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

Guenther's essay places Roh within the social and historical contexts of his time and elaborates on the kind of art being produced in this period. She writes:

"The goal of this post-World War I art was a new definition of the object, clinically dissected, coldly accentuated, microscopically delineated. Over-exposed, isolated, rendered from an uncustomary angle, the familiar 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" and de Chirico's non-sentimental art was seen as a precursor to both magical realism and Surrealism (36-8).

The diversity of Neue Sachlichkeit art had some common bonds, including the lack of visible brushstrokes creating a smooth finish, and that objects were scrutinized in their minutiae: "Artists 'painted inward from the outside' to get to the invisible. With surgical probing, a deeper layer--the magic and the "unheimlich" (uncanny) behind the real--was revealed" (53).

The link to magic realism in art seems much closer to the Surrealists, who were interested in expressing repressed cultural taboos and the darker corners of the human psyche, and Guenther admits that linking magic realist art with magic realist literature is difficult since Roh's words have been twisted, and "few definitive answers can be found; gaps and conjecture, however, abound" (57).

Regardless, applying art criticism to the literature of the fantastic, magic realism, and postmodernist texts that would come later in the century can be fruitful. Consider this quote from Alfred Döblin: "Art comes from not 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" (41).

This formulation speaks directly to Brian McHale's main thesis in his Postmodernist Fiction, that the identifying characteristic of the postmodern text is that the ontological (ways of being) is foregrounded, whereas modernism foregrounded the epistemological (ways of knowing). This again brings up the question of the relation of the magical realist text within postmodernism, and whether all or only select magical realist texts could be considered sufficiently "postmodern."