GALLERY TWO: Fairies, Symbolism and Surrealism

I FIRST CAME ACROSS Richard Dadd's Fairy Feller without any warning in a basement at Tate Britain in London where the William Blake pictures and other oddities were then shown. It must have been about two hours later that I moved on in a daze. Soon afterwards the picture was to be seen everywhere thanks to the psychedelic mood of the times, but I've never grown tired of it. Years later I took along an Argentinian artist friend who had never heard of Dadd. He was similarly stunned. Finally he looked up and said 'The man was mad!' after noticing that some leaves in the picture were actually sculpted in paint. His opinion was of course perfectly correct.

Apart from a couple, Dadd's other paintings are more in the accepted style of Victorian fairy painting, which was a wonderfully subversive way of celebrating sensuality in those repressed days. As with pseudo-classical sculpture it was an accepted medium for nudity and other forbidden fruits.

Click on the thumbnails for enlargements.
Some of those will enlarge again if you click on them.

SURREALISM

FANTASTIC REALISM is much less well known than Surrealism but was kind of a continuation by the next generation who had been inspired by Ernst, Delvaux, Dali and the rest. It was a much looser affiliation and so avoided the absurdity of the Surrealists' falling into dogmatism and expelling Salvador Dali, their most enduringly famous exponent. Also known as Magic Realism, the group grew from a group of art students in Vienna who were scattered by the War in 1939 and regrouped afterwards to try and pick up where they had left off. A signature of the style is high, almost Renaissance quality realism applied to fantastic and symbolic subject matter.