Louis Maeterlinck and the ‘Fantastic’ in Art

‘Fantastic art’ evokes visions of chimeras, sorcerers and hallucinatory shapes and colours, and certain artists and their subjects are regularly associated with it, from Hieronymus Bosch and his devils to Salvador Dalí and his dream landscapes. This contemporary image of ‘fantastic art’ exists primarily thanks to the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition, staged in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1936-37 and curated by then-director Alfred H. Barr Jr. He linked the Surrealists to artists from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.1

Barr, though, was not the first to delve into the ‘fantastic’ in art. Recent research has shown that he was influenced by earlier writers and researchers.2 Louis Maeterlinck (1846-1926), the Belgian artist, art historian and curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, for example, wrote two books that deal with the ‘fantastic’ as a separate art genre: Le genre satirique dans la peinture flamande (1903, revised version 1907) and Le genre satirique, fantastique et licencieux dans la sculpture flamande et wallonne: les miséricordes de stalles (art et folklore) (1910). He mainly situated this fantastic genre in the sixteenth-century painting of Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but also placed it within a broader tradition that stretched from antiquity to his own time.

In doing so, Maeterlinck played a central role in the development of the concept of ‘fantastic’ in art. Even though the term had been circulating in the description of art for centuries, in a relatively short time the use of it underwent a change. Somewhere between the rise of Romanticism and the opening of Barr’s exhibition the concept evolved from a sporadically-used term, associated with the caricatural, grotesque and diabolical, into the designation of a genre in its own right and a tradition spanning the entire history of art. Research into it offers insight into how and why certain artists and art forms have been classified as part of the ‘fantastic’ tradition. However, little has been written to date about the development and the influence of Maeterlinck’s publications. This article aims to fill this gap. Maeterlinck’s conceptualisation of the fantastic genre is examined in relation to the underlying discourse and the art-historical developments, as well as its translation into modern art criticism, in which fantastic art is ultimately explained as a tradition spanning time and place.

This article discusses the use of the term ‘fantastic’ in various periods and languages, but before delving into this, it is useful to briefly define the concept itself. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as today, the term refers to that which originates from the imagination and is not grounded in reality, or relates to someone who is inclined to give free rein to their flights of fancy, or who possesses strong powers of imagination.3

As long ago as the sixteenth century the Italian painter, architect and artists’ biographer Giorgio Vasari described art as ‘fantastic’ in his influential Vite. In his description of the prints published by Hieronymus Cock based on designs by Bruegel, Vasari spoke of ‘fantastic and laughable’ demons and ‘fantastic and fanciful’ inventions.4 The Haarlem-born artist and art historian Karel van Mander also used terms such as ‘fantasijen’ and ‘fantastijck’ here and there in his Schilder-Boeck (1604) to describe creative fabrications and idiosyncratic imagination in Italian Renaissance art.5 For Bosch and Bruegel, he used other terms, such as ‘wonderlijcke versieringhen’ (wonderful decorations), ‘vreemde tronien’ (strange faces) or ‘spoockerijen en drollen’ (ghosts and monsters).6 These various formulations fit within a common conceptual framework from the time when Bosch and Bruegel were praised for their fantastic, whimsical, comical or inventive aspects.7

Later a moralising meaning was frequently sought behind the same grotesque figures and monsters. Nevertheless, this network of concepts and terms persisted. For instance, in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources consulted for this article, the aforementioned and other overlapping terms such as ‘bizarre’ (bizarre), ‘terrifying’ (effrayant), ‘comical’ (burlesque) and grotesque (grotesque) regularly recur. Both these terrifying and humorous characteristics are associated with devils, demons, and other monsters in art and considered ‘fantastic’ or diablerie.

The specific term ‘fantastic’ does not seem to have been used often in the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but this changed over the course of the nineteenth century. In his French language edition of the Schilder-Boeck (1855), the Belgian art historian Henri Hymans, for example, introduced ‘fantastic’ and ‘fantasy’ in the biographies of Bosch and Bruegel. In Hymans’ translation, Bosch’s ‘hoofd’ (head) becomes his ‘fantasy’, and a ‘vreemde roots’ (strange rock) and ‘aerdige Clippen’ (nice cliffs) both become ‘fantastic’ rocks. Additionally, in his added commentary on Bosch he spoke of the ‘extraordinary fantasy’ of ‘one of the most personal painters of the Netherlandish school.8

The terms discussed above also appear frequently in Maeterlinck’s books Peinture (1903/1907) and Sculpture (1910). Although ‘fantastic’ does not yet feature in the title of Peinture, he already treated the ‘fantastic genre’ as a genre in its own right, equivalent to the ‘satirical genre’.9 ‘Fantastic’ is explicitly referred to as a genre in Sculpture in the title of the book, on equal footing with ‘satirical’ and ‘licentious’.10

In defining these artistic concepts, Maeterlinck sometimes used ‘subject’ and ‘genre’ interchangeably. The classical genres of art (and painting) were also classified by theme: history paintings, portraits, genre paintings, landscapes and still lifes. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, these genres were largely established, including their hierarchy, with history paintings being the most prominent. By the time Maeterlinck introduced the ‘fantastic’ genre, this hierarchy of genres and the strict dividing lines between them were being widely questioned.11 This will have provided Maeterlinck the freedom to define genres himself. In doing so, he did not so much attempt to formulate a new category alongside the existing genres; he was more concerned about the human need for the ‘satirical’ or ‘fantastic’, which was expressed in specific choices of subjects. Maeterlinck maintained that human love of satire was a universal characteristic: in his opinion, the need to see daily life depicted in a humorous or exaggerated way was already present in antiquity and in folk culture. At the same time, he specifically regarded the ‘satirical’ and ‘fantastic’ genres in painting and sculpture as typically Flemish. In his view, both genres often went hand in hand.12

The subjects Maeterlinck classified as ‘fantastic’ show strong coherence. In the first place, he focused on representations that are suitable for diablerie: primarily religious iconography such as The Last Judgment (fig. 1) or The Temptation of Saint Anthony (fig. 2), but also scenes with sorcerers, witches and associated monsters (fig. 3). Non-demonic figures could also be fantastic. For instance, there were dragons and other fantasy creatures from mythology and folklore, and figures that were ‘fantastic’ through varying degrees of abstraction and distortion (fig. 4). But above all, they were the hybrid creatures that consisted of parts of various plants, animals, humans, fantasy creatures or objects (fig. 5). It was those inventive combinations that Maeterlinck once again labelled ‘fantastic’ in the physiognomy of all kinds of devils.

It cannot be said with certainty why Maeterlinck chose ‘fantastic’, and not, for example, ‘grotesque’. This can be partly explained by the fact that ‘fantastic’ can have the humorous connotation of drôle, referring to drolleries that were already linked to Bruegel by Van Mander.13 This is in keeping with Maeterlinck’s idea of ​​the fantastic genre as a sister genre to the satirical. The fact that he used Hymans’ French translation of the Schilder-Boeck reinforces this link between ‘fantastic’ and Bosch and Bruegel.14 Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, a use of ‘fantastic’ arose through literature and music that was linked to the Romantic appreciation of expression and the breaking of rules and conventions. As will be discussed later, this was in line with Maeterlinck’s ideas regarding Belgian fantastic art. A final explanation may lie in the multiple meanings of ‘grotesque’.15 On the one hand, this could point to diablerie and to the ornamental ‘arabesque’, both associated with the ‘fantastic’ by Maeterlinck and his predecessors.16 ‘Grotesque’, though, was also used regularly for irreverent antics and vulgar bodily functions, in other words, for the ‘carnivalesque’, which for Maeterlinck was more associated with popular entertainment and ‘licentious’, lewd scenes (fig. 6).17 Although the ‘grotesque’ played a major role in the history of caricature from which Maeterlinck drew his inspiration, these various explanations may have caused him to ultimately opt for the ‘fantastic genre’.

As an art historian, Maeterlinck focused primarily on early Dutch painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the sculpture and folk art of this period also held his attention.18 Peinture and Sculpture arose from these areas of interest. Both books deal with ‘Belgian’ satirical art, particularly that of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.19 In the first publication Maeterlinck discusses the painting of the school of Bosch and Bruegel. His second book deals with sculpture, mainly wooden misericords: sculpted supports on the underside of choir stalls on which monks could lean during the service. These ‘zitterkens’ often have satirical fantastic and profane subjects (fig. 5). In both publications Maeterlinck devoted a great deal of attention to their cultural-historical context, such as religious festivals, proverbs and other forms of folk culture.

Maeterlinck used different art-historical, historical and antiquarian sources for his work. For the development of the ‘fantastic’, he drew primarily from the history of caricature, a field of research that became increasingly important during the nineteenth century and in which caricature and the grotesque were linked by various researchers and theorists.20 The term ‘grotesque’ had already frequently been linked to the figures from diablerie and the carnivalesque, and was discussed in the context of comedy and satire.21 Maeterlinck must have been influenced by this for his connection between the ‘fantastic genre’ and diablerie.

The two caricature historians most frequently cited by Maeterlinck are Thomas Wright and Champfleury (pseudonym of Jules-François-Felix Fleury-Husson). The English historian and antiquarian Thomas Wright was an important figure within the British historical and archaeological research field.22 In 1865 he published his survey work History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art.23 The French writer and art critic Champfleury was a prominent champion of French realism.24 Between 1865 and 1880 he wrote a series of books about the history of caricature: Histoire de la caricature antique (1865), Histoire de la caricature moderne (1865), Histoire de la caricature au moyen-âge et sous la renaissance (1870), Histoire de la caricature sous la république, l’empire et la restauration (1874) and Histoire de la caricature sous la réforme et la ligue – Louis XIII à Louis XVI (1880).25 The influential poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire moved in the same circles as Champfleury. Even though Maeterlinck does not appear to have used him directly as a source of information, he did read his Curiosités esthétiques (1868) which contains essays about the comical in visual art and about various caricaturists. He even praised Baudelaire as the founding father of the cultural-historical approach within the history of caricature.26

Maeterlinck maintained that Bosch gave a boost to the Flemish satirical and fantastic art of the sixteenth century. In doing so, he characterised his fantastic subjects as diabolical scenes (diablerie), dreams or nightmares.36 Typical are the inventive creatures in The Last Judgment (c. 1520-25, fig. 1), a triptych Maeterlinck attributed to Bosch, but now seen as a copy made by Lucas Cranach the Elder of Bosch’s The Last Judgment (c. 1490-1505, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna).37 There is always something going on to see here: a well-endowed beast dances merrily to music of his own nose trumpet, while on the other side an elaborately-dressed devil with a fire basket for its midriff sits in his tent. 

Maeterlinck viewed Bruegel as the great representative of both the satirical and the fantastic genres, and caricature historians in the nineteenth century had also already portrayed him as an important representative of caricature and diablerie.38 Bruegel’s print of St. James Visiting the Magician Hermogenes (1565, fig. 9) is full of bizarre and grotesque monsters which menace the magician, such as a horse’s head with human legs and a rooted foot. Maeterlinck saw this as a satire on magicians and demons, and emphasised that the fear of them in Bruegel's time was genuine. This combination of satire and the ‘fantastic’ in one work may be the reason why Maeterlinck regarded the print as one of Bruegel's most interesting diabolical and fantastic compositions.39 This legitimised the unbridled fantasy.

According to Maeterlinck, the fantastic genre slowly but surely disappeared from the seventeenth century onwards, both in painting and in the sculpture of church pews.40 He did maintain that Jacques Callot in France continued to draw inspiration from the Flemish masters (fig. 10) and also included works by David Teniers II and David Rijckaert III in the later diablerie.41 However, in the many temptations of Saint Anthony painted by Teniers (such as that of c. 1650, fig. 11) he missed the ‘verschrikkelijke nachtmerries’ (terrible nightmares) of Bosch and the ‘satirische en moraliserende duivelarijen’ (satirical and moralising devilries) of Bruegel. They had been exchanged for ‘luchtige tovenarij’ (light-hearted sorcery) and ‘amusante drôlerieën’ (amusing drolleries).42 Maeterlinck’s negative attitude, based on the assumption that these scenes were purely for entertainment and contained no deeper philosophical layer, may explain why an artist like Teniers hardly features in discussions of the ‘fantastic’ in art.

Maeterlinck shared the same opinion as Champfleury and Wright regarding this idea of ​​an end to the fantastic genre. In their publications, the term ‘fantastic’ disappears almost entirely after the seventeenth century. The later satire and caricature of politics and society apparently became too realistic, with only caricatural exaggerations of the appearance. The illustrations that did contain fantastic elements were not labelled as such by Wright and Champfleury. That is probably because, in their eyes, they were visual metaphors that were too direct, rather than purely imaginative inventions, such as the anonymous political cartoon Un monstre a trois têtes (1789, fig. 12).43 The emaciated quadruped with leathery wings, drooping breasts, and four types of heads would, however, not have looked out of place in the hellish scenes of the fantastic genre.

At the end of Peinture, Maeterlinck reflected on what remained of the fantastic and satirical genres in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Belgium. He linked contemporary Flemish art, which addressed social issues, to Bruegel's satirical genre, but did not mention any specific names.44 He did, though, in a later article: Eugène Laermans and Jules De Bruycker.45 Remarkably, Maeterlinck evidently did not see the fantastic genre reappear in contemporary art. However, the ‘fantastic’ implicitly continued on in Maeterlinck’s view in, for example, Félicien Rops (fig. 13), whom he classified as belonging to the ‘diabolical’ (diabolique) genre of Bosch and Callot.46

However, the term ‘fantastic’ had already been used frequently in Belgian art criticism for various types of contemporary art. Magazines like Durendal, L’Art Moderne and Onze Kunst discussed several artists, who with their monsters, skeletons or mysterious atmosphere, contributed towards the diablerie, the grotesque-comic and symbolism, among them Arnold Böcklin, James Ensor and Franz von Stuck.47 Rops’ nightmares were also included.48 Moreover, the use of ‘fantastic’ for both contemporary and old art persisted in the following decades. In doing so, overlapping but different views about the ‘fantastic’ in art emerged. The following chapters explore the underlying body of thought and rhetoric, and how these converged at a certain point in the (re)construction of a longer tradition in the visual arts. 

One artist, who does not feature in Maeterlinck’s publications, is the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Champfleury, though, did briefly discuss him and praised the ‘graphic fantasy’ of his print series Los Caprichos (1797-99).49 This omission may be explained in part by Maeterlinck’s Flemish perspective, in which a Frenchman like Callot contrastingly was included, as Maeterlinck saw influences from the Flemish visionaries in his work. Nevertheless, Goya’s absence is striking given his continuation of the diablerie. Added to that is the fact that Baudelaire, whom Maeterlinck admired, explicitly linked Goya to the ‘fantastic’. He argued that Goya introduced the ‘fantastic’ into the ‘comic’ and that the ‘fantastic atmosphere’ of Los Caprichos had a psychological effect even on the modern viewer without historical knowledge.50 This emphasis on the timeless effect of the comic, grotesque and fantastic in art returned later in the idea of the fantastic as a universal art form.51

In sixteenth-century Italy, terms like capricci, bizzarrie and grilli had been given a positive connotation. Vasari, for example, used capriccio to express artistic creativity and seventeenth-century authors linked liveliness, invention and ‘whimsical fantasies’ (fantaisies capricieuses) with the idea of artistic genius.56 Nonetheless, the relationship between imagination and reason remained a subject of debate.57 Van Mander also emphasised that an abundance of all kinds of fantasije had to be employed harmoniously to serve the performance.58

According to this view, imagination was allowed to be free as long as it assisted in the rendering of a serious subject. The eighteenth-century art collector and connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette, for example, saw the fantastic and comic nature of Callot's Temptation of Saint Anthony (1635, fig. 10) as necessary. Demons that might seem funny now, such as the bespectacled dog-like creature astride a human cannon in the foreground, were meant to instil genuine fear in Anthony.59 Other eighteenth-century theorists were considerably stricter about this. For them, the love of the bizarre, whimsical and arbitrary, of drolleries or caprices stemming entirely from the imagination, stood in the way of the essential and, consequently, beauty.60

From the end of the eighteenth century, a revaluation of unbridled fantasy, the ugly and the grotesque took place. The academic view of art as the imitation and idealisation of nature was rejected.61 This was linked to the rise of Romanticism, in which breaking with the classical canon and abandoning old rules and conventions became important. French Romantic art theorists characterised the pre-academic sixteenth century – the time of Bosch and Bruegel – as a moment of enthusiasm, free expression and the abandonment of rules.62

The origin of such fantasies remained mysterious to art critics, as well as a source of enduring tension between the rational and the irrational. In the nineteenth century, the image of the irrational, sometimes even insane artist became widely associated with creative genius, which was further reinforced by the performative self-promotion of artists.63 In art history this led to various interpretations of, for example, the psychological origin of Bosch’s fantasies. Art historians like Max Rooses wrote about an unbridled fantasy that took over Bosch: ‘creatures of the wildest and most extravagant imagination, which make one think that their maker, in broad daylight, was incessantly spurred on by the nightmare’.64

But then again, Maeterlinck emphasised that Bosch’s visions did not stem from the imagination or from a medical madness, but reflect his historical reality; the turbulent sixteenth-century world full of death and danger found its representation in demons and monsters.65 By doing so, Maeterlinck chose a cultural-historical explanation over a psychological one. This did not prevent him from admiring the artistic qualities and inventiveness of the great masters, such as the creative and observational genius of Bosch.66 Maeterlinck, too, allowed himself to be seduced by imagery when he wrote about the ‘bizarre hellish visions created by the mad imagination’ of Bosch and Bruegel.67

These interpretations are linked to broader nineteenth-century ideas. The expression of irrational art reached its peak with the Surrealists, but this, too, had its seeds in the romantic love of fantasy and emotion. This interest in irrational art also increased interest in everything considered grotesque, naive and ‘primitive’. The ‘primitive’ was contrasted with modern industrialisation and academic conventions. Art from distant regions such as Asia or Africa was viewed as ‘primitive’, but Gothic art and local folk art could also be included in this category.68 Nineteenth-century caricature historians operated from the same primitivist ideology and thereby contributed to the revaluation of popular art and folk culture outside the canon.69

Maeterlinck not only used the term ‘primitive’ in the context of medieval art, but also, for example, in his visual comparison between the grotesque human-animal figures of Indian and Flemish art.70 The fascination with Bosch’s overcrowded nightmares tied in with this and rested partly on the view that his work was still Gothic in nature.71 The origins of Gothic art were annexed by the northern (German-Flemish) regions as a counterpoint to the classical, rigid French-Italian south. In this context, ‘Gothic’ moved within a conceptual apparatus focused more on ornament than on subject matter, but which also stemmed from an assumed underlying irrationality, unbridled imagination  and unfathomable symbolism, as was expressed by ‘burlesque’, ‘hieroglyphic’, ‘arabesque’ and ‘naive’.72 It laid the foundation for modernist artists and critics to embed irrational art within a tradition of both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and non-Western cultures.

Because of this appreciation for experimentation and imagination over strict artistic rules, the ‘fantastic’ played an important role in Romanticism, as has recently been argued by music and literary historians.73 When the fantastic ghost stories by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann started to be published in French in 1828, he quickly became one of the most widely read and discussed figures in Parisian literary circles. His contes fantastiques unleashed a craze for everything ‘fantastic’.74 The contemporaries of the French composer Hector Berlioz, too, strongly associated him with the ‘fantastic genre’ due to his music full of horror themes and alienating melodies; this genre was widely recognised in the middle of the century as a distinct musical and literary form.75

In the nineteenth century the fantastic genre was still linked above all to literature and music.76 But all things considered, this romantic ‘fantastic’ was an interdisciplinary phenomenon, in which art, literature, and music were rhetorically linked. Writers saw an inspiration for fantastic literature in grotesque visual art, in which conventional beauty and rationality were deliberately disrupted.77 Hoffmann recognised this disruption of artistic rules in Callot's work. He praised his ‘strange, fantastic prints’ as reflections of ‘all the fantastic, wondrous phenomena that the magic of his overactive imagination induced’.78 The fantastic monstrosities of Berlioz, Callot, Goya, and Hoffmann were compared in the same context: that the rules of their respective art forms were transcended. Instead of harmony, there was dissonance, through incomprehensible musical compositions or by way of a caricatural formal language.79 These rhetorical connections between, on the one hand, fantastic literature and, on the other, a visual art that was still largely expressed in terms such as grotesque, caricature, drôle or caprice, may have given Maeterlinck free rein to define sixteenth-century Flemish art as a fantastic genre.

The same romantic rhetoric was employed in Belgian art criticism to formulate its own artistic identity. Belgium, formed only in 1830, was searching for a national identity, drawing upon historical art and culture, among other sources. In doing so, region-defining terms such as ‘Flemish’ or ‘Belgian’ were sometimes used interchangeably. Hence, in 1902, the North Brabant artist Bosch was classified among the Flemish Primitives in the influential Les Primitifs flamands exhibition in Bruges, with the justification that the Low Countries had formerly belonged together.80 Maeterlinck, too, regarded Bosch as unequivocally Flemish.81 Even though he was not involved in the composition of the exhibition, there was actually a work by Bosch on display from his personal collection.82

Belgian art critics embedded the idea of ​​a Belgian-Flemish identity supposedly to be found in earlier times in the broader art-historical debate surrounding north versus south, or rather Franco-Latin versus Germanic(-Flemish), form versus content, and abstract formalism versus expressionism. In this context, the fantastic fell on the northern side of spontaneity, romanticism and expression.83 In analogous terms, Maeterlinck contrasted Belgian art and national character with the rigid and solemn art of the South. He considered the satirical and fantastic genres to be so dominant in Belgium that they could provide a counterweight to the influence of Italian art.84 He saw the moment when the Italian style, with its pure and well-considered formulas, gained the upper hand, as a loss of Flemish originality.85 This Belgian national character and its cultural expressions were defined in similar ways by the Brussels jurist and writer Edmond Picard in ‘L’âme Belge’ (1897, Revue Encyclopédique Larousse) and later by André de Ridder in Le génie du Nord (1925).86

Like the French Romantic critics before them, critics in fin-de-siècle Belgium were making connections between contemporary writers and fantastic visual artists from the past and present in order to endorse this identity. Belgian writers used the fantastic to distinguish themselves rhetorically from French literature, which was considered more analytical and stricter.87 In so doing, Belgium partially adopted ideas from the dominant French culture and used them for the formation of its own identity. Belgian critics emphasised the expressive sensitivity of Belgian writers, who were portrayed as colourists and painters.88 Writers from successive generations, among them Charles de Coster, Maurice Maeterlinck and Franz Hellens, therefore liked to see themselves as the heirs of Flemish painters. In this process, the dual characteristics of realistic and mystical (or fantastic) were emphasised in the work of Bosch and Bruegel, for example.89 The foreign ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann were also regularly cited as comparison material for fantastic art.90

Visual artists employed a similar tactic. To position himself as an artist, Ensor used references to the great Flemish painters in both his art and in his writings. Seventeenth-century giants such as Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens were cited for their expressive painting style and use of colour. When it came to fantastic and humorous art, Bruegel came to the fore in particular.91 Compare, for example, Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels (1888, fig. 15) with Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebellious Angels (1562, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels).92 Art criticism also made connections between Ensor's work and that of the Flemish masters.93 In the play Psukè (1903), Picard made the character Korsor, Ensor's alter ego, the reincarnation of Bosch and his ‘northern eyes’ (yeux de boréal).94

In the discourse about a typical Belgian national character and its associated art, the emphasis often lay on both realistic and fantastic qualities. This synthesis between realism and mysticism has also been seen as ‘a lubricant for the self-conscious development of a coherent, national art history’.95 Maeterlinck, too, viewed good observational skills, truthfulness to nature, and an eye for detail as characteristic of Flemish art. He explained how this enhanced fantastic art: Schongauer’s hybrid demons, which Maeterlinck maintained were inspired by the primitifs flamands, were built up with remarkable zoological insight from different animals.96 In the gruesome demons that assail Saint Anthony, the observant viewer discovers goat's legs, octopus suckers, and hedgehog spines.

In 1887 Picard had introduced the aesthetic category of le fantastique réel in the magazine L’Art Moderne. He expressed this as a broad art concept, but took literature as the example. Whereas Picard associated le fantastique imaginatif with the literature of Hoffmann and Poe drawn from the imagination, he viewed the fantastique réel drawn from reality as a contemporary phenomenon. In doing so he was primarily alluding to the Symbolists. He was convinced that by closely observing reality and acknowledging its incoherence, the artist could demonstrate what hides behind it. As a result, the fantastic in art was ‘the bizarre in the terrifying’.97

It is tempting to equate Picard’s concept of le fantastique réel with what, according to Maeterlinck, was typical of Belgian satirical-fantastic art: an eye for reality and detail. Maeterlinck loved the devils and drolleries of Bosch and Bruegel too much for that, and Hoffmann’s ‘imaginative fantastic’ ghost stories were too often compared by art critics to those same Flemish masters. That these observed relationships between reality and imagination could shift in art criticism is evident from the fact that, in Hoffmann's own time, a great deal was actually written about the surnaturel vrai in his work, referring to the constant fluctuations between reality and the unreal.98 His natural depiction of reality has also been typified as the brush of a Flemish master at the moment in the story when that same reality nevertheless begins to become strangely distorted.99 However one defined the ‘fantastic’ and divided it into a scale of real-unreal, according to the rhetoric of Maeterlinck and his contemporaries it was intrinsically interwoven within the Flemish-Belgian national character. In this context, the ‘fantastic’ was used to position Belgium internationally and to defend its influence on later art and other countries. The fantastic genre developed by Maeterlinck was defined as a predominantly Belgian sixteenth-century phenomenon. Nevertheless, his approach and the broader (neo)romantic context in which it emerged already contained the seed for a broader interpretation that transcended period and nationality. During the interwar period, this was further elaborated by modern art critics.

The idea that artistic quality of genius does not lie in the application of the classical laws of painting, but arises from expression and spontaneous invention, also remained popular in the twentieth century. In Belgium, this was once again explicitly linked to the ‘fantastic’, as in the article ‘La peinture fantastique’ (1928) by the journalist, writer, gallery owner, art critic and couturier Paul-Gustave van Hecke.100 Van Hecke was a key figure in the avant-garde Belgian art world and regularly collaborated with the aforementioned writers such as De Ridder and Hellens, for example in the gallery and in the accompanying magazine Sélection.101 After Sélection had stopped being published, in 1928 he founded the magazine Variétés: a periodical intended to give expression to both the art and to life in the modern era. The issues were filled with both articles and photo spreads that created surprising visual combinations.102

Avant-garde circles around Sélection and Variétés also expressed a neo-romantic predilection for the primitive.109 Van den Berghe, for instance, (fig. 16) and other Expressionists were portrayed in Sélection as modern primitives from the countryside.110 At the same time, in Onze Kunst, Van den Berghe’s wild excesses of fantasy were linked to the extravagancies of Bosch and African art.111 The fact that the issue of Variétés containing ‘La peinture fantastique’ was loosely devoted to ‘primitive’ art is exemplary. Van Hecke’s article concluded with a section of illustrations of masks and figurines of, among others, Aztec and Mayan origin. The spontaneous expression of ‘fantastic’ art was therefore placed on equal footing with the supposed naivety and irrationality of these distant peoples.

‘Perhaps it is the fantast who, after all, gets closer to the truth than anyone else, for instead of giving us an idealised transmutation of reality or a photographically accurate record, he gives us only its most salient and telling features after they have been distilled in the alembic of his fantasy.’112 Writing this in 1935, E.M. Benson reflected on previously cited ideas: imagination as an instrument to bring together elements from reality into something new in art; and the power of fantastic artists to interpret the truth behind the reality. Benson was a well-known American art teacher and critic.113 He had the ambitious idea to write articles about the different ‘phases of art’ for the American Magazine of Art. These phases transcended specific styles, movements, peoples and zeitgeist.114 He subdivided the four articles into ‘primitive’ art, naturalism, fantasy and calligraphy.115 For Benson, fantasy was an essential part of all the arts, and he attached great value to the creative imagination of the artist. According to Benson, fantastic art produced a physical or psychological shock in the viewer beyond reason. Following his predecessors, he argued that this effect was brought about by unexpected combinations or distortions.116 Benson also made the primitivistic comparison between modern Western and ethnographic art on the basis of formalistic qualities; he stated that the abstracted heads of Constantin Brancusi, Miró and a Congolese artist all showed the ‘cross-blending of nature’s morphology and man’s’.117

Benson defined fantastic art as a tradition that could be found in all times and in all parts of the world. Several artists return, like Bosch, Bruegel, Ensor, Goya, Grosz and Schongauer. He maintained that ‘all those bearing the Surrealist trade-mark’ were also present-day fantasists.118 His only source cited explicitly in this article was Maeterlinck’s Peinture.119 He had probably closely studied both books by Maeterlinck, as well as the publications on the history of caricature by his predecessors. This is evident from Benson’s references to Gothic choir stall decorations and caricaturists such as Rowlandson and Daumier, and also from his emphasis on diablerie and Bruegel. According to Benson this last artist had influenced modern artists like Chagall, Dalí, Klee, Alfred Kubin and Wassily Kandinsky.120

Benson discussed and appreciated various expressions of the fantastic, from Bosch's nightmares to Ensor's personal symbols. His preference, however, seems to have been satirical-fantastic art in which fantasy is intertwined with social commentary. In that respect, too, he continued the line of Maeterlinck. For Benson, Bruegel and Goya were pre-eminently the artists with a balance between imagination and reason (Bruegel), and a rational use of demonology (Goya).121 He therefore began his article with a paraphrased version of the caption describing Goya’s Sleep of Reason: ‘Fantasy divorced from reason produces monsters; united, the true artists’.122

The discussion surrounding the rational and the irrational thus continued, and fantastic art was not always equated with the irrational. However, the art historians and critics discussed did invariably view the 'fantastic' as an expression of creativity and invention, rather than adherence to classical, reasoned rules of art. Fantastic art operated on the boundary between fantasy and reality. Terrifying devils and strange distortions could question the rules of the real world and thereby reveal a deeper truth. According to this interpretation, the fantastic functioned in a similar manner to the grotesque.123 Arabesque ornamental shapes, diablerie, hybrid creatures and caricature were all active in a process of transformation and questioning reality.

Barr was familiar with Benson’s and Maeterlinck’s texts and they probably contributed to the fact that he included the word ‘fantastic’ in the title of his exhibition in 1936. Presumably, he found inspiration in their linking of the fantastic genre to diablerie and other scenes arising from fantasy, and in the way they treated artists such as Bosch, Bruegel, Ensor, and the Surrealists. All of this was in line with Barr’s own association of Surrealism with fantasy.124 This relied heavily on a link between Surrealism and Romanticism, which in its turn was classified as Expressionist, spontaneous and Northern art.125 This is how various strands of the grotesque found their way into a modernist interpretation of Surrealism by way of fantastic art.

Thus, between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ‘fantastic’ as an artistic concept developed from a loose descriptive term into a framework within which art historians and critics made connections between diverse types of art. Central to this development, Maeterlinck defined the ‘fantastic’ as a genre rooted in sixteenth-century Flemish art. His approach, strongly influenced by the Romantic revaluation of imagination and expression, as well as the accompanying nineteenth-century historiography of caricature and interdisciplinary rhetoric surrounding the ‘fantastic’, laid the foundation for later interpretations in which the ‘fantastic’ was treated as a universal expression and tradition. Maeterlinck’s ideas developed in parallel with a broader Belgian formation of a cultural identity, which appropriated the ‘fantastic’ as an essential part of the national identity. This association between Belgian art and the ‘fantastic’, deeply rooted in a North-South dichotomy, was continued by later art critics.

In outlining this development, topics of importance in the research into fantastic art were inevitably excluded from this article. For instance, there is the romantic love for the Gothic that arose in England in particular during the second half of the eighteenth century. How writers such as Sir Walter Scott and Matthew Lewis, whose novel The Monk was beloved by the Surrealists, related to the literary concept of ‘fantastic’, has already been partially investigated.126 However, how this was linked to what we currently view as fantastic art and to the dream scenes by artists such as William Blake and Henri Fuseli deserves more attention. And did this English context influence antiquarians like Wright? The research conducted also raises further questions regarding the role of humour in the appreciation and definition of fantastic art. How does the ‘comic-grotesque’ in German modern art relate to this, for example, or Baudelaire’s comique absolu? Finally, valuable explorations into the ‘fantastic’ functioning of formalistic properties are possible. Is there a line to be drawn between the designation of light and colour in Rembrandt's or Georges Seurat's works as ‘fantastic’ and later abstract surrealist art? And to what extent do these different uses of ‘fantastic’ create problems with regard to the historiographical development, as described here? Are there any roads that don’t lead to Barr? An ever richer image of the multifaceted tradition of fantastic art can be formed through further research into these various themes.

This article was made possible thanks to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s Surrealism Fund. The Surrealism Fund was established with the generous annual gift of a private benefactor and serves as a grant in anticipation of the 500 Years of Fantastic Art exhibition that the museum intends to stage following its reopening. Each year, an emerging art historian is given the opportunity to conduct research into a specific issue relevant to the planned exhibition. The third grant was awarded to Lotte Kremer. In 2024, she completed her RMA in Art History at Utrecht University, where she specialised in the nineteenth century, with a focus on the art and culture of fin-de-siècle Belgium and France. Her interest in collective and individual identity formation, engagement with tradition, the use of humour, and intermediality came together in her master's thesis on the self-portraits of James Ensor (1860-1949). Various sources relating to fantastic art and caricature that she encountered during this formed the basis for the present article. The research was supervised by the compilers of 500 Years of Fantastic Art: the curator of modern and contemporary art, Saskia van Kampen-Prein and the curator of prints and drawings, Peter van der Coelen.

Author
Lotte Kremer

Supervision
Peter van der Coelen
Saskia van Kampen-Prein

Text editing
Yvonne Brentjens

Image editing
Lotte Kremer

Production
Eva van Bladel
Sabine Terra

Translation
Philip Clarke

Photographic credits
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Collection, Rotterdam: header, figs. 2, 9
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin: fig. 1
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: figs. 3, 8, 10, 11, 14
Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris: figs. 7, 12
Amsterdam University Library: figs. 4, 5, 6
Art in Flanders: figs. 13, 15, 16

Header: Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel (I), The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1556, engraving, 231 x 323 mm, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam     

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