With the technological advances of photography and printmaking modern artists needed a new challenge in the art world and focused on expressionism, cubism, abstraction, fantasy and surreal art. The meaning and purpose of art changed as artists explored different ways of expressing ideas – not just reporting historical events, and subjects. Artists turned to painting the unseen (and thanks to their literary counterparts) their imaginations ran wild. Today, fantasy art continues to be extremely popular where artists and art lovers can enjoy sci fi, surreal, mythological, unexplainable, imaginative, and taboo themes.

For example Dutch artist Hieronomous Bosch was a famous fantastical artist of the 1500’s who is most well known for his painting of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" . The piece is a triptych of Eden portraying Adam and Eve, giant fruits, winged houses, and glass domes. His nudes were sensuous yet haunting as he wanted to relate his ideas about Adam and Ever and their Original Sin.

Fantasy art is historically rooted in mythology, folklore and religious art from all over the globe. We can track the history of fantasy art back to Greek mythology, Christian mythology, Chinese folklore, various cultural traditions and African myths and superstitions regarding magic. Our museums are proof of this with sculptures and pottery portraying gods, dragons, evil demons, spirits, ghosts, forces of nature, angels, and heroic immortals. Fantasy art is a mixture of imagination and direct observation of reality. It takes reality and adds a fanciful, unrealistic, fantastic, dreamy, wistful feeling to it. Essentially the result of artists with wild imaginations.

Tolkien himself made artwork in an attempt to illustrate the world he had created, but that was like unleashing a floodgate as the world of Middle-Earth has been a popular topic for amateur and professional fantasy artists ever since.

Thus modern fantasy art (and science fiction art) was born out of the literary world. Literary icons such as Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan) and J.R.R Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings) have inspired artists for eight decades with their characters and fantastic plots. Conan especially, with his brutal sexual magneticism and scantily clad slave-girls and princesses falling at his feet, would profoundly effect how we still view fantasy art even today as primarily male-driven.

Early fantasy art was usually the result of narrative, and thus illustrations for books or pulp fiction journals was a primary source of income for fantasy artists. The Avon Fantasy Reader, Weird Tales, Argosy Weekly, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, The Blue Book Magazine, The Popular Magazine, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Unknown Fantasy Fiction, Future, Startling Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Unknown Worlds, Imagination, Imaginative Tales, Fantastic Novels, A Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post Fantasy Stories, and Fantasy Magazine are but a few.

Fantasy art has been largely considered "low brow" ever since, thanks to every common man or woman drawing their own fantastical creatures or stories. During the Neo-Classicist period religious mythology was one of the highest endeavours to paint a topic on. Today most serious artists don't even paint religious themes unless they are making fun of it ( Maurizio Cattelan's "La Nona Ora/The Ninth Hour" in 2000 is a good example). Collectively religious, mythological and fantasy art has been reduced to the level of "folk art". There will never be another Cistine Chapel. The Vatican isn't about to commission any young, ambitious artists to paint ceiling tiles. So just forget about it.

But Western culture did not sprout fantasy art (as we know it) until after wide-spread literacy and common use of printing presses to create books. A method of serigraphy (to put images on paper) did not become patented until 1907. Prior to that time it was reasonably expensive to create printed works with images.

To find the humble beginnings of fantasy art we don't have to look very far. Religious mythology has been rampant in previous art movements and artwork about angels, demons, gods, centaurs and similar creatures can be found both Christian mythological art and Greek & Roman art . Gustave Dore's attempts to illustrate the story of "Paradise Lost" [right] for example was a marked achievement in Christian mythology.

Many of the most phenomenal art pieces I have ever seen have been fantasy pieces. The artists' creativity has simply overflowed into new ideas that would never have occurred to the majority of us. It therefore seems silly to me ignore a very large aspect of popular art which has dominated book covers, illustrations and movie posters for the past century.

Perhaps it is because most art historians do not take fantasy art seriously, or because it is such a lengthy movement that goes back centuries and has its origins in folk art done by common peasants. Yet we take mythological and religious art fairly seriously judging by the amount shown in art history books, so why not fantasy art? Sheer ignorance perhaps.

I have yet to find an art history book which lists "fantasy art" as an art movement.