Magical Realism

MAGICAL REALISM
Theory, History, Community

Edited with an Introduction by

LOIS PARKINSON ZAMORA

AND WENDY B. FARIS

D U K E U N I V E R SIT Y PRE S S Durham & London 1995

© 1995 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Typeset in Berthold Bodoni by Tseng Information Systems.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Magical realism: theory, history, community / edited, with an
introduction, by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8223-1611-0 {aIle paper}. - ISBN 0-8223-1640-4 {pbk. :
aIle paper}
1. Magic realism {Literature} 2. Fiction-20th century-History
and criticism 3. Spanish American fiction-20th century-History
and criticism. I. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. II. Faris, Wendy B.
PN56.M24M34 1995
809.3'937-dc20 94-47223 CIP
To Friendship
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments x

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris

Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian
Parrot(ie)s 1

I. Foundations

FranzRoh
Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925) 15

Irene Guenther
Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts
during the Weimar Republic 33

Alejo Carpentier
On the Marvelous Real in America (1949) 75
The Baroque and the Marvelous Real (1975) 89

Angel Flores
Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction (1955) 109

Luis Leal
Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature (1967) 119

Amaryll Chanady
The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America:
Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms 125
 Contents Vll

Scott Simpkins
Sources of Magic Realism/Supplements to
Realism in Contemporary Latin American Literature 145

II. Theory

Wendy B. Faris
Scheherazade's Children: Magical Realism and
Postmodern Fiction 163

Theo L. D 'haen
Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering
Privileged Centers 191

Rawdon Wilson
The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space:
Magical Realism 209

Jon Thiem
The Textualization of the Reader in Magical
Realist Fiction 235

Jeanne Delbaere-Garant
Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque
Realism: Variations on Magic Realism in
Contemporary Literature in English 249

III. History

John Burt Foster Jr.

Magical Realism, Compensatory Vision, and Felt
History: Classical Realism Transformed in
The White Hotel 267

P. Gabrielle Foreman
Past-On Stories: History and the Magically
Real, Morrison and Allende on Call 285
Vlll Contents

Richard Todd
Narrative Trickery and Performative Historiography:
Fictional Representation of National Identity in
Graham Swift, Peter Carey, and Mordecai Richler 305

Patricia Merivale
Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Midnight's Children,
Magic Realism, and The Tin Drum 329

Steven F. Walker
Magical Archetypes: Midlife Miracles in
The Satanic Verses 347

David Mikics
Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History,
and the Caribbean Writer 371

IV. Community

Stephen SIemon
Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse 407

fohn Erickson
Metoikoi and Magical Realism in the Maghrebian
Narratives of Tahar ben Jelloun and
Abdelkebir Khatibi 427

Susan J. Napier
The Magic of Identity: Magic Realism in Modern
Japanese Fiction 451

Melissa Stewart
Roads of "Exquisite Mysterious Muck": The Magical
Journey through the City in William Kennedy's
Ironweed, John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio,"
and Donald Barthelme's "City Life" 477
 Contents IX

Lois Parkinson Zamora

Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S.
and Latin American Fiction 497

Selected Bibliography 551

Contributors 559
Index 563
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Lilia Carpentier for the rights to translate Alejo Car-
pentier's essays, "On the Marvelous Real in America" and "The Baroque
and the Marvelous Real"; to the editors of Twentieth Century Literature
for permission to reprint Scott Simpkins' essay, originally titled "Magical
Strategies: The Supplement of Realism," in Twentieth Century Literature
34, 2 (1988): 140-54; to the Women's Studies Program of the University
of Maryland for permission to reprint P. Gabrielle Foreman's "Past-On
Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende On Call,"
Feminist Studies 18,2 (1992): 369-88; and to Auburn University for per-
mission to publish a revised version of John Burt Foster's "Magic Realism
in The White Hotel: Compensatory Vision and the Transformation of Clas-
sic Realism," Southern Humanities Review 20, 3 (1986): 205-19.
The following essays, some in slightly different versions, were originally
published in these collections: Franz Roh, "Realismo magico: Problemas
de la pintura mas reciente," Revista de Occidente 16 (April, May, June
1927): 274-30l; Angel Flores, "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fic-
tion," Hispania 38,2 (1955): 187-92; Luis Leal, "El realismo magi co en la
literatura hispanoamericana," Cuadernos Americanos 43, 4 (1967): 230-
35; Stephen SIemon, "Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse," Cana-
dian Literature 116 (1988): 9-24; Rawdon Wilson, "The Metamorphoses
of Space: Magic Realism," in Magic Realism and Canadian Literature, ed.
Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed J ewinski (Waterloo, Ontario: University of Water-
loo, 1986), 61-74; Patricia Merivale, "Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Inter-
textual Strategies in Midnight's Children and The Tin Drum," Ariel 21, 3
(1990): 5-21.
To our contributors, for their patience and good humor, we are espe-
cially grateful.
 LOIS PARKINSON ZAMORA
AND WENDY B. FARIS
Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and
Flaubertian Parrot{ie)s

A quota system is to be introduced on fiction set in South America. The intention

is to curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony. Ah, the propin-
quity of cheap life and expensive principles, of religion and banditry, of surprising
honour and random cruelty. Ah, the daiquiri bird which incubates its eggs on the
wing; ah, the fredonna tree whose roots grow at the tips of its branches, and whose
fibres assist the hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the
hacienda owner; ah, the opera house now overgrown by jungle. Permit me to rap
on the table and murmur "Pass!" Novels set in the Arctic and the Antarctic will
receive a development grant.-lulian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot l

Barnes has got it just right. His parodic pastiche of magical realism moves
back and forth, as do many of the literary texts we consider here, between
the disparate worlds of what we might call the historical and the imaginary.
Propinquity-Barnes' word-is indeed a central structuring principle of
magical realist narration. Contradictions stand face to face, oxymorons
march in locked step - too predictably, Barnes insists - and politics collide
with fantasy. In his reference to religion and banditry, and to the miracu-
lous impregnation of the hacienda owner's haughty wife (clearly the kind
of magical realist image he wishes would go away), Barnes implies that
bad politics has become an expected ingredient of the form. His images
reflect the popular perception of magical realism as a largely Latin Ameri-
can event.
In ridiculing the forms and conventions of magical realism, Barnes
helps us distinguish them. As in all effective parody, he turns the form
against itself, uses its conventions to critique its conventions. His hyper-
bole parodies the hyperbole of magical realism, for excess is a hallmark
of the mode. His distillation of characters into types suggests the shift
2 Zamora and Faris

in emphasis in magical realism from psychological to social and political

concerns. His refusal to sign on for the baroque "package tour" suggests
the style of the cabin decor in many of these textual cruises. His comic
curse on magical realism declares that its conventions have become ossi-
fied, tedious, overripe.
Julian Barnes is fun to argue with because his prescription ("Pass!") is
so self-consciously reductive. He invites refutation, because the resources
of magical realist narrative are hardly exhausted. On the contrary, they
have been enabling catalysts for the development of new national and
regional literatures and, at the same time, a replenishing force for "main-
stream" narrative traditions. Readers know that magical realism is not a
Latin American monopoly, though the mastery of the mode by several re-
cent Latin American writers explains Barnes' association. It is true that
Latin Americanists have been prime movers in developing the critical
concept of magical realism and are still primary voices in its discussion,
but this collection considers magical realism an international commodity.
Almost as a return on capitalism's hegemonic investment in its colonies,
magical realism is especially alive and well in postcolonial contexts and is
now achieving a compensatory extension of its market worldwide. Further-
more Barnes' parodic suggestion that magical realism is a recent glut on
that market ignores its long history, beginning with the masterful inter-
weavings of magical and real in the epic and chivalric traditions and con-
tinuing in the precursors of modern prose fiction -the Decameron, The
Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote. Indeed, we may suppose that the
widespread appeal of magical realist fiction today responds not only to
its innovative energy but also to its impulse to reestablish contact with
traditions temporarily eclipsed by the mimetic constraints of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century realism. Contemporary magical realist writers self-
consciously depart from the conventions of narrative realism to enter and
amplify other (diverted) currents of Western literature that How from the
marvelous Greek pastoral and epic traditions to medieval dream visions
to the romance and Gothic fictions of the past century.
It is a temptation to run Barnes' risk, to polarize the distinction between
realism and magical realism in order to define the latter. In fact, realism
and magical realism often spring from coherent (and sometimes identi-
cal) sources. Consider the magical departures from realism by such mas-
ter realists as Gogol, James, Kafka, Flaubert. Indeed, Barnes might have
noticed that beside his daiquiri bird, mentioned in the passage quoted
 Introduction 3

above, perches Flaubert's parrot, the presiding spirit and eponymous hero,
as it were, of Barnes' own wonderful book, Flaubert's Parrot. Barnes' title
refers to Flaubert's short story, "A Simple Heart." In this story, Flaubert
writes of the maidservant Felicite, whose banal reality eventually admits
a transcendental parrot: "To minds like hers the supernatural is a simple
matter."2 In the magical realist texts under discussion in these essays, the
supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary mat-
ter, an everyday occurrence - admitted, accepted, and integrated into the
rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic
madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most
complicated sort.
An essential difference, then, between realism and magical realism in-
volves the intentionality implicit in the conventions of the two modes.
Several essays in our collection suggest that realism intends its version of
the world as a singular version, as an objective (hence universal) repre-
sentation of natural and social realities-in short, that realism functions
ideologically and hegemonic ally. Magical realism also functions ideologi-
cally but, according to these essays, less hegemonic ally, for its program is
not centralizing but eccentric: it creates space for interactions of diver-
sity. In magical realist texts, ontological disruption serves the purpose of
political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural cor-
rective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of
causality, materiality, motivation.
Ironically, the dichotomy encoded in the critical term "magical realism"
positions its users outside of the world portrayed in the "magical realist"
texts we wish to enter, for the term implies a clearer opposition between
magic and reality than exists within those texts. For the characters who
inhabit the fictional world, and for the author who creates it, magic may
be real, reality magical; there is no need to label them as such. We will do
well, then, to test the term magical realism against such alternative terms
as metaphoric realism or mythic realism, as one of the following essays
proposes. Texts labeled magical realist draw upon cultural systems that are
no less "real" than those upon which traditional literary realism draws-
often non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over empiri-
cism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation. Their primary
narrative investment may be in myths, legends, rituals-that is, in collec-
tive (sometimes oral and performative, as well as written) practices that
bind communities together. In such cases, magical realist works remind
4 Zamora and Faris

us that the novel began as a popular form, with communal imperatives

that continue to operate in many parts of the world. Or, where these prac-
tices (and communities) have been occulted or supplanted, magical realist
writers may revitalize them in their fictions. A number of the writers dis-
cussed here self-consciously recuperate non-Western cultural modes and
nonliterary forms in their Western form (the novel, the short story, the epic
poem), among them Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Juan Rulfo, Derek
Walcott. So, too, Gabriel Garda Marquez insists that he is a social realist,
not a magical realist: one of his characters in One Hundred Years of Soli-
tude confirms this amplification of the realm of the real by observing, "If
they believe it in the Bible ... I don't see why they shouldn't believe it
from me."3
How, then, are we to proceed, distanced as we are by our own term
from the very texts we wish to approach? Comparative literature can be an
effective medium for deconstructing ideologically charged dichotomies,
including that of "magic" and "real." Our aim in soliciting discussions of
a wide variety of texts and traditions is to establish the viability of magical
realism as a significant contemporary international mode and to encour-
age attention to local contrasts, to cultural and political divergences. The
authors of the essays in this collection recognize in a variety of ways the
contradictions between the critical label and the literary practice of magi-
cal realism, as well as the dangers of appropriation, colonization, domes-
tication inherent in their analytical activity. They are at pains, in general,
not to monumentalize magical realism as the postmodern or the post-
colonial mode or to propose marginality as some new (disguised) main-
stream. Indeed, a collective discussion like ours, which features six recent
Nobel prize winners - Garda Marquez, Paz, Morrison, Kawabata, Walcott,
Oe - as well as such diverse and widely read writers as Rushdie, Allende,
Barthelme, Rulfo, to name only a few, suggests that magical realist practice
is currently requiring that we [re] negotiate the nature of marginality itself.
Amidst complex definitional and conceptual questions, the authors of
these essays recognize that, by whatever name, magical realism is an im-
portant presence in contemporary world literature. Because they treat
texts from many countries and cultures, they create a complex of compara-
tive connections, avoiding separatism while at the same time respecting
cultural diversity. Included here are references to Eastern, Mrican, and
indigenous American mythological and expressive traditions as well as to
European traditions, and to works that self-consciously depart from Euro-
 Introduction 5

pean traditions. So the following essays, like the texts they treat, circulate
eccentrically: their arguments overlap, but they do not revolve around a
single ideological or geographical center.
Within this eccentric comparative context, each essay offers general-
izing theoretical formulations, as well as specific discussion of particu-
lar literary works. Rather than providing a comprehensive geographical
or linguistic survey of magical realism, the essays tend to illustrate the
strength of the mode by intensive textual analyses. They show that magi-
cal realist writers are reading and responding to each other across national
and linguistic borders in ways that have influenced individual works and
encouraged the recent development of magical realist subjects and strate-
gies. The essays on contemporary literature describe various formal and
thematic interactions among the literary texts they treat, interactions that
suggest the existence of a flourishing trend, perhaps one that will eventu-
ally be recognized as a movement. On the other hand, the essays that look
back to earlier periods of literary history may suggest that magical realism
is less a trend than a tradition, an evolving mode or genre that has had its
waxings and wanings over the centuries and is now experiencing one more
period of ascendency. The challenge of these latter essays is to articulate
the differences between current literary manifestations of magical realism
and their many magical precursors.
In the diversity of texts and traditions they discuss, the authors of these
essays remind us that a literary genre is both a formal and a historical
category. As a group, the essays address the synchronic relations of a par-
ticular magical realist work within its own cultural context and beyond its
borders, as well as the diachronic relations of the texts that comprise an
on-going generic tradition. Together, they allow us to evaluate the formal
capacities of magical realism to express a variety of cultural and historical
conditions. Ortega y Gasset said of a writer's choice of literary genre that
it reflects "at one and the same time a certain thing to be said and the only
way to say it fully:' 4 In their use of magical realist devices to enhance the
expressive potential of their chosen genre, the authors considered here
confirm (and complicate) Ortega's assertion.
In surveying the definitions of magical realism in the following essays,
we sight several repeating elements. The essays generally agree that magi-
cal realism is a mode suited to exploring-and transgressing-bound-
aries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or
generic. Magical realism often facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of pos-
6 Zamora and Faris

sible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes

of fiction. The propensity of magical realist texts to admit a plurality of
worlds means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory be-
tween or among those worlds - in phenomenal and spiritual regions where
transformation, metamorphosis, dissolution are common, where magic is
a branch of naturalism, or pragmatism. So magical realism may be consid-
ered an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and
its representation, at the same time that it resists the basic assumptions of
post-enlightment rationalism and literary realism. Mind and body, spirit
and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and
female: these are boundaries to be erased, transgressed, blurred, brought
together, or otherwise fundamentally refashioned in magical realist texts.
All of the essays in this collection address the negotiations of magical real-
ism between these normative oppositions and alternative structures with
which they propose to destabilize and/or displace them.
Magical realism's assault on these basic structures of rationalism and
realism has inevitable ideological impact, another point upon which these
essays agree. Magical realist texts are subversive: their in-betweenness,
their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political and cul-
tural structures, a feature that has made the mode particularly useful to
writers in postcolonial cultures and, increasingly, to women. Hallucinatory
scenes and events, fantastic/phantasmagoric characters are used in sev-
eral of the magical realist works discussed here to indict recent political
and cultural perversions. History is inscribed, often in detail, but in such
a way that actual events and existing institutions are not always privileged
and are certainly not limiting: historical narrative is no longer chronicle
but clairvoyance. As Denis Donoghue states in a review of Carlos Fuentes'
magical realist tales, Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins, the plu-
perfect subjunctive is often more used (and useful) than the past perfect.5
John Erickson, in the essay he contributes here, summarizes this aspect
of magical realism by calling it "a corrosion within the engine of system,"
an admission of the exceptional that subverts existing structures of power.
Implied in this formulation are other subversions and repositionings: of
the Cartesian identification of truth with human consciousness; of ratio-
nalist notions of the probable and predictable relations of cause and effect;
of the reader's relation to the text and the text's relation to the world.
These issues and others are examined in the essays that follow. Here, let
us simply cite Henry James, who warns against "the peril of the unmea-
 Introduction 7

sured strange," stating that to make his stories of the supernatural work,
he needed to juxtapose them to another history, to "the indispensable his-
tory of somebody's normal relation to something;' 6 But this notion, too, is
unsettled by magical realist texts because within them magic is often ac-
cepted as our "indispensable history" of "normal relations" to everything.
The world is altered and enriched accordingly.

We have divided our volume into four parts: Foundations, Theory, His-
tory, Community. In our first section, we include essays published in 1927,
1949, and 1975 by two writers who were especially influential in develop-
ing the concept of magical realism. They are the German art critic and
historian Franz Roh and the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. Roh and
Carpentier formulate two issues that have become essential in the theory
and practice of magical realism: the imaginary and the autochthonous.?
Roh speculates about the quotients of the real and the imagined and more
particularly about the status of the object in Post-Expressionist painting in
the twenties in Europe; Carpentier posits a particular affinity between the
real and the imaginary in Latin America. Carpentier calls this experience
lo real maravilloso americano, a term and concept that Amaryll Chanady
will refer to in her essay as Carpentier's "territorialization of the imagi-
nary:' Roh's emphasis is on aesthetic expression, Carpentier's on cultural
and geographical identity. Despite their different perspectives, Roh and
Carpentier share the conviction that magical realism defines a revisionary
position with respect to the generic practices of their times and media;
each engages the concept to discuss what he considers an antidote to exist-
ing and exhausted forms of expression. We also include early and widely
cited literary critical studies by Angel Flores and Luis Leal, on magical
realism in Latin America.
The other essays in this first section provide an explanatory history of
these foundational essays. Irene Guenther's historical overview surveys the
ways in which Franz Roh's term of Magic Realism, overlapped with and
was ultimately eclipsed by Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, during
the Weimar Republic. Guenther also considers the routes by which Roh's
art historical formulation found its way to Latin American writers in the
1920S and, thirty years later, into the transnational discourse of literary
criticism. Amaryll Chanady builds on her own seminal study of the nar-
rative dynamics of magical realism, Magical Realism and the Fantastic:
Resolved Versus Unresolved Antimony (1985), to investigate how Western
8 Zamora and Faris

rationalism is subverted, mimesis displaced by poe sis, in the work of Latin

American writers and critics - Carpentier, Flores, and Leal among them.
She argues that they use the resources of European Surrealism even as
they modify them in their efforts to articulate a theory of magical realism
as a New World phenomenon. In the essay that follows Chanady's, Scott
Simpkins places Roh, Carpentier, and Flores in their philosophic and cul-
tural contexts. Using these early discussions of magical realism as his point
of departure, he analyzes the generic strategies employed by two literary
magicians, Borges and Garda Marquez, and their influence on many of
their contemporaries.
We have said that our essays circulate eccentrically, that they belie a
single, controlling center. It is, however, plausible to say that they orbit
around three thematic centers, and the following three sections - Theory,
History, Community-are grouped accordingly. The essays in our second
section theorize magical realism. Wendy B. Faris proposes a conceptual
framework for the mode. She establishes a set of distinguishing charac-
teristics for magical realism as an international movement and in so doing
argues for its central place in any consideration of postmodernism. Equally
broad in focus, Theo D'haen's essay also explores definitional questions.
His survey of the history of the term itself traces the radical revisions and
recenterings of magical realism in an international context.
Rawdon Wilson and Jon Thiem begin to particularize these theoretical
issues by focusing on the nature of space in magical realist texts. Wilson
observes the interactions among distinct worlds proposed within the text
and finds their shifting relations - the "metamorphoses of space" - to be
a primary source of counterrealism. In a related argument, Jon Thiem
points to the interactions between the textual world and the world out-
side the text, that is, the interactions between the characters' world and
the reader's. Thiem identifies a magical realist narrative process, which he
calls the "textualization of the reader," whereby the assumed boundaries
between the fictional world and the reader's world are magically trans-
gressed. The reader's reality, and the characters' fictionality, are called into
question by this process of "textualization," as Thiem demonstrates in a
group of texts by Julio Cortazar, Michael Ende, Italo Calvino, and Woody
Allen, among others.
Concluding the theory section is Jeanne Delbaere-Garant's call for
closer definition of the critical concept of magical realism. She argues that
magical realism is useful as a generic marker only if we make distinctions
 Introduction 9

about the particular sources and motivations of "magic" in a given text.

She investigates psychological, mythical, and grotesque elements that un-
settle the assumptions and practice of literary realism in works by the
postcolonial writers Angela Carter, Jack Hodgins, and Janet Frame, with
reference to Michael Ondaatje and Wilson Harris as well.
The essays in the history section are also concerned with the nature of
magical realism as a literary mode. However, their focus narrows some-
what as they concentrate on the practice of individual writers in particu-
lar historical and political territories. John Burt Foster's essay on D. M.
Thomas' The White Hotel begins this exploration by developing the con-
cept of "felt history," or the magical bodily echoes of external events-
a useful concept with which to understand magical realism as a mode
that bears witness to our era. P. Gabrielle Foreman compares Toni Morri-
son's The Song of Solomon and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits,
arguing that both, in their different ways, use magic to recuperate the
real, that is, to reconstruct histories that have been obscured or erased
by political and social injustice. Richard Todd looks at novels by Graham
Swift, Peter Carey, and Mordecai Richler that present alternative national
histories of England, Australia, and Canada. These novels contain narra-
tor/historians who self-consciously undermine the "facts" of history by
means of a variety of "magical" narrative strategies in order to provide
the structural freedom necessary to perform their own dramatic histories.
Patricia Merivale's essay on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and
Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum shows how the characters in these novels are
"handcuffed to [the] history" of European colonialism and world war in
this century. Merivale is also interested in literary history: she traces the
clear lines of influence that connect Rushdie to Grass and the parallel ways
in which their narratives resist the "facts" they record. Steven Walker ana-
lyzes what is, perhaps, the most controversial magical realist text of all,
Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Illustrating the often-mentioned af-
finities between magical realism and Jungian psychology, Walker uses the
Jungian archetype of the puer aeternus to illuminate the novel's engage-
ment of the unconscious mind.
David Mikics' essay considers magical realist devices of transcultura-
tion and identity formation, that is, the potential of magical realism to
imagine a coherent postcolonial collectivity - specifically, in the Carib-
bean, in the poetry of Derek Walcott and the fiction of Alejo Carpentier.
Mikics' essay argues that history and community are inseparable cultural
10 Zamora and Faris

constructs, especially in colonized regions of the world. At the outset of

his discussion of the Caribbean, Mikics states that magical realism "real-
izes the conjunction of ordinary and fantastic by focusing on a particular
historical moment affiicted or graced by this doubleness. Since magical
realism surrounds with its fabulous aura a particular, historically resonant
time and place, the theory of magical realism must supply an approach to
history, not merely literary genre;' In the community of Caribbean cul-
tures, Mikics argues, magical realism is a self-consciously historical form.
The fourth section focuses our attention on issues of community. The
essays in this section suggest that magical realism, in contrast to the real-
ism upon which it builds, may encode the strengths of communities even
more than the struggles of individuals. Societies, rather than personalities,
tend to rise and fall in magical realist fiction. Stephen SIemon's essay shows
how magical realist devices serve postcolonial communities. He focuses
on four anglophone Canadian authors, situating them in their postcolonial
cultures and also connecting them to indigenous New World cultures. In
so doing, SIemon observes how the competing codes of realism and fantasy
mirror, and thus begin to deconstruct, colonial cultural programs. John
Erickson addresses postcolonial communities in another part of the world.
His subject is North African narratives of French expression, in particular,
Abdelkebir Khatibi's Love in Two Languages and Tahar ben Jelloun's The
Sand Child. These writers use the strategies of magical realism to create a
counterdiscourse, and a countercommunity, to distance and critique colo-
nizing power structures in Morocco. Susan Napier's essay on modern Japa-
nese literature uses magical realism to construct a comparative poetics.
The theory and practice of magical realism provides the comparative con-
text in which Napier analyzes the intriguing admixture of Western magical
realist innovations and Japanese traditions in recent Japanese fiction.
Melissa Stewart, in her essay on the problems and delights of cities
in the work of U.S. writers William Kennedy, John Cheever, and Donald
Barthelme, demonstrates, this time in an urban context, the ways in
which magical realism promotes the integration of rational and irrational
domains. Lois Parkinson Zamora discusses a hemispheric American lit-
erary territory, comparing the traditions of romance in the United States
and magical realism in Latin America. The frequent appearance of ghosts
in these traditions allows her to compare cultural constructions of the self
and literary constructions of character in a variety of works of American
fiction. These last two essays - one on visible cities, the other on ghost
 Introduction 11

towns underground - confirm the communal force of magical realist fic-

tion.

Notes

1 Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), p. 104.
2 Gustave Flaubert, "A Simple Heart," in Three Tales, trans. Robert Baldick
(New York: Penguin, 1961), p. 39.
3 Gabriel Garda Marquez, One Hundred Years ofSolitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa
(1967; New York: Avon Books, 1970), p. 277.
4 Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, trans. Julian Marias (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 113.
5 Denis Donoghue, "Safe in the Hands of the Uncanny," New York Times Book
Review, April 8, 1990, p. 15.
6 Henry James, "Preface to The Altar of the Dead" (volume 17 in the New York
edition), in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (Boston: Northeastern Uni-
versity Press, 1984), p. 256.
7 For a comparative history of the development of these terms and concepts in
various European cultural traditions, see Jean Weisgerber, "La Locution et Ie
concept," in Le Realisme magique: roman, peinture et cinema, ed. Jean Weis-
gerber (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1987), pp. 11-32. Seymour Menton dis-
cusses Post-Expressionism in light of Franz Roh's formula in Magic Realism
Rediscovered: 1918-1981 (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1983).
p A R T I

Foundations
 FRANZ ROR
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 paint-
ing'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 sig-
nal 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 ofthe 1920S returns to a re-
newed 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 prac-
tice of contemporary magical realists.
Roh's 1925 essay was translated into Spanish and published by Jose
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. l We provide a translation of the widely circulated Revista de Occi-
dente 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 in-
16 FranzRoh

dicates 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 1925.2

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 with-
out 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 statis-
tics 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 paint-
ing separates itself from Expressionism by means of its objects. Immedi-
ately 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 pur-
pose 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 ex-
ample, 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
 Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism 17

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) ani-
mals walked in the sky; behind the transparent brain of the viewer, also
present in the picture, appeared towns and villages; overly vehement and
heated heads popped like corks from overflowing bottles; grandiose chro-
matic storms flared through all these beings; and the farthest reaches of
the pictures appeared mysteriously close to the foregrounds.
The Expressionist serials and reviews were called The Last Judgment,
Fire, Storm, Dawn. These titles are enough to reveal the world of objects
favored at that time.
But let us glance at the pictures reproduced at the end of this book.3
It seems to us that this fantastic dreamscape has completely vanished and
that our real world re-emerges before our eyes, bathed in the clarity of
a new day. We recognize this world, although now-not only because we
have emerged from a dream -we look on it with new eyes. The religious
and transcendental themes have largely disappeared in recent painting. In
contrast, we are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world, that
celebrates the mundane. Instead of the mother of God, the purity of a
shepherdess in the fields (Schrimpf). Instead of the remote horrors of hell,
the inextinguishable horrors of our own time (Grosz and Dix). It feels as if
that roughshod and frenetic transcendentalism, that devilish detour, that
flight from the world have died and now an insatiable love for terrestrial
things and a delight in their fragmented and limited nature has reawak-
ened. One could say that once again a profound calm and thoughtfulness
prevails, a calm that is perhaps a prelude to a new flight, launched with a
more mature knowledge and earthly substance. Humanity seems destined
to oscillate forever between devotion to the world of dreams and adher-
ence to the world of reality. And really, if this breathing rhythm of history
were to cease, it might signal the death of the spirit.
Reactionaries believe unequivocally that with the new art such a mo-
ment has arrived. But considered carefully, this new world of objects is
still alien to the current idea of Realism. How it stupefies the rearguard
and seems to them almost as inappropriate as Expressionism itself! How
it employs various techniques inherited from the previous period, tech-
niques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries
18 Franz Roh

that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things:
excessively large bodies, lying with the weight of blocks on a skimpy lawn;
objects that don't imitate the least movement but that end surprisingly
real, strange mysterious designs that are nevertheless visible down to their
smallest details!
All heads, hands, bodies, objects that express "convulsive life," "fiery
exaltation"; in short, anything nervous has become suspect in this new
art, for which nervousness represents wasted forces. Truly vigorous life is
imagined to be civil, metallic, restrained. We don't need to describe in de-
tail the kinds of men, women, children, animals, trees, and rocks that we
produced in the past.
Finally, the new art does not belong to the series of initial artistic phases
that includes Expressionism. It is a movement of decantation and clari-
fication that was fortunate enough to find right at the start an almost
exhausted artistic revolution that had begun to discover new avenues.
In addition, these circumstances habitually express themselves in a more
measured group of themes. Is this the way to reconcile art and the people
(largely through the reestablishment of objectivity)? The future will tell.
History, of course, always shows that the bottom layer of the population,
which experiences the monotony of hard labor, is more easily touched by
discrete and prudent works than by lofty and inspired ones. Biedenneier
painting, whose serene grandeur, barely exhausted even now, was always
threatened by vulgar bourgeoisification; it has forced us to see the danger
that prudent art courts when it caters to contemporary taste.

Objectivity

Objectivity is not equally important in all the arts. Music does not repro-
duce objects; it creates out of nothing, given the fact that its phenomena
do not really attempt to refer to nature. Architecture does not attempt that
reference either. But during the development of Expressionism, painting,
which has somehow almost always held on to nature, went as far as it
could toward rejecting its representative, imitative meaning; specific ob-
jectivity was suspected of lacking spirituality; in Futurism, the objective
world appeared in an abrupt and dislocated form. On the other hand,
Post-Expressionism sought to reintegrate reality into the heart of visibility.
The elemental happiness of seeing again, of recognizing things, reenters.
Painting becomes once again the mirror of palpable exteriority. That is
 Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism 19

the reason to speak of a New Realism without in any way alluding to the
instinctive attitude that characterized previous Realisms in European art.
The viewers who continue to prefer that attitude do not feel satisfied with
this new "frigid, unanimated" Realism.
An example will explain what we mean by objectivity. When I see sev-
eral apples on a table, I receive an extremely complex sensation (even
without leaving the plane of aesthetic intuition). I am attracted not just
by the breath of exquisite colors with which Impressionism entertained
itself; not just by the varied designs of spherical, colored, and deformed
shapes that captivated Expressionism. I am overcome by a much wider
amalgam of colors, spatial forms, tactile representations, memories of
smells and tastes; in short, a truly unending complex that we understand
by the name of thing. Compared with Post-Expressionism's integrative atti-
tude, Impressionism and Expressionism seem outmoded simplifications,
limiting themselves now to fulgurations of chromatic surface, now to ab-
stractions of stereometry and color; they steal the seductive integrity of
objective phenomena from the viewer. But when painting returns to a full
objectivity, all those relations and feelings that we do not find in pure
harmonies of color and form reappear. It is clear that only after art had
become abstract could feeling for the object, which had been dragged all
over like a vague, vacuous and unsubstantial rag, flower again. Only then
could the object again constitute a fundamental emotion and require a
corresponding representation. After art has been spiritualized, objectivity
once again becomes the most intense pleasure of painting.
We must admit that the world created like this in its most tangible
reality offers us the fundamental artistic feeling of existence for the first
time. But let us not forget (as we often have recently) that we can only be-
come aware of the objective world if to these tactile impressions we add
impressions of color and form, ordered according to a principle that is also
valid for living. Of course the new art does not restore objectivity by using
all sensory potential in the same way: what it principally evokes is a most
prolific and detailed tactile feeling.
We may use the most varied circumstances to illustrate this idea. For
Impressionism, that the world consisted of objects was an "obvious" fact
not worth much attention; for the Impressionists, then, painting delighted
in giving maximal value and meaning to chromatic texture, which floated
in the air. Expressionism also considered the existence of objects to be
patently "obvious" and looked for meaning in powerful and violent formal
20 FranzRoh

rhythms; vessels into which man's spirit (that of either an artist or a man
of action) could pour everything. But the most recent painting attempts to
discover a more general and deeper basis, without which the two previous
enthusiasms could not have succeeded. Before, people were not at all de-
voted to the object: they took the exterior world which art molds and
shapes for granted. In making what was formerly accepted as obvious into
a "problem" for the first time, we enter a much deeper realm, even though
some of the results may seem inadequate to us. This calm admiration of
the magic of being, of the discovery that things already have their own
faces, means that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world
can take root has been reconquered - albeit in new ways.
The new art has been maligned for its rough drawing and "penetrating"
execution. This criticism does not take account of the possibility of feel-
ing existence, of making it stand out from the void; that a solidly modeled
figure crystalizes itself, as if by a miracle, emerging from the most obscure
source. Here, perhaps, the background is the last frontier, absolute noth-
ingness, absolute death, from which something emerges and vibrates with
energetic intensity.
This seems to be a more important viewpoint than the "objectivity"
everyone keeps evoking. The latter doesn't acknowledge that radiation
of magic, that spirituality, that lugubrious quality throbbing in the best
works of the new mode, along with their coldness and apparent sobriety.
The great abstract system of Expressionism had tended more or less
toward mural painting, in which a free rhythm filled broad surfaces that
would affect the spectator from afar. But with Post-Expressionism, easel
painting, pictures with frames, easily transportable works that delighted
many tastes besides those of postmedieval Europe are enjoying a renais-
sance. Now, when a piece of imitated "reality" hangs on the wall it only
makes sense if it starts from and then (consciously or unconsciously) tran-
scends the representation of a window, that is, if it constitutes a magical
gaze opening onto a piece of mildly transfigured "reality" (produced arti-
ficially).
This idea of a picture on a wall is prospering and increasing in popu-
larity again. The clash of true reality and apparent reality (of the actual
room with the visionary realm of the painting) has always had an elemental
attraction. This enchantment is enjoyed now in a new way. Such a juxta-
position of reality and appearance was not possible until the recuperation
of the objective world, which was largely lacking in Expressionism. Ex-
 Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism 21

pressionism appeared to have already rejected the image of real nature in

favor of an exclusively spiritual world.
With this new movement painting distances itself from the Expression-
ists' rivalry with music. Already with Kandinsky, painting had felt obliged
to take second place to music because music unfolded in time and conse-
quently had great expanses at its command, whereas easel painting con-
tinued to be an art of simultaneity. Painting could only contain a few
measures, as it were, that could be embraced by a glance in a short space
of time - a space of time in which a consummate condensation could be
achieved nonetheless. Such a condensation evokes in the viewer the desire
and even the need to remain for a long time in front of this instantaneous
vision enclosed in a few measures, whereas an art of successive time (like
music, the novel, drama, film) never ceases to insert new figures. This was
a disadvantage for painting; unlike music, in the majority of countries
and periods painting compensated for this shortcoming by synthesizing its
concerns: painting became not only a harmonious form of expression but
also a representation of objects, something that music could never really
be. Thus, painting makes use of keys that can open in the viewer all the ex-
citing emotions that come only from representing the object. The Expres-
sionist way of seeing, according to which the only "true artistic and spiri-
tual" technique was composition, the placing and design of lines and colors
but not the portrayal of objects, was impossible to maintain. That way of
seeing forgets that the sphere, expressive in and of itself, made of pure
forms and colors, embodies a completely different meaning when it refers
to object A and changes entirely if the same combination of forms refers to
object B. A very simple example: a harmony of color and form, applied to
the heart of a cabbage, embodies a completely different meaning when it
is applied to a female nude; because in the second instance, without even
considering other factors, there emerges an erotic meaning that the cab-
bage can never assume. Imagine the innovations that such a wide-ranging
and original combination immediately imply. Furthermore, as far as ex-
pression goes, the (positive) darkness of an abstract form means something
completely different from the (positive) darkness of a given object.
The Futurism of Severini, Boccioni, and Carra had already recognized
this when (as I have said) in the midst of a general confusion of purely
compositional strokes, objects suddenly emerged, created, like voices from
another world, only to disappear immediately. Many people dismissed this
as something of no consequence; but the truth is that it produced an effect
22 FranzRoh

as stimulating as it was odd. So, just as with futurism, the miracle of realis-
tic depiction appeared quickly in the midst of abstraction, only to lose itself
again, so Post-Expressionism offers us the miracle of existence in its imper-
turbable duration: the unending miracle of eternally mobile and vibrating
molecules. Out of that flux, that constant appearance and disappearance
of material, permanent objects somehow appear: in short, the marvel by
which a variable commotion crystallizes into a clear set of constants. This
miracle of an apparent persistence and duration in the midst of a demonia-
cal flux; this enigma of total quietude in the midst of general becoming, of
universal dissolution: this is what Post-Expressionism admires and high-
lights. For Expressionism, the deepest meaning, the reason it erects this
world of permanent bodies as a symbol, lies in building something that by
means of its very persistence resists eternal fluidity. Post-Expressionism
faithfully raises a pane of glass in front of a light and is surprised that it
doesn't "melt," that it doesn't inevitably transform itself, that it is accorded
a brief stay in eternity. It is the same feeling that motivates the invocation
of norms, of ethical and even political positions, from either the right or
the left. And this is not a result of intimate inertia; it is the glimmer from
which the elan vital (the previous generation's philosophy of life) cannot
save us. So then, New Objectivity is something more than the simple re-
spect for the objective world in which we are submerged. In addition, we
see juxtaposed in harsh tension and contrast the forms of the spirit and the
very solidity of objects, which the will must come up against if it wishes to
make them enter its system of coordinates. The spirit cannot show itself in
the open with such facility and speed as Expressionism thought it could;
in the end, Expressionism aimed at disrupting the world as it existed in the
structure of the Self, which in turn resisted such disruption. At least this
is how New Realism, Ideal Realism, understands the Expressionist gen-
eration. It is true, says the New Realism, that Expressionism has broken
with individualism in directing meditation toward the basic fundamentals
of all human sensation; but it hasn't abandoned subjectivity (a collective
subjectivity) at all, because the very consistency of the world has degener-
ated almost entirely into the special rhythms of the collective subject.
One could say of Cubism, as a basic comparison, that it painted what
we might call pre-forms, primordial forms, categories of human percep-
tion, at the same time that it depicted perceived matter. Likewise, it can be
said that without losing sight of its own modeling force (we are still deal-
ing with the very definite means of composition that it employs) today's
 Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism 23

art proposes to catch reality as such, instead of evading it with a sudden

and inspired stroke. This new art is situated resolutely between extremes,
between vague sensuality and highly structured schematics, as true phi-
losophy may be located between ingenuous realism and exalted idealism.
In order to clarify the situation of this art in relation to the world of
objects, we can compare it not only to the kind of man who contemplates
and knows but also to a new kind of man of action. The end of the nine-
teenth century, including Impressionism, gave many men a new capacity
for enjoyment, a new sense of smell and even a new knowledge of exist-
ing reality. The Expressionist generation rightly contrasted such men with
another kind of man who imposes ethical norms, who constructs the future
according to preconceived plans, a utopian who scorns mere knowledge
of past life, a nobler and more audacious kind of man who truly moves
the world and who-even indirectly-has always pushed it decisively in
the direction of its evolution. The most recent art corresponds, however,
to a third class of man who, without losing anything of his constructivist
ideals, nonetheless knows how to reconcile that desire with a greater re-
spect for reality, with a closer knowledge of what exists, of the objects he
transforms and exalts. This kind of man is neither the "empirical" Machia-
vellian politician nor the apolitical man who listens only to the voice of an
ethical ideal, but a man at once political and ethical, in whom both char-
acteristics are equally prominent. The new position, if it survives, will exist
on a middle ground not through weakness but, on the contrary, through
energy and an awareness of its strength. It will be a sharp edge, a narrow
ledge between two chasms on the right and the left.

The Proximity of the Object as Spiritual Creation

Painting now seems to feel the reality of the object and of space, not
like copies of nature but like another creation. We have already seen
that Expressionism in its last stages was very enamored of the "spiritual:'
This recent painting could not, then, fall back into amorphous sensuality,
although here and there it does court that danger. It manifests its interior
point of departure more purely than does nineteenth-century Realism,
revealing its compositional structure with a different kind of clarity. It
continues to approach the ultimate enigmas and harmonies of existence
through a hidden stereometry. It also believes that Being consists of fun-
damentally simple forms and that in the best modern works these forms
24 Franz Roh

are metallic and quiescent. The new idea of "realistic depiction" as it is rig-
orously conceived wishes to make such forms concretely evident in nature
rather than in the abstract. To depict realistically is not to portray or copy
but rather to build rigorously, to construct objects that exist in the world
in their particular primordial shape. The old Aristotelian idea of imita-
tion had already gained a spiritual quality. For the new art, it is a question
of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior
figure, of the exterior world. This mattered very little to Expressionism.
The point is not to discover the spirit beginning with objects but, on the
contrary, to discover objects beginning with the spirit; for that reason, one
accords consummate value to the process in which spiritual form remains
large, pure, and clear. This second objective world thereby rigorously re-
sembles the first, the existing world, but it is a purified world, a referential
world. We have already seen that we cannot leap out of the existing world
and jump into the free spaces of pure spirit, as Expressionism often tried
to do. Post-Expressionism, in holding to existing exteriority, wants to say
clearly that we have to shape the world we find in front of us.
This is how we must understand what today's historical situation shows
us so extraordinarily well: that the invention and re-establishment of the
object can reveal to us the idea of creation. It is well known that the
nineteenth century rarely attempted anything other than extrinsic imita-
tion, and hence it had to remain seated in front of nature or works of
art or plaster casts, limiting itself in the end to copying the object before
its eyes. When, in violent reaction to this, Expressionism had crystallized
the object's exclusively internal aspect, the unusual opportunity of look-
ing at the object close up from the other side had arrived; in other words,
the opportunity of reconstructing the object, starting exclusively from our
interiority. Thus, returning to the previous example of the apples, today
we could say that the fantastic apples of Expressionism may belong to a
better world because it is simpler and more circumscribed, but that they
lack true existence. Speaking in moral terms, we could almost say that the
Expressionist ideal has not been realized because of the tragic fact that
creating the best always means a compromise with what already exists.
The way in which the restorative process of this new painting oper-
ates here is quite clear. A painter like Schrimpf, who attempts to create
the exterior world with the utmost precision, considers it very important
not to paint outdoors, not to use a model, to have everything flow from
the interior image to the canvas. That is why he paints his landscapes in
 Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism 25

his studio, almost always without a model or even a sketch. Nevertheless,

he repeatedly insists that the landscape be definitively, rigorously, a real
landscape that could be confused with an existing one. He wants it to be
"real," to impress us as something ordinary and familiar and, neverthe-
less, to be magic by virtue of that isolation in the room: even the last little
blade of grass can refer to the spirit. That is the painter's aim-of course,
he doesn't always achieve it. Only when the creative process achieves its
goal from the inside out can it generate new views of reality, which is at
most built in pieces, never imitated as a whole.
The opposite side of this double-sided art that struggles between oppo-
sites appears in the painting of Kanoldt, for example, who builds his land-
scapes out of Italian cities because he feels certain of their spiritual con-
tent, working whenever possible in nature, outside. Thus he accentuates
and intensifies the power of the object.
As long as Post-Expressionism works with this dialectic, it will be open
to a thousand spiritual possibilities. But if it degenerates into a simple ex-
ternal imitation (as can easily happen in this difficult attempt at objectifi-
cation), it will become less significant and painting will find itself trampled
to death by those marvelous machines (photography and film) that imitate
reality so incomparably well.

The New Space

As we have previously suggested, the partisans of nineteenth-century sen-

suous Realism reject the new painting's Realism as schematic, intellec-
tual, constructed, inert, frigid. In fact, what happens is that the feeling
of space has changed. To understand that change, we will compare the
latest styles of landscape painting. The Impressionists represented space
from the perspective of air, of vaporous atmosphere: that is, they gasified
and shattered color on the intervening atmosphere. But in attempting to
create a shimmering colored vapor to fill the whole picture, and in con-
ceiving of the whole world as a chromatic veil, what Impressionism actu-
ally achieved was a flattening of space. Matter visualized in form and color
was caught as in a gaseous substance on the picture plane. It was impos-
sible to say whether this matter was projected by an object situated behind
the intervening surface or by an object in front of this projection screen.
Thus, in the age of Impressionism people talked a great deal about the
value of the visual plane, so much did its theory owe to a contemporaneous
26 FranzRoh

current of classicism (Fiedler, Hildebrand). But after Expressionism the

demands of the surface decreased. The desire for spatiality re-emerged,
bringing with it a certain ambiguity. Painters felt depth to be primary and
placed everything obliquely to emphasize the force of foreshortening. The
canvas, which was made to reveal extended surface qualities in both Im-
pressionism and Impressionist classicism (Hildebrand did not understand
sculpture except as a continuation of bas relief, a conception in which he
was basically wrong), was deepened, hollowed out, and filled with depres-
sions and elevations. But it was always a matter of adjacent spaces that
invaded and assaulted the foreground. Furthermore, all the foreshortened
figures appeared to move forward rather than backward (something that
could have happened in the middle- and backgrounds as well). However,
every foreshortened figure could be given a different trajectory. From that
principle the rough and often ferocious aggressivity of purely Expression-
ist paintings emerged.
In adopting a classical position again, the most recent painting concili-
ates and synthesizes the decisive elements of these three possibilities that
have appeared in the history of art. The best new landscapes reveal a con-
stant surface, to which is added a certain forward thrust (in this case as
if the painter were "displaying" the shape for us), but they also make use
of distance. Thus in the same way that (as we will see shortly) the delight
in the juxtaposition of small and large is felt again, so another polarity
and juxtaposition is also reestablished: I refer to the juxtaposition of the
far and the near, which in the new painting are reconciled and face each
other. This meeting is now asserted more purely and not, as in Impression-
ism, through intermediate veils and vaporizing, dissolving, conciliating
atmospheres. It could be said that the new landscapes, like the landscapes
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, move vigorously forward, at the
same time that they recede into the far distance. In Post-Expressionism
the bird's-eye view, which Expressionism reapplied but which Impres-
sionism prohibited because it sacrificed the flatness of the picture plane,
embodies that double meaning. They must have sensed at some point-
so the Expressionists proudly declared of their landscapes - how to pene-
trate deeply into the distance, how to "really" enter into the picture. These
words manifest the exalted feeling of reality that makes the picture a sug-
gestive spatial unity, whose floor invites footsteps. These landscapes on the
wall no longer try (as those by Marees did) to spring from surface force,
from the continuous feeling of the wall, as we have said elsewhere.
 Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism 27

Art tries over and over again to picture the whole volume of space,
making it felt through its division into three dimensions. While the Gothic
(including painting) expresses extension primarily as an upward thrust,
the Renaissance deliberately extends volume horizontally in order to savor
it fully. In contrast, as is well known, the Baroque attempts to throw it all
into the vortex of depth. With a charm that goes unrecognized today, the
best fifteenth-century painting establishes a calm juxtaposition between
breadth of surface and depth of field. This juxtaposition produces a mag-
nificent intensity that contrasts, on the one hand, with the era of Raphael
and Titian, and, on the other, with the nineteenth century (at least during
its second half), where we find only the rigors of surface with no com-
pensating factors. Today we see a renewed sensitivity to the dynamics of
depth and direction, a sensitivity that is a distinguishing feature of Post-
Expressionism.
Recall, finally, that in both its horizontal extensions and its elevations,
Expressionism searches for a secret geometry. That is why we can say that
(to the advantage of the new painting) Expressionism has still not disap-
peared.

Smaller than Natural (Miniature)

The rigorous dedication to the object functions in very different ways in

the most recent art, but it almost always manifests itself in miniature form.
It seeks to endow the viewer, who is frequently too cursory and careless
in his knowledge of the world and in his idealism, with a penetrating and
meticulous lucidity.
By miniature we mean a fine and exact painting, executed on a very
small surface; a painting whose decisive character typically comes from
its minimal exterior dimensions. Though it is true that the narrowness of
the surface compels all representation to search for smallness from within,
this is no more than the extrinsic and superficial concept of miniature.
The intrinsic miniature (which can encompass also very large paintings,
a typical example of which is Altdorfer's Battle of Alexander) is art pro-
duced by attempting to locate infinity in small things. This is the idea of
the miniature that takes its inspiration from a special way of intuiting the
world and, as such, can apply to all the arts, even music. Its opposite pole
is another feeling for life, which animates monumental art, an idea that
applies equally to all the arts. This idea of monumentality is not limited
28 FranzRoh

to external dimensions either. Thus, for example, The Lacemaker by Ver-

meer is a little painting the size of a plate that nevertheless produces the
impression of a poster the size of a house. The miniature and the monu-
ment are two poles situated beyond the development of styles, at a distance
from known spiritual models. For this reason they must be investigated on
their own terms. Vermeer has painted a small object, the bust of a woman,
and Altdorfer, in contrast, a gigantic battlefield with a panoramic view of
the mountains. In order to understand the aesthetic means used here, it
is not enough to say that the "monumental" painter seeks the foreground
while the other represents distances with his small shapes. It is more im-
portant to notice that the "monumental" man piles up shapes in large
groups while the "microscopic" one establishes the largest possible num-
ber of subdivisions. When the latter does not have a multipartite object
in front of him, like thickets of leaves or fibers of grass or human masses
spread out over the horizon, then he carves, separates, and divides the
foreground. (The painting by Vermeer I mentioned above can be sketched
perfectly well by accenting the small parts, without objects branching off
into space in the way we see them, for example, in the well-known repro-
duction by Unger, who altered Vermeer's formal continuity, converting it
into the prolixity of the nineteenth century.)
The spiritual type of painting that seeks what is powerful becomes cari-
cature by virtue of its emphatic presentation and its statuesque turgidity.
The other type, which cultivates the profound meaning of the diminu-
tive, usually plunges us into tedious minutia that scatter and confuse our
attention. In the best periods, both possibilities almost always coincide,
which is what happened in the late Gothic period, even at the point
when it was already becoming the Renaissance. (One of the most timeless
examples is Durer, especially in his copper engravings.) Expressionism
tended exclusively toward the monumental; Post-Expressionism again be-
comes the triumphal synthesis of both tendencies. However, the tension
between the two possibilities should never be suppressed. In this way Post-
Expressionism avoids (consciously or unconsciously) any central "organic"
line that would divide these modes of representation; on the contrary, it
tends to weave them together. Thus in wide compositions we find the world
of smallness ensconced at regular intervals, so to speak. At other times
the hostility of the two opposing tendencies remains. Schrimpf insolently
knocks large bodies down on the smallness of grass, thereby juxtaposing
its diminutive fibers with the vigor of the human form. Or again, a painter
 Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism 29

may enjoy positioning a powerfully foregrounded near shape in front of

dimunitive details in the distance, as the southern Italians of the quattro-
cento liked to do, when the minutiae of the late Gothic coexisted genially
with the massed volumes of the Renaissance.
The extent to which the miniature can express maximum power all by
itself can be explained by thinking of the greatest spectacle that nature
offers us, a sight that contains the smallest units, almost simple points
placed on the prodigious surface width of the picture: the spectacle of the
starry sky, through which we experience infinity.
The desire for precision and refinement motivated both the Construc-
tivists and their sworn enemies the Verists. So that even when the theme
is abstract (as in Leger, Feininger, Schlemmer), we see a sharper, more
minute, cleaner structure than in the first five years of Expressionism. We
must distinguish this phenomenon from Post-Expressionism's tendency-
which I described earlier-to reappropriate the real world in painting. We
could say that in this new painting the very system of categories has been
refined, gaining in clarity, richness, and precision.
Two types of miniatures take on completely contradictory meanings in
the different styles of Expressionism, a phenomenon that we need to note
here, although we will reserve the study of these different styles for later.
In Grosz and Dix this miniaturism tries to present the horrible side of the
world in the crudest manner and in all its minute detail, but still without
any political overtones. Later comes the political meaning, and it attempts
to give us a microscopic image of social ills, to put them under the very
noses of the bourgeoisie, who usually refuse to look at such disagreeable
sights. In contrast, Schrimpf and Spiess celebrate the intimacy of everyday
life with precise fidelity; they conceive of the world as a handful of grass,
an anthill, and wish once again to evoke the long-forgotten and exquisite
quality of the diminutive in art.
In addition, an erroneous judgment has been hanging over all this,
namely that in representing small things one necessarily falls into spiri-
tual pettiness. I have already mentioned Altdorfer's Battle of Alexander.
Divided into a thousand little pieces, it is something final and definitive, in
exactly the same way as The Last Judgment conceived on a large scale by
Rubens or Michelangelo. In science the same thing applies: the planetary
microcosm of the atom is a mystery in the end, no less than the macro-
cosm of astronomy. Now then, both kinds of miniaturist painting (the
one that reconciles us to the world, and the one that tries to horrify us)
30 FranzRoh

imply an orientation toward the infinity of small things, of the microcosm.

One must, therefore, be very careful not to apply the criteria of Impres-
sionism and Expressionism automatically and, basing ourselves on their
fluctuating and monumental characters, deprecate this faithful devotion
to small things, this "nitpicking," as Diirer put it. This "nitpicking" is, in
fact, like the slow steps of a magnificent parade and reveals a profound
new meaning.
The most recent painting coincides with Expressionism in painting pic-
tures of vast scope. But while Expressionism was entirely consumed with
this effort, Postexpressionist paintings open the way to meticulous expres-
sion. Now is when we really draw near to the painting of the late Middle
Ages, often allegedly without a motif, from which Expressionism took the
geometric plan of large scale composition. On entering the church, the
ensemble of an altar painting unfolded its essential meaning at a hundred
paces, and then, as the distance diminished, revealed little by little the new
world of the very small in successive planes of details, details that were
symbolic of all true spiritual knowledge of the world because they always
remained subordinate to the total structure. Thus the viewer could satiate
himself with minutiae, with the thickness and density of all cosmic re-
lationships. Perhaps many Postexpressionist pictures offer the appearance
of something slow and laborious at first sight; but eventually, after we have
absorbed them, they offer us secret delights and intimate charms that the
pure unifying idealism of abstract art never even imagined. Impression-
ism and Expressionism aspired to an exciting, surprising, suggestive art
that with their vast grids aimed at stimulating man's fantasy, his personal
associations, and his creations. But the latest painting wants to offer us the
image of something totally finished and complete, minutely formed, op-
posing it to our eternally fragmented and ragged lives as an archetype of
integral structuring, down to the smallest details. Someday man too will
be able to recreate himself in the perfection of this idea.
Translated by Wendy B. Faris

Translator's Notes

1 Roh's original work is Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme

der neuesten Europiiischen Malerei (Leipzig, Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1925).
Roh takes up the issue of definition again in a later article, "Ruckblick auf
den Magischen Realismus," in Das Kunstwerk 6, 1 (1952): 7-9. In Spanish the
 Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism 31

book is Franz Roh, Realismo mrigico, post expresionismo: Problemas de la pin-

tura europea mas reciente, trans. (from the German) Fernando Vela (Madrid:
Revista de Occidente, 1927); the article is "Realismo magico: Problemas de la
pintura europea mas reciente," trans. Fernando Vela, Revista de Occidente 16
(April, May, June 1927): 274-301. This translation is from the Spanish. I have
consistently capitalized the term Magic Realism in accordance with art histori-
cal usage.
2 Preface to the book cited above, from which this essay is excerpted.
3 At the end of the book from which this essay is excerpted are a series of
about ninety reproductions of paintings. The first several pages consist of com-
parative pairings illustrating the contrast between Expressionism and Magic
Realism. Kandinsky is juxtaposed with Carra, Delaunay with de Chirico and
Citroen, Metzinger with Schrimpf, and Schmidt-Rottluf with Mense. Other
painters whom Roh includes in the group of new Magic Realists are Schottz,
Spies, Borje, Herbin, Mir6, Nebel, Huber, Grosz, Dix, Picasso, Davringhausen,
Galanis, etc.
 IRENE GUENTHER
Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts
during the Weimar Republic

In 1920, leading cntIcs and artists perceived Expressionism as having

nothing more to say. It was resolutely pronounced "tot," dead.! The "child"
anxiously awaiting to take Expressionism's place, however, needed a "real
name:' 2 This proved problematical because the child, the artistic trend
nipping at the heels of Expressionism even before 1920, defied easy cate-
gorization. At the time, no one viewed this new trend as a movement; no
cohesive artists' groups formed, and the artists themselves proposed no
theories except for a few disparate pronouncements. The one tendency
that seemed to hold the child together was its complete repudiation of
Expressionism, but this renunciation did not hold up in the ensuing art
historical discourse.3 The child did not even embody one coherent style,
but instead comprised numerous characteristics, new ways of seeing and
depicting the familiar, the everyday. It was, in effect, ein neuer Realismus
(a new Realism}.4
To complicate matters, the child was not given a simple name to con-
note its chronological place in art history, as Roger Fry had done with
"Post-Impressionism;' Rather, it was baptized twice within a very short
timespan - Magischer Realismus (Magic Realism) by the German art histo-
rian Franz Roh,s and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) 6 by the German
museum director Gustav Hartlaub? More complications ensued. From the
outset, Hartlaub viewed his child as having two distinct characteristics, a
right-wing, sometimes idyllic, Neoclassicist traits and a left-wing, politi-
cal, Veristic one.9 Roh, although acknowledging these variations, at first
analyzed his child in more aesthetic, stylistic terms.1O
Hartlaub's New Objectivity quickly eclipsed Roh's Magic Realism in the
art world, in part because of the famous Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition of
1925. Roh's term did not reappear until a new interest in the Weimar Re-
34 Irene Guenther

public and German art of the time gave rise to a flurry of publications and
exhibitions beginning in the 1960s.
From that time on, art historians began dissecting the movement in
Marxist vs. non-Marxist terms,ll by geographical location, artistic char-
acteristics, political affiliation, and social content, sometimes separating
Magic Realism from New Objectivity, sometimes treating them as oneP
And sometimes, both terms were thrown out, as divergent aspects of the
movement were subsumed under the rubric Realismus or RealismY How-
ever, as discussed in the subsequent essays in this volume, Magic Realism
found its way into literature in diversified forms. Pictorial in origin, the
term eventually became a widely used literary concept.
In order to bridge the gap between Roh's artistic formulation and its
literary connotations, an historical context and aesthetic explanation of
the term are needed. Because of the fluidity of boundaries, the ambiguity
of definitions, and the sometimes untraceable transformation of concepts,
conjecture and fact have intertwined in the history of Magic Realism and
its eventual dissemination. In effect, Roh's artistic child of the 1920S has
become a present-day historian's nightmare.

The concept of "magischer Idealismus" (magical idealism) in German phi-

losophy is an old one.14 Novalis, at the end of the eighteenth century, wrote
of a "magical idealist" and a "magical realist" in the realm of philosophy.ls
It is, however, with Franz Roh's 1925 publication, Nach-Expressionismus,
Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europiiischen Malerei (Post-
Expressionism, Magic Realism: Problems of the Newest European Paint-
ing), that the term Magischer Realismus (Magic Realism) was employed
in an artistic context.16 Two years earlier, Gustav Hartlaub had announced
his intention of organizing an exhibit based on the theme of Neue Sach-
lichkeit (New Objectivity), a project also brought to fruition in 1925, the
same year that Adolf Hitler's book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), was pub-
lished. It is to Roh's Magic Realism that we will first turn our attention.
From the outset, Roh did not place any special value on his term Magic
Realism. The new art style that he saw emerging all over Europe 17 "needed
a real name," an aesthetic descriptive alongside its time referent, Nach-
Expressionismus (Post-Expressionism). Magic Realism seemed preferable
to Ideal Realism, Verism, and Neoclassicism, since each of those desig-
nated only a part of the whole (preface, n.p.). Yet, Roh felt ambivalent
about employing the term from the start.
Moreover, Roh never gave a concise definition of Magic Realism. His
 Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic 35

1925 work, however, contains a list of characteristics and adjectives

sprinkled throughout with which he formulated his conception of the new
art. In his book, Roh insists on a "cold cerebral approach" (27) by the art-
ist and on the "intellectual statism" of the work (69). The term "magic" as
opposed to "mystic" is meant to imply that the "secret" should not enter
into the realistically depicted world, but should hold itself back behind
this world (preface, n.p.). Objects, depicted in their minutiae, appear as
"strange shadows or phantoms" (25). Elsewhere, Roh writes of an "inner
spiritual texture" in all of its purity (37) 18 and a "matter of clarity" by
which the structure of the composition is unveiled (36).
The world of painted objects Roh describes does not "reproduce"
nature through instinct, but "recreates" it (36). Reality is "reconstructed"
through "spiritual" phenomena (37). This drive for a "spiritual recon-
struction" proceeds in tandem with the artist's conviction of the prob-
lematical character of the objective, palpable, phenomenal universe (29).
Sometimes, when the empirical no longer suffices, it "yields with aston-
ishment before the magic of Being" (29-30). "Magic" in this sense, Roh
explains, suggests neither a return "to the spiritual" in an "ethnological"
sense (30, 38) 19 nor to a "demonic irrationalism" or "naive vitalism" (68).
Instead, "magic of Being" refers to "an authentic rationalism" which
"venerates" as a "miracle" the "world's rational organization" - "ein Ma-
gischer Rationalismus," a magical rationalism (67-68).
In his 1925 book, Roh listed twenty-two characteristics of the new Post-
Expressionist art in contrast with those of Expressionism (119-20). By
1958, when Roh published Geschichte der Deutschen Kunst von 1900 bis
zur Gegenwart (published in English as German Art in the Twentieth Cen-
tury) he had reduced the characteristics to fifteen. He had also replaced
the heading Nachexpressionismus [sic] with Neue Sachlichkeit, in recog-
nition that his terms Magischer Realismus and Nach-Expressionismus had
been eclipsed by Hartlaub's Neue Sachlichkeit. They are as follows:

EXPRESSIONISM NEW OBJECTIVITY

1. Ecstatic subjects Sober subjects

2. Suppression of the object The object clarified
3. Rhythmical Representational
4. Extravagant Puristically severe
5. Dynamic Static
6. Loud Quiet
7. Summary Thorough
36 Irene Guenther

8. Close-up view Close and far view

9. Monumental Miniature
10. Warm (hot) Cold
11. Thick color texture Thin paint surface
12. Rough Smooth
13. Emphasis on the visibility Effacement of the
of the painting process painting process
14. Centrifugal Centripetal
15. Expressive deformation External purification
of the object 20

Roh also provided a list of artists whose works were included in his
book as well as a supplemental list of painters not included, but whose
works exemplified certain tendencies of Magic Realism (133-34).21 Sub-
jects most often painted include the city square, the metropolis, stilllifes,
portraits, and landscapes (125-27). Clearly, it was not the subject matter
that made this art so different. Rather, it was the fastidious depiction of
familiar objects, the new way of seeing and rendering the everyday, thereby
"creating a new world view," that inspired the style. As New Objectivity
artist Grethe Jurgens noted, "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. One looks at technological objects with
different eyes when one paints them or sees them in new paintings." 22
The goal of this post-World War I art was a new definition of the ob-
ject, clinically dissected, coldly accentuated, microscopically delineated.
Over-exposed, isolated, rendered from an uncustomary angle, the famil-
iar became unusual, endowed with an Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) which
elicited fear and wonder. The juxtaposition of "magic" and "realism"
reflected far more the monstrous and marvelous Unheimlichkeit within
human beings and inherent in their modern technological surroundings,
of which both Freud and de Chirico wrote,23 than "the psychological-
philosophical ideas of Carl Jung," as Seymour Menton has asserted.24 Roh
later recalled, "For a while, one was so in awe of objects that they received
new, secret meanings as pictures. Objectivism as spiritual creation."25

Originally, both Roh's Magic Realism and Hartlaub's New Objectivity de-
noted the same thing: a mode of art that had come into being with the
 Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic 37

1.Ludwig Meidner, "Burning City," 1913. (St. Louis Art Museum, Morton D. May
Bequest)

demise of Expressionism and the aftermath of World War I. It was an art

that was firm in compositional structure and was, once again, representa-
tional. In reaction to Expressionism's apocalyptic visions (figure 1), heated
color palette, utopian message, and the shattering disillusionment which
followed the war, this post-Expressionist art concerned itself with the tan-
gible real, the familiar. After the emotional fervor of Expressionism, as
well as the horrors of the war and subsequent German Revolution, artists
searched for "soberness" and "freedom from all sentimentality." 26
Already in 1914, however, the artist Ludwig Meidner pleaded with his
fellow artists to return to painting the magnificent and the unusual, the
monstrous and the dramatic inherent in tumultuous city streets, train sta-
tions, factories, and nights in the big city.27 He cautioned them not to re-
sort to the techniques of the Impressionists from the 1870S and 1880s, like
Camille Pissaro or Claude Monet, since these would be inadequate tools
with which to depict the contemporary world. Artists would do best to for-
get these previous methods. Instead, they should develop new techniques,
learn to see more intensively and more correctly than had their Impres-
38 Irene Guenther

sionist precursors in order to penetrate reality in all of its depths.28 What,

by 1918, Meidner described as an emerging "fantastic, ardent Naturalism"
was, in fact, the beginning of a decisive new Realism in the paintings of
the 1920S;29 a Realism that was labeled Magic Realism by Roh and New
Objectivity by Hartlaub.
In 1919 an announcement appeared in Das Kunstblatt that noted the
appearance of a new Italian journal, Valori Plastici, under the editor-
ship of Mario Broglio, which "fights with enthusiasm for the newest
art." Painters whose works were reproduced included Giorgio de Chi-
rico, Giorgio Morandi, and Roberto Melli. Carlo Carra, who had recently
published his book, Pintura Metafisica (Metaphysical Paintings), received
center stage. The announcement continued: "Characteristic of this whole
group of younger artists is a singular, extreme Verism which applies a
correct, hard drawing suppressing any individual style. In Germany, as
one knows, George Grosz and Heinrich Davringhausen are on the same
road." 30
The arte metafisica (metaphysical art) of de Chirico and Carra greatly in-
fluenced German artists like Max Ernst, George Grosz, and Anton Riider-
scheidt.3l De Chirico exhibited in Italy for the first time in 1919. Already
by the end of that year, Max Ernst had seen reproductions ofthe Italian's
works at Galerie Goltz in Munich, which had a copy of the journal Valori
Plastici. His reaction to de Chirico's paintings was one of sheer amaze-
ment.32 Broglio's art gallery, also called Valori Plastici, put together travel-
ing exhibits of the Scuola Metafisica paintings. Several of these shows
came to Germany in 1921 and had an enormous impact there.33 In re-
cent years, de Chirico's works of the pre-war period have been considered
"forerunners of Magic Realism"34 as well as the principal precursors of
Surrealism;35 his influence has been assessed as greater than any other
painter on the artists of New Objectivity.36
De Chirico's bleak new world (figure 2), with its appearances of objects
isolated and mysterious, his pictorial vision of modern man's alienation
and disorientation, were recognized by Franz Roh as extremely impor-
tant in the development of Magic Realism. He included two paintings by
de Chirico and Carra in his Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus
book. It is especially in de Chirico's evocation of Unheimlichkeit (uncan-
niness, eeriness), his clarity of color, his precision and ordering, his use
of sharp contrasts, his ability to make "the real appear unreal, the unreal
real"37 that he most coincides with those tendencies of New Objectivity
 Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic 39

2. Giorgio de Chirico, "The Enigma of a Day," 1914. (Museum of Modern Art, New
York, New York, James Thrall Soby Bequest)

art which Hartlaub enumerated in his exhibition catalog 38 and with those
artists Roh labeled Magic Realists.39
In 1921 Roh saw the new artistic developments in full bloom at the
early summer exhibitions of the Munich galleries. Especially at the Galerie
Goltz, he noted that "the works do not only have a high quality, but present
the new European trend in painting in which we are presently engaged: the
40 Irene Guenther

trend toward a new objectivism, the rejection of all ... [those] techniques
which many contemporaries in the aftermath of Impressionism are still
using. 'The pulsating life' has finally become an impossible metaphor, and
any sort of Baroqueness like Greco appears strange to us. Everything shall
appear solidly rounded and limited, but not in the direction of Matisse
and others of the last decade. Instead of heavy conglomerates, there is a
sharpened cleanliness, even minute articulation with internal drawing." 40
What was taking shape, according to Roh, was a phenomenon on a Euro-
pean scale. In retrospect, he termed it a "movement which had as its goal
a new definition of the object. Suddenly, once again, the depth-attraction
of object accentuation was discovered .... In contrast to the expressive
urge of sensibility, one now coldly accentuated the inner law of the objects
in our surroundings ... objects ... in no way banal and obvious," but
which "deserve to be gazed at in wonder and to be created anew." 41 Artists
were reaching for the magic, the mystery behind the real.
In 1922, Paul Westheim, art historian and editor of Das Kunstblatt, pub-
lished responses to a questionnaire he had sent out to authors, artists, art
historians, museum directors, and critics. Westheim posed questions con-
cerning the end of Expressionism and the appearance of the "New Natu-
ralism" that was being debated in studios and in literature. Was this "New
Naturalism" only a slogan or was it, indeed, something essential, vital? Did
the new trend, "the child," warrant attention, a real name? Respondents
included Wilhelm Pinder, Clive Bell, Alfred Dablin, Ernst Ludwig Kirch-
ner, Adolf Behne, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Archipenko, and Gustav
Hartlaub.
Opinions and descriptions of the new artistic manner varied widely.
Pinder wrote, "the end of fruitful styles does not mean death but rather
transformation .... Expressionism is not totally alienated from nature,
Naturalism is not alienated from expression." Meidner advocated, within
a religious framework, a "more deliberate [reflective] approach toward
nature .... Greater respect for the object-I remind myself everyday!"
Behne perceived the "Neo Naturalism" as a "demand by mostly the
nouveaux-riches ... the materialists. They long for a materialistic, natu-
ralistic, objective art."
Kandinsky responded to Westheim's questionnaire, stating that the
"period of the coming Realism will bring: freedom from conventionalism,
narrowness and hate, enrichment of sensitivity and vitality.... Realism
will serve abstraction. We, the abstract artists, will some day be seen as the
 Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic 41

champions of absolute art." Alfred Doblin asserted that "propagandizing

a new 'Naturalism' would not help, just as it had not helped other devel-
opments.... Art comes not from knowing, but from being.... We are not
in need of art products, but rather manifestations of life .... The being of
the artist is the foundation of art ... [and] indicate[s] ... that one is and
what one is:' 42 Rudolf Grossmann thought it "more important to paint a
good picture in all innocence than to stir up again the controversy about
some ism; or should again the drum be rolled in order to interest a bored
public and to force them to take a stand?"
In his response, Hartlaub reviewed the splintering of Expressionism,
how the second and third generation of Expressionists, "mostly irre-
ligious," "disappointed and worn out by the war, revolution, and post-war
period, broke down... :' In the new art, he saw "a right, a left wing. One,
conservative towards Classicism, taking roots in timelessness, wanting to
sanctify again the healthy, physically plastic in pure drawing after nature
... after so much eccentricity and chaos .... The other, the left, glaringly
contemporary, far less artistically faithful, rather born of the negation of
art, seeking to expose the chaos, the true face of our time, with an addic-
tion to primitive fact-finding and nervous baring of the self. . . . There is
nothing left but to affirm it [the new art], especially since it seems strong
enough to raise new artistic willpower." 43
Less than a year after responding to Westheim's questions, Hartlaub's
affirmation of the new art began in earnest. Recently instated as direc-
tor of the Mannheim Kunsthalle, he announced his intention to curate a
show of this Post-Expressionist art. The actual opening of the large Neue
Sachlichkeit exhibition took place in 1925, at the same time Roh's book
on Magischer Realismus appeared. The child now had two names.
For the exhibit, Hartlaub wanted to assemble artists who rejected "im-
pressionistically vague and expressionistically abstract" art and whose
work was "neither sensuously external nor constructively internal"; artists
"who have remained true or have returned to a positive, palpable reality"
in order to reveal the truth of the times.44 Building on his response to
Westheim's questionnaire, Hartlaub also wanted to display the two strains
he had observed developing within this broad movement toward Realism.
In the Neoclassicist conservative wing, artists would include the French
a la Picasso's 1916-24 paintings, Andre Derain, and Auguste Herbin; the
Italians congregating around the Novecento of Milan, those grouped with
Valori Plastici in Rome, the Scuola Metafisica painters Giorgio de Chirico
 Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic 43

and Carlo Carra; and the German painters, especially those residing in
Munich, like Georg Schrimpf, Carlo Mense, and Alexander Kanoldt. Art-
ists in the politically committed Verist wing would be represented by Otto
Dix, George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, and others.45
Although there were stylistic variants among the artists, and concep-
tual differences between the two art historians, both Roh and Hartlaub
tried to highlight the common denominators in order to present this post-
Expressionist art as a unit. Roh, in fact, assisted Hartlaub with his exhibi-
tion by making available a list he had compiled of artists he thought best
demonstrated the characteristics of Post-Expressionism.46 Even so, he felt
uncomfortable with Hartlaub's term Neue Sachlichkeit and "avoided" it
"in order to imply" that he was not referring to "the more neutral Realism
of Courbet and Leibl." 47
Roh was not the only one who feared that the new trend toward realism
and Naturalism would draw too much from the art of the late nineteenth
century. Several of the respondents to Westheim's 1922 Das Kunstblatt
questionnaire regarding the New Naturalism voiced the same concern. 48
Paul Fechter's assessment of the new art, however, published only a few
months later in the same journal, was essentially correct. Neue Sach-
lichkeit was a "fanatical Naturalism," not a reactionary movement which
duplicated the "softness," "peacefulness," and "tranquility" of the earlier
paintings.49
Especially in the German context, Neue Sachlichkeit was an art of its
time: the visible world of urban life,50 night life (figure 3), crowded streets,
dirty cities, workers, machines, and factories, as well as of the alienated
individual placed in a modern world he could neither fathom nor control.
It was an art that reflected the turbulent fourteen -year life of the Weimar
Republic (1919-33); an art of a demoralized Germany reeling from its dev-
astating loss in World War I, its subsequent revolution, and the worst mone-
tary inflation in history that peaked by early 1924, when one American
dollar was worth more than 40 trillion marks. It was an art of the first years
of the struggling Republic (1919-23); an art of controlled bitterness that
festered as the hopes and idealism of 1918 were dashed by the early 1920S,
and the dreams of a better society gave way to resignation and cynicism.
This art also depicted the middle period of superficial calm (1924-29),

3. Otto Dix, "Metropolis," triptych (top, left and right wings; bottom, center piece),
1927/28. (Gal erie der Stadt, Stuttgart)
44 Irene Guenther

an era of growing confidence brought about, in part, by the restructuring

of war reparation payments with the Dawes Plan and the end of the French
occupation of the Ruhr. It was an art that portrayed bourgeois smugness,
political and economic stabilization, and further industrialization before
the disastrous depression years (1929-33).
As the economic situation worsened and politics radicalized, the Weimar
Republic slowly and agonizingly collapsed. While the center parties, vot-
ing increasingly conservatively, opted for law and order, the numerous
right-wing and left-wing groups tore themselves and each other apart. Few
looked up from the fray long enough to see the threat of the Third Reich,
sense the magnitude of this peril, and somehow prevent the young Repub-
lic's demise. By April 1933, Hitler's "cultural cleansing" was in full swing.
Books were burned, paintings destroyed; sides had to be chosen. Objec-
tivity in art was now out of the question. Artists had to find new means by
which to express the best and the worst that was Germany.
In the 1920S, however, the term and the style Sachlichkeit or objec-
tivity appeared constantly.51 Sachlich had been used earlier, in 1900, by
Hermann Muthesius, the head of the German Werkbund, to oppose the
nonfunctional, often prodigal decoration of architectural historicism and
lugendstil. 52 The term began to be applied to the newer architecture, which
was functional, honest, and simplistic in design.53
By 1925, sachlich appeared pervasively in relation to the new mode of
factual, objective journalism of Egon Kisch; in the cleaner, less-compli-
cated style of shop-window display; in the photographs by Hans Finsler
and August Sander;54 in science; and even, in modified form, in some of
the new philosophical and social theories.55 Thomas Mann suggested in
1920 that schools should teach objectivity- "love for objects, passion for
objects, fulfillment from them is the source of all formal brilliance" - as
the best means by which "to educate the youth of an unrhetorical people
for beautiful expression." 56 In music a "clearer form and an objectivity"
emerged in reaction to the "soulful pollution of the previous hyperexpres-
sive epoch." 57 Not surprisingly, "Es liegt in der Luft eine Sachlichkeit"
(There's Objectivity in the Air), by the famous lyricist/composer duo Mar-
cellus Schiffer and Mischa Spoliansky, made a quick rise up the popular
song charts in 1928.
In art, this new attitude and economy of expression, with variations in
theme and terminology, became the "dominant style" by 1925.58 The more
conservative strain of Neue Sachlichkeit "triumphed" in Austria. Painters
 Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic 45

like Rudolf Wacker, Sedlacek, Herbert Ploberger, Herbert von Reyl, and
Klemens Brosch oriented themselves mostly with respect to German art-
ists in Munich like Kanoldt, Schrimpf, and Mense, but created more dis-
turbing images than the idyllic, somewhat sentimental ones prevalent in
the Munich circle. The Austrian Rudolf Wacker, rather than choosing be-
tween a certain realism or beauty, opted for a synthesis-beauty in real-
ism.59
In Russia, the new art was called Constructivism.60 In France, Fer-
nand Leger termed his painting style after 1918 "Realisme Nouveau" (New
Realism), Picasso began his classicist period in 1916, Georges Braque re-
nounced Cubism, and Jean Cocteau appealed for a "rappel a l'ordre" (an
appeal to order). Andre Derain and other avant-gardists heeded the call.6!
By 1931 the French painter Pierre Roy was declared a Magic Realist.62
Italian painters in the Valori Plastici and Novecento groups also advo-
cated a return to rational, ordered painting.63 Whereas some artists ran
into difficulties with the totalitarian governments of the 1920S and 1930s,
n
the Italian had little trouble under the Fascists. In fact, Duce Mussolini
was one of the main speakers at the first exhibit of Novecento Italiano in
Milan in 1923.
Works of the 1920S and 1930S by the Flemish painters A. Carel Willink
and Pyke Koch, and the American artists Edward Hopper, Charles De-
muth, Charles Sheeler, and later Grant Wood also reflected some of the
same sachlich, Magic Realist tendencies.64 In the catalog for the 1943 New
York Museum of Modern Art exhibition "American Realists and Magic
Realists," Lincoln Kirstein explicitly linked the American art works on
display to German Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920S.65 The Magic Realist
Pierre Roy, who exhibited frequently and successfully in the United States,
may very well have helped spread Franz Roh's formulations. By 1927 Neue
Sachlichkeit, according to French art critic Waldemar George, was deemed
"Americanism ... a cult of purpose, the naked fact, the preference for
functional work, professional conscientiousness and usefulness." 66
In Germany, this return to a tangible objective reality dominated all
other painting styles. For the most part, Neue Sachlichkeit artists dis-
cerned the visible world with a cool, analytical approach, a new matter-
of-factness, and sobriety. Certainly, there were some artists who tended
slightly toward sentimentality, idyllic escapism, or an Henri Rousseau
naive style, like Georg Schrimpf (figure 4) and Carlo Mense, but their start-
ing point was always the microscopic analysis of objective reality. Alex-
46 Irene Guenther

4. Georg Schrimpf, "Landscape in the Bavarian Forest," 1933. (Bayerische Staats-

gemaldesammlungen, Munich)

ander Kanoldt, with his sharp focus and precise representations, evoked
imagined objects that seemed to appear from within his stilllifes (figure 5)
and petrified vistas. Other artists in this more conservative vein invoked a
clear, timeless Classicism. Industrial or urban landscapes, sometimes bar-
ren of human life, were painted by Carl Grossberg (figure 6) and Franz
Radziwill (figure 7).
Christian Schad, an exemplar of what was meant by New Objectivity,
produced the most photographic, most meticulously painted works. Far
from sentimentality, he painted portraits of fellow artists and writers with
a scrupulous objectivity, an icy detachment. His subjects seemed frozen in
time, alienated from the world and totally alone in their solitude (figure 8).
Yet, Schad's "no-comment" objective paintings cry out, their subjects
overwhelmed by the almost unbearable stillness and isolation of their
silent sphere.
Contrasting this more conservative and objective aesthetic of New Ob-
jectivity was the socially conscious aspect that Hartlaub termed "Verism;'
The generally left-wing Verists were best represented by George Grosz,
Otto Dix, Georg Scholz, Rudolf Schlichter, and Otto Griebel. In their con-
cise, hardheaded art, they gave voice to post-World War I Germany, the
tormented political theater of the Weimar Republic, the instability of Ger-
man society, and the desperate disquietude of the time.
5· Alexander Kanoldt, "Still Life II," 1926. (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Ge-
maldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden)
48 Irene Guenther

6. Carl Grossberg, "Bridge over Schwarzbachstrasse Wuppertal," 1927. (Von der

Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal)

Some of these artists became politically active, as well. Grosz and

Schlichter helped to organize the Rote Gruppe (Red Group), an organiza-
tion of Communist artists that joined the KPD 67 in 1924. Others became
involved with the Assoziation revolutioniirer bildender Kiinstler Deutsch-
lands (Association of Revolutionary German Fine Artists), founded in Ber-
lin in 1928. The ARBKD'S aim was "to promote the class struggle, and [its
art] will correspond in style and content to the needs of the workers."
Within a year, there were sixteen branches of the ARBKD in Germany, with
over 800 members.68 All wanted to make an impact with their art and,
thereby, improve society.69
 Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic 49

Dix went after his subject with a barely checked ferocity in order to
get to the unheimliche Wahrheit (the uncanny truth) that lay behind it
(figure 9).1 0 In one of the few theoretical pronouncements by Neue Sach-
lichkeit artists, Dix wrote, "For me, anyway, what is new about this painting
is that the subject matter is broader.... [I]n any case, the object remains
primary and the form will first take shape through the object. That is why
I have always placed such significance on the question of whether I can
move as close as possible to the thing that I see, because what is more im-
portant to me than how! The how has to develop out of the what." 71
With the belief that "der Mensch ist ein Vieh" (man is a beast) fuel-
ing his ire and his art, Grosz fought against the pervasive complacency,
pettiness, and social inequity that, to him, characterized modern German
society (figure 10). "My art was to be my arm, and my sword," Grosz later
recounted, "pens that drew without a purpose were like empty straws;' 72

7. Franz Radziwill, "Back Buildings in Dresden," 1931. (Hessisches Landesmu-

seum, Darmstadt)