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Magic Realism
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Short Description: Magic Realism is a term coined by art historian Franz Roh in 1925 to describe a ... experiment with a new form, labeled Magischer Realismus (Magic Realism) ...
Content Inside: Magic Realism A Background Reading/Primer for Teachers of Fourth Eighth Grade Students Who first used the term "Magic (or "Magical") Realism"? Magic Realism is a term coined by art historian Franz Roh in 1925 to describe a visual arts movement emerging throughout Europe. By the 1920s leading art critics had determined that Expressionism (which seeks to convey personal inner experience through the distortion of natural images) had run its course. Several artists were beginning to experiment with a new form, labeled Magischer Realismus (Magic Realism) by Roh, and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) by German museum director Gustav Hartlaub. After a famous exhibition in 1925 entitled Neue Sachlichkeit, Hartlaub's term prevailed, temporarily, over Roh's; Magischer Realismus did not reappear until the 1960s, during which time increased attention to German art generated many exhibitions and publications. In a list of characteristics describing the two styles, Roh called Expressionism ecstatic in subject, rhythmical, extravagant, dynamic, loud, hot, rough, and thick in texture; in contrast, the New Objectivity, or Magic Realism, he deemed sober in choice of subject, representational, severe, static, quiet, cold, smooth, and thin. But how could such a style be considered in any way magical? For Roh, the key was a "reengagement" with the real, what Zamora and Faris [see below] say is a "renewed delight in real objects," the represented surface behind which magic, in Roh's words, "hides and palpitates." A statement from 1936, by artist Grethe Jurgens, makes even clearer how this "new objectivity" can also be magical: "It is the discovery of a totally new world. One paints pots and rubbish piles, and then suddenly sees these things quite differently, as if one had never before seen a pot. One paints a landscape, trees, houses, vehicles, and one sees the world anew. One discovers like a child an adventure-filled land." How did the term "Magic Realism" make its way from the visual to the literary arts? Roh expanded the essay in which he first used the term "Magic Realism" into a book, Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus (Magic Realism: Post- Expressionism). The essay was quickly translated into Spanish and published, in part, in José Ortega y Gasset's widely read journal, Revista Occidente, in Madrid in 1927. The book, too, was translated into Spanish; both were distributed not only in Spain but in Latin America as well. In Spanish, the book's title was Realismo Mágico, Post Expresionismo, a positioning which gave the new term "Magic Realism" additional prominence. Within a year, the term Magic Realism was being applied to the prose of European writers in the literary circles of Buenos Aires. The term's currency was shortly reinforced by emigrants from Europe to the Americas in the 1930s and 1940s. More than one-fifth of the half million persons who fled Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria between 1933 and 1941, including many
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