Customer Reviews

Fantasy Worlds (English, German and French Edition)

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Fantasy Worlds is worth at least twice its price. It is a showy, large-format hard-cover "coffee table" art photography book worthy of purchase for yourself or as a gift.

Its 340 pages are crammed with full-page photos of bright and saucy gems of personal architecture. The subject matter consists of the creations of untrained visionaries who are obsessed with the desire to decorate and embellish their dwellings.

The book features 73 environmental creations -- 37 in Europe, 27 in America and 9 in Asia and Africa. The works vary from famous sites such as the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, the Gaudi creations in Barcelona and the Tiger Balm Gardens in Hong Kong to largely unknown jewels such as Salvation Mountain near Niland in the Salton Sea area of California.

The text is in English, French and German.

I borrowed the 1999 edition of this book from the library and absolutely loved all 340+ pages of it. I was extremely disappointed to discover that this book is 100 pages shorter. There are fewer sites covered, and the sites that are covered are shown in less detail. I suppose if I had never seen the original book, I might think this book was adequate. Save your money and get a copy of the original edition. And beware of Taschen 25 editions -- I also bought a copy Modernism Rediscovered, only to discover that it is 160 pages shorter than the original. How would anyone know this, when the books have the same titles, authors and publisher as the original editions -- just a lot fewer pages.

Beautifully photographed and well documented book of unusual structures. Got me hooked on the topic of "outsider constructions". Thanks for the inspiration.

First, because Taschen often releases its books in a variety of formats, some basics on the copy I'm reviewing - this is a large-format hardcover (9 1/4" x 12 3/4") with a hot pink binding and a large white "25" in interlaced design on the cover to mark Taschen's 25th anniversary as a publisher. It is dated 2007; all of the text is in English, French and German.

The book is essentially a visual introduction to the "fantasy worlds" of a variety of (mostly) self-taught "outsider artists" around the world, with anywhere from 2-8 pages each devoted to large and generally excellently shot photographs from 62 total sites in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. It doesn't pretend to be "complete" (impossible) or even comprehensive (difficult at best), so the lack of sites from Australia or South America, or certain other famous pieces in the parts of the world that are covered shouldn't be seen as a problem. The brief introduction sets the tone, linking the work theoretically to that of the French artist and writer Jean Dubuffet and the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, among others in the last century, and tracing a little bit the history of such white elephant works as King Ludwig's Bavarian castles of the mid-19th century, which may have helped to set the stage for some of the more grandiose geniuses represented here.

A great many of the works seem to fall into the religiously-inspired category; others are clearly made by utopianists; still others seem to have no specific spiritual or social intentions - or at least, none that were revealed by the artists themselves. More than half of the environments were created in either the United States or France - such dominance might reflect the authors' chauvanism I suppose, but it could also be a sign of the dominance of the two countries' attitudes towards Democracy and freedom of expression, coupled with a certain yearning for a better future (whether in Heaven or on Earth) that might perhaps be more prevalent in these places than in certain other, older, more stolid cultures. The book doesn't really give answers to these questions, though in the case of France it's clear that the French attitude towards the preservation of art has something to do with it as well.

Everybody will have their own favorites here; mine include the works from my home state, Wisconsin, home to an unusually high number of such oddities. Among those represented here are the crazy science fiction-metalwork "Forevertron" and the wonderful Catholic grotto in Dickeyville, a sister of sorts to an larger and more fabulous Grotto of the Redemption in Iowa. The Georgian artist Howard Finster is represented by his famous Paradise Garden; the Watts Tower in Los Angeles is one of the few big-city pieces portrayed. I also love La Scarzuola, a Utopian arts complex in Italy that never got finished (many of these wonderful places are the visions of single individuals who spent whole lifetimes on them), and the weird mix of medieval European and Asian feudal influences on the castles of Le jardin de nous deux in France. But really, I'd love to visit every single place in the book someday.

Hours and hours of delight, then, for the architecture or art-lover. As I said, it's really more a visual introduction to the subject than anything else; some of the individual fantasy worlds have entire books devoted to them, and the text can't hope to provide any kind of detailed understanding as to what drove most of these artists, or the contexts of their works. There is a fairly long bibliography, though alas it's just a listing, and doesn't give any information as to the contents of the dozens of books and journals listed. But don't let these minor caveats deter you from getting this fabulous book.

I love it!
If you are an eccentric gardener with an artistic streak,or and eccentric artist with a gardening streak,or someone who likes to recycle ceramics into a living garden,(or just a plain and ordinary person who may not be plain and ordinary-hence,why are you looking at this book)?
Oh Heck- buy this neat publication! It's ten buckaroos,with millions of ideas!
If you love "outsider art" then you have no excuse to not get this publication.