Visionary
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Narrowly, a visionary is one who experiences a supernatural vision or apparition.
By extension, visionary came to mean also a person with a clear, distinctive and specific (in some details) vision of the future, usually connected with advances in technology or political arrangements. Examples would be the Italian futurists and Buckminster Fuller in architecture. A visionary may function as a secular prophet, emphasising communication and a figurehead role, rather than implementation.
Visionary art is defined as a category of primitive art (i.e. art of those not formally trained). Artists may produce art categorised as 'visionary' for its luminous content, without being primitives in any sense (e.g. Samuel Palmer). An artist celebrated for his visionary, religious take on ordinary life is Stanley Spencer.
Visionary art in France
The two greatest attempts, thus far, to bring these diverse groups and genres together may be found in the writings of Michel Random and Hervé Sérane. In 1979 Michel Random published his richly illustrated study l'Art Visionnaire, followed by a companion volume (with the same title, but different text and images) in 1991. Meanwhile Hervé Sérane, the founder of Galerie Râ, published his own essay on Les Visionnaires (Editions Galerie Râ) as well as the more polemical text Voyage au bout de l'art moderne (Voyage to the edge of Modern Art, Editions M. de Maule, 1997). It is, above all, in the works of these two writers that a uniquely French perspective onto Visionary art emerges. --L. Caruana for the visionaryrevue.com
