This section includes paintings on canvas, Möessel used allegory and fantasy themes throughout his life to illustrate stories and ideas at the periphery of reality. As Robert Cozzolino has observed, “By the early 1930s, several observers identified pluralism as a distinctive feature of the Chicago art scene which encouraged and sustained many simultaneous styles without the pressure to form a ‘school.” Susan Weininger makes a similar point apropos of a group of Chicago artists who delved into the realm of fantasy and symbolism in their work between 1910 and 1945. Although, as she points out, the term surrealism can be used as a broad designation for this trend, she refers to it even more broadly, as “fantasy art.” (Mark Alvey 2016).

Allegory: picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.