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. This was in the early 70s when I was a student. Soon afterwards a cult grew up around it thanks to the psychedelic mood of the times and helped by appearing in Oz magazine, the taste bible of the hippy generation.

I've never grown tired of it. Years later I took along an Argentinian artist friend Ciruelo Cabral 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 few, Dadd's other fairy 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.

For a brilliant and all too plausible account of how Dadd tipped over the edge I can recommend Bedlam by Jennifer Higgie, a fictional account of the trip to the Middle East that changed him forever.

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.