Long before magical realism became associated with Latin American literature, the term belonged to the history of European visual art. It was the German art historian and critic Franz Roh (1890–1965) who introduced Magischer Realismus, or Magical Realism, as a term for contemporary painting in 1925. His concept was closely connected to the artistic transition that followed Expressionism and to the renewed interest in precise, recognizable representations of the visible world.
Roh’s importance is therefore greater than simply having coined a memorable artistic label. His writing attempted to describe a fundamental change in the way artists were looking at reality after the First World War.
Who was Franz Roh?
Franz Roh was born in Apolda, Germany, in 1890. He studied literature, history, philosophy and art history in several German and Swiss universities and later worked as an assistant to the influential art historian Heinrich Wölfflin at the University of Munich. He received his doctorate in 1920 with a study of seventeenth-century Dutch painting.
Roh was not an artist in the conventional sense. He was primarily an art historian, critic and writer, although he also worked with photography and collage. During the 1920s he wrote for important German art journals and became closely involved with contemporary art. He supported artists and developments that were challenging established ideas about what modern painting could be.
This position is important for understanding his concept of magical realism. Roh was not creating a new style himself. He was trying to recognize and describe something that was already happening in contemporary European painting.
The book that changed the terminology
In 1925, Roh published his most famous book:
Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei
The title can be translated as Post-Expressionism: Magical Realism: Problems of the Newest European Painting. The book was published by Klinkhardt & Biermann in Leipzig and was 134 pages long.
The title itself is revealing.
Roh used Post-Expressionism to indicate the historical position of the new art. But he also needed a term that described its particular visual character. He chose Magical Realism.
Importantly, Roh did not present the term as a rigid artistic movement with a fixed membership. Later scholarship has emphasized that he never provided one concise definition of magical realism. Instead, his book describes a broad transformation in European painting.
From Expressionism to a new kind of reality
To understand Roh, it is necessary to understand what he believed had changed after Expressionism.
Expressionism had emphasized subjective experience, emotional intensity, distortion, strong color and the expressive potential of the artist’s individual vision.
Roh observed a new tendency moving in another direction.
Artists were once again interested in objects, people, architecture and the visible world. But this was not simply a return to nineteenth-century realism.
The world was being represented with precision, yet it could appear strangely detached, enigmatic or unfamiliar.
Roh’s own comparison between Expressionism and Post-Expressionism makes this particularly clear. In his 1925 schema, he contrasts Expressionist qualities such as the ecstatic, dynamic, loud and heavily worked image with Post-Expressionist qualities such as the quiet, static, precise and object-oriented image. Yet the post-Expressionist image could still be both obvious and enigmatic.
That last distinction is crucial.
The object is recognizable.
But the experience of looking at it is not necessarily ordinary.
Reality becomes strange
This is perhaps the most useful way to understand Roh’s magical realism.
He was interested in what happens when an artist represents reality with unusual clarity, but the resulting image nevertheless produces a feeling of mystery.
A chair remains a chair.
A person remains a person.
A landscape remains a landscape.
Yet something has changed in the relationship between the viewer and the familiar world.
Roh described this new visual experience as a renewed appreciation of the autonomy and wonder of the objective world. The everyday world could once again appear astonishing simply through the act of looking at it carefully.
This is very different from painting a supernatural event.
The magic does not necessarily come from what is depicted.
It can come from how reality itself appears.
Why did Roh call it “magical”?
The word magical can easily be misunderstood today.
When we hear “magical realism,” we may think of ghosts, supernatural events, fantasy creatures or impossible transformations. That is not what Roh primarily meant.
His idea was much more subtle.
The magic could emerge from the renewed perception of ordinary things. A precisely painted object could suddenly seem mysterious. A familiar room could acquire an unfamiliar presence. An ordinary landscape could appear almost timeless.
The painting did not have to abandon reality in order to become strange.
In fact, the opposite could happen:
The more precisely reality was observed, the more mysterious it could become.
This is one reason Roh’s concept remains so useful when discussing twentieth-century painting.
Magical realism and Neue Sachlichkeit
Roh’s concept appeared in the same historical moment as another important term: Neue Sachlichkeit, usually translated as New Objectivity.
In 1925, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub organized the important Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, presenting new tendencies in German painting after Expressionism. The exhibition and Roh’s book appeared in the same year and addressed closely related developments.
The two terms, however, should not simply be treated as synonyms.
New Objectivity became particularly associated with German artists and with a more concrete artistic movement. Roh’s magical realism was a broader theoretical and critical concept that he applied to developments in European painting.
His book discusses artists and tendencies beyond the narrower boundaries of Neue Sachlichkeit. The distinction is important because magical realism was not simply another name for New Objectivity.
Which artists did Roh have in mind?
Roh’s book discussed a wide range of artists and developments in European painting. Among the names appearing in the book are George Grosz, Georg Schrimpf, Alexander Kanoldt, Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Rousseau, Picasso and others.
This variety tells us something important about his concept.
Magical realism was not defined by one recognizable visual formula.
An artist did not have to paint in one particular way in order to qualify.
Instead, Roh was interested in a broader change in the relationship between the artist and the visible world.
This is why an artist such as Georg Schrimpf is particularly interesting in connection with Roh. Schrimpf’s precisely painted figures and landscapes can appear quiet, static and intensely concrete, while simultaneously possessing a strange distance from ordinary reality.
That combination of precision and unfamiliarity lies very close to Roh’s concept.
Roh was not talking about Latin American literature
There is an important historical distinction here.
Today, magical realism is often associated with writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. But this literary use of the term developed later and in a different intellectual context.
Alejo Carpentier’s concept of lo real maravilloso, or “the marvelous real,” was articulated in connection with his 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World. His understanding of the marvelous was rooted in a different cultural and historical conception of reality.
Roh, by contrast, was writing about European visual art in the 1920s.
The two traditions eventually became connected under the same broad term, but they should not be treated as identical.
Roh’s importance today
Franz Roh’s significance lies partly in the fact that his original concept was much more specific than the way the term is often used today.
He was responding to a particular historical moment.
Expressionism had challenged conventional representation through subjective intensity and distortion. After the First World War, a number of European artists turned again toward recognizable objects and carefully observed reality.
But they did not simply return to traditional realism.
The world they painted was recognizable and strange at the same time.
That tension is what made Roh’s term so effective.
His concept gave art historians a way to describe an artistic experience in which reality itself could become uncanny without ceasing to be reality.
And that is perhaps the most important thing to remember about Franz Roh.
He did not invent the paintings he described.
He gave a name to a new way of seeing them.
Sources
- Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei, Leipzig, 1925.
- German History in Documents and Images, Franz Roh, “Post-Expressionist Schema” (1925).
- Deutsche Biographie, biography of Franz Roh.
- Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Duke University Press.
