxieties and secrets? Is this dream of Beksinski’s pictures for us - to use the words of Witold Gombrowicz - ‘pregnantly terrible, with an undiscovered meaning,’ where ‘everything touches us more profoundly, more confidentially than even the most burning of the day’s passions’? Pictures are painted, after all, to make an impact with their atmosphere on our feelings, not with their content on our intellect.
The ‘fantasy period’ brought Beksinski fame and it seemed the artist would remain loyal to it. But already by the early eighties he was gradually abandoning this spatial and most often landscape visionariness, restricting his motif to one or a few figures, usually placed against an indefinite background. His pictures became much more synthetic; and now it was not the ‘photographing of a dream’ that was the most important, but painting itself. ‘I’m. going in the direction of a greater simplification of the background, and at the same time of a considerable degree of deformation in the figures, which are being painted without what’s known as a naturalistic light and shadow. What I’m after is for it to be obvious at first sight that this is a painting I made.’ In the 90’s a certain differentiation may be discerned in the manner of painting chosen by the artist. In some of his works figures are produced with a sculptor’s sensitivity, and occasionally are even reminiscent of his sculptural forms of the 60’s Some of his pictures appear not so much to have been painted, rather as sketched in coloured lines, from the topsy-turvy of which figures emerge and conduct their solitary dramas. Finally there are pictures executed in an extremely pictorial, synthetic way, in which the automatic operation of form and colour precedes the theme presented. In the computer photo-montages of his recent years there is a return to the painting of the ‘fantasy period’, with spatial landscapes carrying a heavy metaphysical charge. The artist applies a far-reaching degree of deformation in almost each of his objects, including the human body.
The phenomenon of Beksinski’s art is associated above all with the embodying, ‘materialisation’ in his artistic techniques of ‘images of the sub-conscious’, which are no doubt symbolic of his inner experiences, and to a large extent symbolic of the spiritual states of contemporary man. The terror of death, disintegration, destruction, loneliness, is ever-present. Whether Zdzislaw Beksinski’s art is leading us to despair, or whether it works on the grounds of a catharsis; whether he light which we encounter all the time in his art brings just a little bit of hope - will forever remain the personal reflection of each of its observers.

Wiesław Banach

WiesÅ‚aw Banach - art historian, director of Historical Museum in Sanok. He is an author of numerous essays and reviews on Beksinski’s art. He also prepared and oversaw many exhibitions of the Artist. The Museum in Sanok has a large collection of works by Zdzislaw Beksinski.
*This text is part of the Introduction to the album “Beksinski”, published by BOSZ in 1999.

Zdzislaw Beksinski Gallery of Works

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.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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