MAGIC
REALISM
The
term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to
refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit (the Oliver effect).
It was later used to describe the unusual realism by American painters such as
Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1940s
and 1950s. However, in contrast to its use in literature, when used to describe
visual art, the term refers to paintings that do not include anything
fantastic or magical, but are rather extremely realistic and often mundane.
The
term was first revived and applied to the realm of fiction as a combination of
the realistic and the fantastic in the 1960s by a Venezuelan essayist and
critic Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who applied it to a very specific South American
genre, influenced by the blend of realism and fantasy in Mário de Andrades
influential novel Macunaíma However, the term itself came in vogue only
after Nobel prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias used the expression to define
the style of his novels. The term gained popularity with the rise of the Latin
American Boom, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez,
who confessed, "My most important problem was destroying the line of
demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic. More
recent Latin American authors in this vein include Isabel Allende.
Subsequently,
the term has been retroactively applied both to earlier writers such as Jorge
Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov and Ernst Junger
and to postcolonial and other contemporary writers from Salman Rushdie
and Günter Grass to Angela Carter.
When art critic Franz Roh introduced
the term magic realism with reference to visual art in 1925, he was
designating a style of visual art which brings extreme realism
to the depiction of mundane subject matter.
In painting, magical realism (in this
sense) is a term often used interchangeably with post-expressionism. Roh used
this term to describe painting which signaled a return to realism after expressionism's
extravagances which sought to redesign objects to reveal the spirits of those
objects. Magical realism, according to Roh, instead faithfully portrays the
exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object
reveals itself.
Other important aspects of magical
realist painting, according to Roh, include:
The pictorial ideals of of Roh's
original magic realism continued to attract new generations of artists through
the latter years of the 20th century and beyond. In a 1991 New York Times
review, critic Vivien Raynor remarked that "John Stuart Ingle proves that
Magic Realism lives" in his "virtuoso" still life
watercolors.Ingle's approach, as described in his own words, reflects very much
the early inspiration of the magic realism movement as described by Roh; that
is, the aim is not to add magical elements to a realistic painting, but to
pursue a radically faithful rendering of reality; the "magic" effect
on the viewer comes from the intensity of that effort: "I don't want to
make arbitrary changes in what I see to paint the picture, I want to paint what
is given. The whole idea is to take something that's given and explore that
reality as intensely as I can."
While Ingle represents a "magic
realism" that harks back to Roh's ideas, the term "magic
realism" in recent visual art has tended to refer to work which
incorporates overtly fantastic elements, somewhat in the manner of Latin
American literary magic realism.
Occupying a somewhat intermediate place
in this line of development, the work of several American painters whose most
important work dates from the 1930s and 1940s, including Paul Cadmus, Ivan
Albright, Philip Evergood, George Tooker, even Andrew Wyeth, is often
designated as "magic realist". Some of this work departs sharply from
Roh's definition, in that it (according to artcyclopedia.com) "is anchored
in everyday reality, but has overtones of fantasy or wonder." In the work of Cadmus, for example, the
surreal atmosphere is sometimes achieved via stylized distortions or
exaggerations which are not, strictly speaking, realistic.
More recent "magic realism"
has gone beyond mere "overtones" of the fantastic or surreal to
depict a more frankly magical reality, with an increasingly tenuous anchoring
in "everyday reality". Artists associated with this kind of magic
realism include Marcela Donoso and Gregory Gillespie.
Magic realism, 10/12/08, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism