How do fairy tales, with roots reaching deep into the past, continue to cast their spell on us? This question animates The Art of Fairy Tales by Joanna Ebenstein. The book is a visual exploration of the ever-changing lives that fairy tales take on through the imagination of artists.
In the preface to her essay collection Forms of Enchantment (2018), historian, mythographer and writer Marina Warner invokes the classical idea of enargeia, or “shining vitality”, to describe the vividness through which an artwork seems almost alive. The collection of artworks that Ebenstein presents in The Art of Fairy Tales captures this shining vitality across centuries of fairy tale art.
