Series:

Visual Arts S.

1 total work

Cover of Fantastic Illustration and Design in Great Britain, 1850-1930
The Victorian era in Britain spawned an unprecedented outpouring of fantastic and visionary themes in literature, illustration, and design. This book documents an exhibition of prints, drawings, paintings, decorative objects, and furniture from this era and the next two decades held at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.The exotic, erotic, and grotesque, children's fantasy, the world of the faerie, and anthropomorphic themes are all depicted in the book's beautifully reproduced illustrations and discussed in two scholarly essays. The first, by Diana L. Johnson, who is Director of the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art, and who organized the exhibit, discusses the precursors to fantastic art, the art, artists, and their audience. The second essay, by George P. Landow, is unusual in an art catalog. Titled "And the World Became Strange: Realms of Literary Fantasy," it focuses on fantastic art in literature."Fantastic Illustration and Design in Great Britain" is in the MIT Press series Exhibition Catalogs in the Visual Arts. It includes 150 biographical profiles of the artists and a bibliography.