Editing Magical realism (section)

===Excluding the overtly fantastic===
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 (arts)|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:<ref name="publicasu">{{cite web|title=Magical Realism: Definitions|url=http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/resourcebank/definitions/|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170925115858/http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/resourcebank/definitions/|archive-date=25 September 2017|access-date=25 April 2018 |publisher=Arizona State University}}</ref>

{{blockquote|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&nbsp;... 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 "Post-Expressionism, Magical Realism".<ref name=publicasu/> Indeed, as 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."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.uh.edu/~englmi/ObjectsAndSeeing_intro.html|title=Swords and Silver Rings|publisher=University of Houston|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090126210721/http://www.uh.edu/~englmi/ObjectsAndSeeing_intro.html|archive-date=2009-01-26}}</ref>

[[File:Alexander Kanoldt Still Life II.jpg|thumb|upright|left|[[Alexander Kanoldt]], ''Still Life II'' 1922]]

Roh used this term to describe painting that signaled a return to [[realism (arts)|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 [[Jan van Eyck|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.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Luber |first1=Katherine Crawford |title=Recognizing Van Eyck: Magical Realism in Landscape Painting |journal=Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin |date=1998 |volume=91 |issue=386/387 |pages=7–23 |doi=10.2307/3795460 |jstor=3795460}}</ref>
Other important aspects of magical realist painting, according to Roh, include:
* A return to ordinary subjects as opposed to fantastical ones.
* A juxtaposition of forward movement with a sense of distance, as opposed to Expressionism's tendency to foreshorten the subject.
* A use of miniature details even in expansive paintings, such as large landscapes.

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.<ref>{{cite news | url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFD91031F93AA25756C0A967958260 | work=The New York Times | title=ART; The Skill of the Watercolorist | first=Vivien | last=Raynor | date=1991-05-19 | access-date=2010-05-12 | url-status=live | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090202201725/http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFD91031F93AA25756C0A967958260 | archive-date=2009-02-02 }}</ref> 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."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=71244|title=John Ingle - Artist Biography |website=askART|access-date=25 April 2018|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060225180854/http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=71244|archive-date=25 February 2006}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.johnsandford.org/other1.html|title=The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle|first=Roswell Anthony|last=Camp|website=John Sandford – The Official Website|access-date=25 April 2018|url-status=live|archive-url=http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/20120906215140/http://www.johnsandford.org/other1.html|archive-date=6 September 2012}}</ref>