FRANZ ROH

Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism

Editors' Note

Writing in German in 1925 to champion a new direction in painting, Franz Roh originates the term Magic Realism to characterize this new painting's return to Realism after Expressionism's more abstract style. With the term, Roh praises Post-Expressionism's realistic, figural representation, a critical move that contrasts with our contemporary use of the term to signal the contrary tendency, that is, a text's departure from realism rather than its reengagement of it. According to Roh, the "convulsive life" and "fiery exaltation" of Expressionism have yielded to the representation of vigorous life in a "civil, metallic, restrained" manner. He describes the ways in which the Post-Expressionist painting of the 1920s returns to a renewed delight in real objects even as it integrates the formal innovations and spiritual thrust of Expressionism, which had shown "an exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects." In his statement in the preface to his book, "with the word 'magic,' as opposed to 'mystic,' I wished to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it," he anticipates the practice of contemporary magical realists.

Roh's 1925 essay was translated into Spanish and published by José Ortega y Gasset's influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid in 1927; it was also published in Spanish in expanded form as a book in the same year. We provide a translation of the widely circulated Revista de Occidente article here. The actual influence of Roh's art-historical argument on the literary practice of magical realism is taken up by Irene Guenther in the essay following Roh's.

I attribute no special value to the title "magical realism." Since the work had to have a name that meant something, and the word "Post-Expressionism" only indicates ancestry and chronological relationship, I added the first title quite a long time after having written this work. It seems to me, at least, more appropriate than "Ideal Realism" or "Verism," or "neoclassicism," which only designate an aspect of the movement. "superrealism" means, at this time, something else. With the word "magic," as opposed to "mystic," I wish to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it (as will become clear in what follows).—Frauenkirch, Davos, March 1925.

The New Objects

The phases of all art can be distinguished quite simply by means of the particular objects that artists perceive, among all the objects in the world, thanks to an act of selection that is already an act of creation. One might attempt a history of art that would list the favorite themes of each era without omitting those whose absence would be equally meaningful. Of course, this would only give us the foundations for a system of characteristics; nevertheless, it would constitute the elementary, indeed the only fruitful, groundwork for wider research. There is, however, a second path open to research on objects. That other way, which transcends the thematic statistics I have just mentioned, would strive to determine, for example, whether an era notoriously fond of painting the heads of old people chose to paint old people as withered or lymphatic. None of this research concerns form. Only later begins the formal operation that reworks preceding layers. In the same way, in reverse fashion, particular objects can have an obscure and inexplicable influence over particular methods of painting. But that would catapult us into an unknown realm of historico-artistic research.

We will indicate here, in a cursory way, the point at which the new painting separates itself from Expressionism by means of its objects. Immediately we find that in its reaction to Impressionism, Expressionism shows an exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects. Naturally, it also resorts to the everyday and the commonplace for the purpose of distancing it, investing it with a shocking exoticism. Many religious themes suddenly appeared in our country, which had been so secular until then; the ultimate religious symbols (which the church rarely modifies) were employed with sudden daring. If a picture portrayed a city, for example, it resembled the destruction produced by volcanic lava and not just a play of forms or the booty of an agitated cubism. If the theme was erotic, it often degenerated into savage sensuality. If devilish men were depicted, they had the faces of cannibals. If animals appeared, they were horses of a heavenly blue or red cows that, even in their objective reality, had to carry us beyond what we could experience on earth. If a painter wanted to sing the exuberance of southern provinces in a landscape, he came up with the tropics of an extraterrestrial world where men of our race burned like piles of paper under dry flames of color. But above all (as in Chagall's work) animals walked in the sky; behind the transparent brain of the viewer, also present in...