The Fantastic

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Imagination has always pulled against observation, and the fantastic is where it wins. Martin Schongauer's engraving Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons (c. 1470–75) lifts the hermit into the air amid spiny, scaly creatures, and Francisco Goya's etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799) surrounds a slumped figure with owls and bats. Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare (1781) perches an incubus on a sleeping woman while a wild-eyed horse looks in.

Later artists found other routes into invented worlds. Odilon Redon's charcoal noirs of the 1880s float disembodied eyes and heads in dark space, and Paul Klee's Twittering Machine (1922) turns birds into a spindly, hand-cranked contraption. Leonora Carrington filled her paintings from the 1940s with hybrid creatures and towering women drawn from Celtic legend and Mexican folklore, and Neo Rauch sets figures from different centuries side by side in puzzling tableaux.