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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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A more recent lineage can be traced with greater precision. Surrealism must undoubtedly be identified as a direct influence upon Visionary art, but two strains within this movement must be separated and identified. The one, Automatist Surrealism, tended more toward form and abstraction - Miro, Arp, Tanguy, and Matta, for example. These inspired movements towards Abstract Expressionism and Action painting in America. Of these, Visionary art has less in common. The other, Figurative Surrealism, tended more toward the accurate, plastic representation of dreams and their imagery in paint. Here, Picasso, Ernst, Magritte, Delvaux, Bellmer, Fini, and particularly Dali must be recognized as the modern forefathers of contemporary Visionary art.
In Vienna, after the second World War, it was their misinterpretation of Surrealism that led a group of academy painters to eventually create the movement now recognized as Fantastic Realism. Hausner and Hutter, Lehmden and Brauer, and particularly Ernst Fuchs sought to revive old master's techniques of painting, combine it with Impressionist color theories, and dedicate this new finesse and precision to fantastic subjects. As many of these painters are still alive today, they have become recognized as 'first generation' Visionaries.
Included among this generation of painters, but working more independently, are also Kurt Regschek, Ernst Steiner, Werner Tübke, Peter Proksch, Le Marechal, Claude Verlinde, Jean-Pierre Alaux, and Wolfgang Grasse. Special mention must be given to the Netherlandish painter Johfra, who brought his esoteric studies to rich fruition in such canvases as the Zodiac Series and his triptych of the Unio Mystica.
Under the spiritual guidance of Fuchs, a second generation emerged in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, practising (what Max Doerner called) the
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Mischtechnik, as taught to them by Fuchs. Now, a direct link could be traced from Fuchs to Mati Klarwein, De Es Schwertberger, and Robert Venosa. Other students of Fuchs, meanwhile, organized movements and became teachers of the technique: Brigid Marlin (member of Inscape and founder of The Society of Art of the Imagination), Philip Rubinov-Jacobson (member of the New York Visionaries and organizer of the Old Masters / New Visions seminars), as well as Fuchs' own son, Michael Fuchs.
Of the same generation, but working more independently is Alex Grey, gradually constructing his series of Sacred Mirrors in light of transpersonal philosophy. And at the same time, in Switzerland, H. R. Giger brought the technique of airbrushing to new heights through his darkened visions of aliens, bio-mechaniods, and the occult. Unexpectedly, the magazine Omni introduced many European Visionaries - Fuchs, Hausner, Giger, De Es, Venosa, et al - to a broader American audience by including their works among its pages.
Contemporary with this development was the rediscovery of l'Art Brut, 'naïf' or outsider art - untrained artists, some mediums, others bordering on the edge of insanity - who developed styles and vocabularies of imagery amazingly similar to the more calculated works of Visionary artists. Now, the forgotten watercolors of Heinrich Nüssbaum, the fairy-filled landscapes of Richard Dadd, the simple crayon drawings of Minnie Evans, and such architectural achievements as the Palais Ideal of le facteur Cheval had to be added to the catalogue of Visionary art. Many of these works have been documented lately through the thirty or more issues of Raw Vision magazine.
In a similar vein, the popular art form of the American 'comic book' produced many unexpected
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