Art of the Fantastic

Henri Rousseau - The Snake Charmer - 1907 - Oil on canvas - 169 x 189.5 cm - Musee d'Orsay, Paris (click photo for larger image)Between the two World Wars, painting lost some of the raw, modern energy that had characterized it at the beginning of the century. Instead, art was dominated by two rather philosophical movements, Dada and Surrealism—both of which have been treated on What About Art?. This development arose partly as a reaction to the senseless atrocities of World War I. Artists were also becoming introspective, concerned with their own subconscious dreams. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories were well known by this time, and painters explored their own irrationalities and fantasies in search of a new artistic freedom. But such art—an art of the fantastic—was practiced uninterrupted by artists from the Middle Ages forward—Hieronymus Bosch, Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco de Goya, and Gustave Moreau among them. A noteworthy practitioner of an art of the fantastic from the Modern era was the celebrated naive painter, Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). Known as Le Douanier, after a lifelong job in the Parisian customs office, Rousseau is a perfect example of the kind of artist in whom the artists of the day believed: the untaught genius whose eye could see much further than that of the trained artist. The term “art of the fantastic” quite aptly describes the oeuvre of this painter.