From the 20th of May until the 14th of September, 2008, the Belvedere is showing a retrospective of six great masters of Fantastic Realism - Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs (right), Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, Helmut Leherb and Anton Lehmden.
Open daily, 10am - 6pm
Wednesday, 10am - 9pm
Lower Belvedere
Rennweg 6
1030 Vienna
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The Magical Mystery Tour - Visionary Art Exhibition.
The organisers of Landau Traveling Exhibitions believe that it is important for art museums to connect with the community by reflecting what is relevant to society at any given moment. Visionary Art, the result of man’s artistic journey through his psyche as artistically portrayed through the evolution of the historical art movements, is certainly not a trend. It is now a part of history, and deserves the participation of the art world in presenting this art form.
This Visionary Art Show focuses on the art of painting; it represents the Visionary Art from the last half of the twentieth century, from the formation of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism in 1946, to the psychedelic school of the 1960’s and 1970’s, to the digital present. However, it is important to trace the thread of visionary art as it weaves its way throughout the history of painting, in order to better understand and appreciate these more recent schools.
The Visionary Art Show consists of four (4) major groups from around the world. The European Group includes, Arik Brauer, L. Caruana, Zeljko Djurovic, Ernst Fuchs, HR Giger, Rudolf Hausner, Erik Heyninck, Hundertwasser, Wolfgang Hutter, Hanna Kay, Anton Lehmden, Ljuba, Dieter Schwertberger and, Eli Tiunine. The American group features, Isaac Abrams, Allen Atwell, Lee Barslaag, Linda Gardner, Andrew Gonzalez, Alex Grey, Carol Herzer, Martina Hoffman, Philip Rubinov Jacobson, Mati Klarwein, Brigid Marlin, Angelo Miranda, Richard Sica, Olga Spiegel, Surya Das, Roman Villagrana and Robert Venosa. The Asians are Yoshitaka Amano, Chalermchai Kositpipat. The California group stars Lee Conklin, Robert Fried, Rick Griffin, Alton Kelly, Bonnie MacLean, Peter Max, Vincent Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, and others to numerous to name.
For more information on this landmark event, go to: The Visionary Art Show Website.
I recently stumbled upon this incredible short animation by Joan Gratz. In 'Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase' (1992) Joan used Two-dimensional clay stop motion animation to morph the work of 35 famous artists and won Best Animated Short at the Academy Awards.
See more Surreal Animation on YouTube.
Brave Destiny The Movie is now available on DVD
63 minutes showing many works by artist participants including HR Giger and a host of others! The film covers the opening reception, the ball, showing behind the scenes on the work by the artists in putting together this colossal show.
The ball footage features original musical compositions by surrealist composer Peter Dizozza.
$19.98 plus $2 shipping in USA and Canada
$5 shipping worldwide
Payments by check or money order or by Paypal to W.A.H. Center
Send to: WILLIAMSBURG ART and HISTORICAL CENTER, 135 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11211
WORLD PREMIER
BRAVE DESTINY THE MOVIE, NOVEMBER 2007
Cocktails, buffet dinner and film showing, where it all happened – the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, Brooklyn, USA. The Brave Destiny show at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (WAH Center) was the world’s largest show of living surrealist artists the world has ever seen. It also held the first international Grand Surrealist Ball in the United States, in the tradition of Surrealist balls put on by the Baroness de Rothschild in Europe up until the death of Dali. Many people, including European nobility, flew in from around the world for the one night event.
Imagine five floors of art of the finest international surrealist/visionaries in a French empire mansion in the world’s trendiest artists neighborhood – filled with magnificent art from catacombs to attic by nearly 500 artists! Add on a month of incredible living installations, dance, theater, a fashion show, ballet, and film. An extravaganza never likely to be equaled. This is the documentary.
The man behind Brave Destiny, Terrance Lindall published a long article about Brave Destiny on beinArt.org
Photo credit Joel Simpson
Once a fringe figure of a very conservative Australia society, Rosaleen Norton since her death in 1979, has become cult figure in esoteric circles for her visionary artwork. In her time she was portrayed as the epitome of wickedness. This was a facade she was quite happy to flaunt to the public and media, loving to shock conservative minds.
From a very early age, Rosaleen exhibited a non conformist rebellious nature. When she was 14, the headmistress of her school, Chatswood Girls Grammar, became the first in a long line of people to identify Rosaleen as a corrupting influence on others, and duly expelled her for producing 'depraved' drawings of vampires, ghouls and werewolves. She later studied for two years at East Sydney Technical College under the noted sculptor, Rayner Hoff who encouraged her 'pagan' creativity.
Although her talents were mainly artistic Rosaleen Norton also had considerable talents as a writer of macabre and exotic tales. At the age of 15 she had several horror stories accepted by Smith's Weekly, a famously irreverent and lively newspaper which seems to have kept almost all of Sydney's bohemian community in gainful employment at one time or another. She preferred to work as an artist, but during her months there she failed to produce anything conventional enough even for Smith's, and was let go.
Rosaleen was Australia's first female pavement artist. She also worked as a model for Norman Lindsay, whose early line drawings were both controversial and notorious. Norman's influence on Rosaleen's work is very evident. Of Rosaleen's own work Lindsay was not so impressed, being even a little too dark for even his own tastes.
In 1935 she met and married Beresford Lionel Conroy, and the pair spent some time hitchhiking around the country from Brisbane to Melbourne. The marriage lasted until after WWII when they divorced.
Rosaleen Norton had her first public exhibition at Melbourne University. However, two days after it opened, police descended on the gallery and seized four of the exhibited pictures. Charges were laid under the Police Offences Act, citing that the works were decadent and obscene, and likely to arouse unhealthy sexual appetites in those who saw them. The charges against her were dismissed and 4 pounds 4 shillings costs were awarded against the police department.
One of the confiscated paintings was the well-known work, Black Magic. This depicted a black panther copulating with a naked woman. Rosaleen Norton's paintings were a mix of magic, mythology, fantasy and Freudian symbols. They were the product of visions seen during self-induced trances and dreams or while carrying out occult experiments. She worshipped Pan - life and death, order and chaos, creation and destruction, and elemental forces. Rosaleen kept very detailed journals of her psychic explorations and was very well read on Freudian and Jungian psychology. She had her own well developed cosmology and an intricate understanding of ceremonial magick.
She experimented with self hypnosis and automatic drawing for years, devising rituals which would put her into a trance state in which she could explore other dimensions. Her paintings and drawings for the most part were depictions of the myriad of gods, demons and other entities with whom she communicated and caroused with on these journeys.
A brave soul named Walter Glover, saw merit in Rosaleen's works and put his own finances into publishing a book, "The Art Of Rosaleen Norton", a collection of her illustrations accompanied by poems by her young boyfriend, Gavin Greenlees. The book like the Melbourne exhibition attracted controversy, and landed Walter in court on obscenity charges. The magistrate fined Glover five pounds and ordered that two pictures, including one of "Fohat", a cheeky looking demon with a snake for a penis, be obliterated from unsold copies of the book. Because of this copies of the book were confiscated and burnt by the US customs. The whole affair bankrupted Walter. He was however never to loose faith in Rosaleen, and would years later when his bankruptcy was lifted, went on to republish the book, this time in a much changed Australia, causing no stir. Both editions are now collectors items.
Rosaleen was now a renowned figure in the infamous Kings Cross district of Sydney, home to prostitutes, criminals, artists and would-be cosmopolitans. She was attracting a steady stream of sensationalist media attention. Originally she enjoyed the attention and played upon the public persona. She certainly looked the part, her eyebrows plucked into high arches, her face framed with jet black hair and curves which resembled her paintings. She was also named as the leader of a witch cult, which was really nothing more than a few friends gathering at her flat. This was however enough for the tabloids to expand into something more elaborate.
By the 60's Rosaleen was starting to slip away from public attention as she increasingly found the small minded media tiring. Her liberated ideas were now no longer so shocking in an age of free love and open drug use. She quietly continued to create her visionary artwork and sell to any who were interested.
A decade later she had become a complete recluse confining herself to her close circle of friends. In her final years her health started to fail before she was finally admitted into the Sacred Heart Hospice, diagnosed with cancer. Here even to the last, surrounded by nuns and crucifixes, she remained unrepentant and committed to her beliefs, dying on December 5th, 1979.
The following article was written by Brigid Marlin. This is the first time it has been published online. Thank you Brigid.
"In 1960 a few young artists in England banded together to study techniques of painting, and to inspire each other. We called ourselves the INSCAPE group, because we wanted to depict the inner landscapes of the mind. We met in Peter Holland’s studio in the attic, where we could pour gesso over everything and splash paint on top. Peter was an inventor as well as an artist and created robots that could serve us tea. It was an inspiring time. We all worked together intensively, preparing gesso panels, and painting vigorously to the sounds of music for inspiration, varied occasionally by odd recordings Peter had made of the amplified sound of snails eating cabbage. Peter specialized in Surreal pictures of umbrellas; Jack Ray did Cathedrals in copper and resin, and Steve Snell, Alan Senior and I did Visionary paintings.
The Inscape Group flourished, and we were joined by artists Richard Jones, who was a dwarf and painted powerful pictures of dwarves, Christiane Kubrick, who painted magic realism, Jan Clutterbuck our first watercolourist and Diana Hesketh, our first Sculptor.
We began to show our work abroad, and were invited by Ernst Fuchs to take part in an unusual Summer Seminar at a huge Castle in the Austrian mountains.
Ernst Fuchs had gathered artists from all over the world; America, Japan, Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Israel. Artists set up their easels;- some in turrets, some in the balconies or the vast high ceilinged rooms, and we vied with each other to produce our greatest masterpieces, exchanging ideas and techniques It became the sort of artistic Brotherhood I had always dreamed of.
Ernst Fuchs showed us the astonishing egg tempera and oil technique of the Italian Renaissance Masters, which he had rediscovered after much research, and now called the ‘Mische Technique’. We worked in layers of white egg tempera separated by coloured glazes. It took us far beyond our own approaches to studying technique.
In the evenings everything changed, and we became just as eager to have fun! There was dancing, singing, and heated discussions about Rembrandt, Vermeer and Jackson Pollock in corners. Wolfgang Manner, who directed the Seminar and was also a Mountain Rescue leader, would umpire heated discussions (possibly brought on by the Schnapps made by the local farmers from cherries) between New Yorker Phil Jacobson (who now leads Summer Seminars himself), an Icelander known as "Fishfingers" and Yoko Shiraishi (who's mother had bright pink hair and was the top Japanese poet).
Ilan Kutz, a Major in the Israeli Army, who had just returned from the Entebbe raid, played and sang for us all on his guitar. Elisa Halvegard from Sweden made garlands of flowers for everyone to wear, and embroidered fairies on people’s clothes in odd places when they weren’t looking. At night the poorer artists slept in a dormitory and when one couple started sharing a bed, and being too noisy, Richard Jones got up and poured a jug of water over them. There were some strange characters there. Marielle (from Germany) got up early every morning to collect butterflies, and was enraged when Joseph (from Haarlem, New York), ate them.
At the end of the Summer there was an Exhibition in the Great Ballroom of the Castle, and the local dignitaries were invited to the Opening and a Masked Ball.
Richard- who although he is a dwarf has a giant voice - stood at the top of the Grand Staircase wearing a black cape and a sword (he said he was Draculet). He held up a flaming seven branched cantlestick and shouted; “Men can only speak to the Gods through the Dwarves. But the Men are killing all the Dwarves. And soon, the Men will no longer be able to hear the voices of the Gods!” Then he staggered into the gardens and was sick.
Back home in England when everyone had recovered we decided that this was a marvelous experience, and returned every year for over a decade. Then in 1993 Ernst Fuchs called a meeting in Metternich Castle in Austria for Imaginative artists and Patrons. There Laurie Lipton and I met H R Giger, Bruno Weber, De Es Schwertberger, Mati Klarwein, and Mauro Albarelli, Ernst Fuchs asked us all to work to help promote Fantastic and Visionary Art, and thanks to Inscape International we were ready to form the Society for Art of Imaginaton, which is open so we changed the small INSCAPE Group' into the SOCIETY FOR ART OF IMAGINATION; open to any imaginative artist in the world. Since then we have been privileged to help many artists to further their careers, and to stage Exhibitions all over the world. It has become truly a Brotherhood of Artists!"
Brigid Marlin is also one of 50 artists published in: Metamorphosis.
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