Magic realism (or magical realism) is an artistic genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting. As used today the term is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous.

The term was initially used by German art critic Franz Roh to describe painting which demonstrated an altered reality, but was later used by Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri to describe the work of certain Latin American writers.

The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (a friend of Uslar-Pietri) used the term "lo real maravilloso" (roughly "marvelous reality") in the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of this World (1949). Carpentier's conception was of a kind of heightened reality in which elements of the miraculous could appear while seeming forced and unnatural. Carpentier's work was a key influence on the writers of the European "boom" that emerged in the 1960s.

History

The term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit. It was later used to describe the unusual realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1940s and 1950s. It should be noted though that unlike the term's use in literature, in art it is describing paintings that do not include anything fantastic or magical, but are rather extremely realistic and often mundane.

The term was first revived and applied to the realm of fiction as a combination of the fantastic and the realistic in the 1960s by a Venezuelan essayist and critic Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who applied it to a very specific South American genre, influenced by the blend of realism and fantasy in Mário de Andrade's influential 1928 novel Macunaíma. However, the term itself came in vogue only after Nobel prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias used the expression to define the style of his novels.

The term gained popularity with the rise of such authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Ernst Jünger and Salman Rushdie and many Latin American writers, most notably Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, Juan Rulfo, Dias Gomes and Gabriel García Márquez, who confessed, "My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." Mexican author Laura Esquivel also wrote in this vein when she penned Like Water for Chocolate. The book, which sold three million copies worldwide, was later made into a film. Upon its release in the United States, it became the highest grossing foreign film in U.S. history. The most widely read of the South American magical realism narratives is García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Today, magical realism is broadly used, to characterize all realistic fictions with an eerie, otherworldly component, such as the tales of Edgar Allan Poe or the American television series Twin Peaks, or realistic fictions where magic is simply an overt theme in the narrative, such as The Stepford Wives, Harry Potter, or The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Elements

Contains fantastical elements.
The fantastic elements may be intrinsically plausible but are never explained.
Characters accept rather than question the logic of the magical element.
Exhibits a richness of sensory details.
Uses symbols and imagery extensively.
Emotions and the sexuality of the human as a social construct are often developed in great detail.
Distorts time so that it is cyclical or so that it appears absent. Another technique is to collapse time in order to create a setting in which the present repeats or resembles the past.
Inverts cause and effect, for instance a character may suffer before a tragedy occurs.
Incorporates legend or folklore.
Presents events from multiple standpoints - ie. alternates detached with involved narrative voice; likewise, often shifts between characters' viewpoints and internal narration on shared relationships or memories.
Mirrors past against present; astral against physical planes; or characters one against another. Open-ended conclusion leaves the reader to determine whether the magical and/or the mundane rendering of the plot is more truthful or in accord with the world as it is.
Owns differing properties of magic and realism at the same time, while incorporating the two together often seamlessly.

Visual Art

Magic realism is a style of visual art which brings extreme realism to the depiction of mundane subject matter.

In painting, magical realism is a term often used interchangeably with post-expressionism. In 1925, art critic Franz Roh used this term to describe painting which 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.

Other important aspects of magical realist painting, according to Roh, include:

A return to mundane 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.

Artists

Artists associated with magic realism include:

Ivan Albright
Paul Cadmus
Philip Evergood
Pedro Ipiña
George Tooker
Michael Parkes
Carel Willink
Alex Colville
Wim Schumacher