Magic realism arts

Magical realism, magic realism, or marvelous realism is a genre of narrative fiction and, more broadly, art (literature, painting, film, theatre, etc.) that, while encompassing a range of subtly different concepts, expresses a primarily realistic view of the real world while also adding or revealing magical elements. It is sometimes called fabulism, in reference to the conventions of fables, myths, and allegory. “Magical realism”, perhaps the most common term, often refers to fiction and literature in particular,: with magic or the supernatural presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting.

The terms are broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous. Matthew Strecher defines magic realism as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe”. Many writers are categorized as “magical realists”, which confuses the term and its wide definition. Magical realism is often associated with Latin American literature.

While the term magical realism first appeared in 1955, the term Magischer Realismus, translated as magic realism, in contrast with its use in literature, magic realist art does not often include overtly fantastic or magical content, but rather looks at the mundane through a hyper-realistic and often mysterious lens.

German magic realist paintings influenced the Italian writer who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality. Magic realism also influenced writers in Hispanic America, where it was translated as realismo mágico in 1927, the seemingly opposed perspectives of a pragmatic, practical and tangible approach to reality and an acceptance of magic and superstition” within an environment of differing cultures.

Visual art
The painterly style began evolving as early as the first decade of the 20th century, but 1925 was when Magischer Realismus and Neue Sachlichkeit were officially recognized as major trends. This was the year that Franz Roh published his book on the subject, Nach Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (translated as After Expressionism: Magical Realism: Problems of the Newest European Painting) and Gustav Hartlaub curated the seminal exhibition on the theme, entitled simply Neue Sachlichkeit (translated as New Objectivity), at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Mannheim, Germany. Irene Guenthe refers most frequently to the New Objectivity, rather than magical realism; which is attributed to that New objectivity is practical based, referential (to real practicing artists), while the magical realism is theoretical or critic’s rhetoric. Eventually under Massimo Bontempelli guidance, the term magic realism was fully embraced by the German as well as in Italian practicing communities.

New Objectivity saw an utter rejection of the preceding impressionist and expressionist movements, and Hartlaub curated his exhibition under the guideline: only those, “who have remained true or have returned to a positive, palpable reality,” in order to reveal the truth of the times,” would be included. The style was roughly divided into two subcategories: conservative, (neo-) classicist painting, and generally left-wing, politically motivated Verists. The following quote by Hartlaub distinguishes the two, though mostly with reference to Germany; however, one might apply the logic to all relevant European countries. “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 [a reference to the repercussions of World War I]… 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 addiction 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.

Both sides were seen all over Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, ranging from the Netherlands to Austria, France to Russia, with Germany and Italy as centers of growth. Indeed, Italian Giorgio de Chirico, producing works in the late 1910s under the style arte metafisica (translated as Metaphysical art), is seen as a precursor and as having an “influence…greater than any other painter on the artists of New Objectivity”.

Further afield, American painters were later (in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly) coined magical realists; a link between these artists and the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s was explicitly made in the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition, tellingly titled “American Realists and Magic Realists.” French magical realist Pierre Roy, who worked and showed successfully in the US, is cited as having “helped spread Franz Roh’s formulations” to the United States.

When art critic Franz Roh applied the term magic realism to visual art in 1925, he was designating a style of visual art that brings extreme realism to the depiction of mundane subject matter, revealing an “interior” mystery, rather than imposing external, overtly magical features onto this everyday reality. Roh explains,

We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world that celebrates the mundane. This new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism. It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things…. it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world.

In painting, magical realism is a term often interchanged with post-expressionism, as Ríos also shows, for the very title of Roh’s 1925 essay was “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism”. Indeed, as Dr. Lois Parkinson Zamora of the University of Houston writes, “Roh, in his 1925 essay, described a group of painters whom we now categorize generally as Post-Expressionists.”

Roh used this term to describe painting that 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. One could relate this exterior magic all the way back to the 15th century. Flemish painter Van Eyck (1395–1441) highlights the complexity of a natural landscape by creating illusions of continuous and unseen areas that recede into the background, leaving it to the viewer’s imagination to fill in those gaps in the image: for instance, in a rolling landscape with river and hills. The magic is contained in the viewer’s interpretation of those mysterious unseen or hidden parts of the image. Other important aspects of magical realist painting, according to Roh, include:

The pictorial ideals of Roh’s original magic realism attracted 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 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.”

Later development: magic realism that incorporates the fantastic

While Ingle represents a “magic realism” that harks back to Roh’s ideas, the term “magic realism” in mid-20th century visual art tends to refer to work that incorporates overtly fantastic elements, somewhat in the manner of its literary counterpart.

Occupying an intermediate place in this line of development, the work of several European and American painters whose most important work dates from the 1930s through to the 1950s, including Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, Paul Cadmus, Ivan Albright, Philip Evergood, George Tooker, Ricco, even Andrew Wyeth, such as in his well-known work Christina’s World, is designated as “magic realist”. This work departs sharply from Roh’s definition, in that it 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 that are not realistic.

Recent “magic realism” has gone beyond mere “overtones” of the fantastic or surreal to depict a 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.

Artists such as Peter Doig, Richard T. Scott and Will Teather have become associated with the term in the early 21st century.

Characteristics:
Magic realism originated in Latin America. Writers often traveled between their home country and European cultural hubs, such as Paris or Berlin, and were influenced by the art movement of the time. The theoretical implications of visual art’s magic realism greatly influenced European and Latin American literature.Artist claimed that Magic realism could be a means to create a collective consciousness by opening new mythical and magical perspectives on reality, Magic realism was a continuation of the vanguardia modernist experimental writings of Latin America.

The extent to which the characteristics below apply to a given magic realist text varies. Every work is different and employs a smattering of the qualities listed here. However, they accurately portray what one might expect from a magic realist text.

Fantastical elements
Magical realism portrays fantastical events in an otherwise realistic tone. It brings fables, folk tales, and myths into contemporary social relevance. Fantasy traits given to characters, such as levitation, telepathy, and telekinesis, help to encompass modern political realities that can be phantasmagorical.

Real-world setting
The existence of fantasy elements in the real world provides the basis for magical realism. Writers and artists do not invent new worlds but reveal the magical in this world, as was done by Gabriel García Márquez who wrote the seminal work of the style, One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the binary world of magical realism, the supernatural realm blends with the natural, familiar world.

Authorial reticence
Authorial reticence is the “deliberate withholding of information and explanations about the disconcerting fictitious world”. The narrator is indifferent, a characteristic enhanced by this absence of explanation of fantastic events; the story proceeds with “logical precision” as if nothing extraordinary took place. Magical events are presented as ordinary occurrences; therefore, the reader accepts the marvelous as normal and common. Explaining the supernatural world or presenting it as extraordinary would immediately reduce its legitimacy relative to the natural world. The reader would consequently disregard the supernatural as false testimony.

Plenitude
In his essay “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real”, Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier defined the baroque by a lack of emptiness, a departure from structure or rules, and an “extraordinary” abundance (plenitude) of disorienting detail (citing Mondrian as its opposite). From this angle, Carpentier views the baroque as a layering of elements, which translates easily into the post-colonial or transcultural Latin American atmosphere that he emphasizes in The Kingdom of this World. “America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations… mestizaje, engenders the baroque”, made explicit by elaborate Aztec temples and associative Nahuatl poetry. These mixing ethnicities grow together with the American baroque; the space in between is where the “marvelous real” is seen. Marvelous: not meaning beautiful and pleasant, but extraordinary, strange, and excellent. Such a complex system of layering—encompassed in the Latin American “boom” novel, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude—aims towards “translating the scope of America”.

Hybridity
Magical realism plot lines characteristically employ hybrid multiple planes of reality that take place in “inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous”.

Metafiction
This trait centers on the reader’s role in magic realism. With its multiple realities and specific reference to the reader’s world, it explores the impact fiction has on reality, reality on fiction and the reader’s role in between; as such, it is well suited for drawing attention to social or political criticism. Furthermore, it is the tool paramount in the execution of a related and major magic realist phenomenon: textualization. This term defines two conditions—first, where a fictitious reader enters the story within a story while reading it, making us self-conscious of our status as readers—and secondly, where the textual world enters into the reader’s (our) world. Good sense would negate this process but “magic” is the flexible convention that allows it.

Heightened awareness of mystery
Something that most critics agree on is this major theme. Magic realist tends to read at an intensified level. Taking One Hundred Years of Solitude, the reader must let go of preexisting ties to conventional exposition, plot advancement, linear time structure, scientific reason, etc., to strive for a state of heightened awareness of life’s connectedness or hidden meanings. Luis Leal articulates this feeling as “to seize the mystery that breathes behind things”, and supports the claim by saying a writer must heighten his senses to the point of “estado limite” (translated as “limit state” or “extreme”) in order to realize all levels of reality, most importantly that of mystery.

Political critique
Magic realism contains an “implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite”. Especially with regard to Latin America, the style breaks from the inarguable discourse of “privileged centers of literature”. This is a mode primarily about and for “ex-centrics”: the geographically, socially and economically marginalized. Therefore, magic realism’s “alternative world” works to correct the reality of established viewpoints (like realism, naturalism, modernism). Magic realist, under this logic, are subversive texts, revolutionary against socially dominant forces. Alternatively, the socially dominant may implement magical realism to disassociate themselves from their “power discourse”. Theo D’haen calls this change in perspective “decentering”.