Franz Roh, Magic Realist

Total Panic, 1937Franz Roh, by Lucia Moholy 1926Unlike the sometimes brashly coloured collages cut from modern magazines today, the images Franz Roh (1890–1965) created are masterful subtleties in warm greys and olive. Somehow this restrained palette lends a more disturbing air to his compositions. Inspired by Max Ernst’s Surrealist collages, Roh pasted together nineteenth-century engravings, excising them from the stolid gravity of the middle-class and casting them into an avant-garde world of whimsy.

Roh was a German art historian and critic of avant-garde film and photography. He began his career as a freelance writer and art critic, and when the Nazis forbade him to continue this work, with the encouragement of László Hoholy-Nagy, he turned to experimental photography.

Orchid Thief, 1935He Handles the Clay-Toned Boat, 1945Bride of the Winds, 1930Loathing photography that was simply representational, he often used a combination of techniques, such as multiple and negative printing, collage and photograms to create his fantastic and sometimes disturbing imagery.

It was he who coined the term ‘magic realism’ in a different sense from today’s accepted literary usage: referring to art style the New Objectivity. In his terminology, Magic Realism was related to Surrealism, though in distinct difference, it focussed on the object and its actual existence in this world, rather than the subconscious reality that the Surrealists explored.

After the war, Roh resumed his critical and academic career, and only publicised his photographic work near the end of his life. They still manage to surprise and fascinate today.

Strange Ark, 1930The Isolation of the Narzisms