The Fantastic In Western Visual Arts

AY2014/2015 Semester 1

The course traces the milestones of the `fantastic' in European art. Beginning with a look at fantastic subject matters in painting from the late Middle Ages onwards, students will consider the different contexts in which artists were driven to depict fantasy: the marvellous, the irrational and the horrific. After reflecting upon examples from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, (Hieronymus Bosch, William Blake, Francisco y Goya among others) and the nineteenth-century French Symbolists, students will focus upon the two most significant twentieth-century movements concerned with the irrational: Dada and Surrealism. Analysis on the notions and the artistic production related to the Fantastic and Magic Realism will complete the study of the twentieth-century. Finally, the work of the latest generation of artists to follow this tradition will also be explored. Students are reminded that ADM rules on attendance and plagiarism are in operation within all ADM courses as laid out in the ADM Student handbook http://www.adm.ntu.edu.sg/CurrentADM/Documents/ADMStudentHandbook2010-2011.pdf.