MAGIC REALISM: NAVIGATING BETWEEN THE WORLDS OF FANTASY

Abstract

Magic Realism developed as a movement of art in the years after World War I. For many decades thereafter numerous artists throughout Europe and subsequently in the Americas crafted a representational art, mixed with elements of fantasy. Magic realism was first introduced by Franz Roh, the German art critic who applied the term 'Magischer Realisms'. He used the term to comment on the inter-war of the Weimar Republic painters that characterized a return to realism after expressionisms' more abstract style. He categorized their form of naturalistic surrealism in painting by giving this name in 1925. However, its visual and painterly connotations dimmed along with time. Later, when the term was introduced in to a Spanish literary context, it referred to the fusion of geography, history, myth, politics, culture, language and the oral traditions of South and Central America