Art critic Franz Roh applied the term magischer Realismus or “Magic Realism” to visual art in 1925. He said, “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 … it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world.” Aspects of Magic 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; and a use of miniature details even in expansive paintings, such as large landscapes. The movement grew out of the German style of painting called “Neue Sachlichkeit” or “New Objectivity,” a reaction to pre-WWI Expressionist styles of European art. The work was figurative and focused on “strange, haunting and satirical imagery that reflected the changes going on in modern society” (Rosie Lesso, thecollector.com). Max Beckmann was a proponent of this style. The term Magic Realism was also influenced by the art of the Greek Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. The style featured accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, and the portrayal of the “magical” nature of the rational world. It also reflected the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment. Exaggerated lighting created strange, uncanny visual effects (Lesso). This was common in de Chirico’s painting and later, in the work of Edward Hopper, who painted scenes from ordinary American life “with strong angles, crisp light and deep shadows, showing how these effects can add an eerie sense of unease and cinematic narrative to his paintings” (Lesso). Artists from the Northern European Renaissance also influenced the Magic Realists. Jan van Eyck, whose hyper-real attention to detail and heightened colors created unsettling visual effects, and Hieronymus Bosch, who painted all manner of strange worlds and haunting creatures, also impacted these artists (Lesso). In 1918, Russian literary theorist, critic, and writer Viktor Shklovsky wrote “Art as Device; Theory of Prose” in which he discussed “the estrangement of familiar objects” as a means to overturn the familiar or cliché in art: “And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious.’ The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant.” Magic Realism was one way artists used the “devices” of art to make the real seem strange.
Surrealism and Magic Realism were strongly related. However, Magic Realism was distinct from Surrealism, due to its focus on material objects and the actual existence of things in the world, as opposed to Surrealism’s more abstract, psychological, and subconscious reality. According to Lesso, both movements featured work with strange, dream-like or nightmarish content. “But where the Surrealists were generally more drawn to ideas around dreams and the inner workings of the unconscious mind, artists associated with Magical Realism were more interested in drawing out qualities that were already inherent in reality.” It is important to note that some Magical Realist artists saw themselves as surrealists also. Magic Realism was later used to describe the uncanny realism of American painters such as Ivan Albright, Peter Blume, Paul Cadmus, Gray Roy, George Tooker, and Brian Connelly during the 1940s and 1950s.
he term Magical Realism (as opposed to Magic Realism) first emerged in 1955 in an essay on Spanish American fiction by Angel Flores. Magical Realism was defined as the portrayal of fantastical events in an otherwise realistic tone. The existence of fantastic elements in the everyday world provides the basis for Magical Realism. Magical events are presented as ordinary occurrences; therefore, the reader/viewer accepts the marvelous as normal and common. There is the presentation of multiple planes of reality. As I stated earlier, Magical Realism differs from Surrealism; Surrealism explores the imagination and the mind, and attempts to express the subconscious, unconscious, the repressed and inexpressible. Magical Realism rarely presents the extraordinary in the form of a dream or a psychological experience (although some Magical Realists were interested in presenting the contents of their dreams in their work). “To do so, takes the magic of recognizable material reality and places it into the little understood world of the imagination. The ordinariness of magical realism’s magic relies on its accepted and unquestioned position in tangible and material reality” (Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism. New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 22-24). In the 1940s and 1950s, American painters were called Magical Realists; a link between these artists and the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s was explicitly made in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “American Realists and Magic Realists.”
In the early 1940s, the Wisconsin Magical Realists stormed onto the state’s art scene. Painters John Wilde (1919-2006), Karl Priebe (1914-1976), Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977), Marshall Glasier (1902-1988), and Dudley Huppler (1917-1988), among others, formed an artistic community that spanned Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago. They established creative partnerships and friendships. They painted fantastical depictions of the Midwest—eerie, and also playful--which "questioned society’s relationship to nature and the quirks of American life” (Milwaukee Art Museum). They explored themes of self-representation, the landscape, and the life of objects (MAM). The Wisconsin Magical Realists were opposed to the realist regionalism—American Scene Painting—of John Steuart Curry who was an artist in residence at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
John Wilde also taught at Madison for over 35 years. He was a leader in the American Surrealist movement (toryfolliard.com). According to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wilde’s art is a “modern extension of traditional realist styles. His meticulous drawing and candid portrayals of the human figure are suggestive of fifteenth-century Flemish and Italian Renaissance art. The element of fantasy in his art also joins him to older northern European traditions. His renderings, however, of living forms that do not seem drawn from nature and his illogical juxtapositions of objects place him within the context of Surrealism and Magic Realism, whose incongruous dream worlds he admires. His art of improbable situations nonetheless explores the most traditional of themes in Western art: love and death.” His works feature self-portraits set within fantastical, imaginative landscapes, memento mori still lifes, hyper-realistic nudes, realistic dream sequences, and Renaissance-inspired paintings.
Karl Priebe was another artist who was a part of the Wisconsin Magical Realist group. According to Alan Rosenberg, he was “invariably described as a fantasist. The strange moods and odd juxtapositions of people, animals and objects in his paintings bring his art into alignment with the surrealism of Salvador Dalí, the neo-romanticism of Christian Berard, the magic realism of Frida Kahlo and the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico. All of those labels are at least partly applicable to Priebe and similarly describe the works of the artists he was close with, aesthetically, geographically and personally, and with whom he formed a small but compelling circle of Midwest artists working in the marvelous mode” (karlpriebe.com). Priebe graduated from the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee and the Art Institute of Chicago. He taught art at the Wabash Street Negro Settlement in Chicago; he worked for four years as a research ethnologist in the anthropology department of the Milwaukee Public Museum; and from 1943-44 he was curator and then director of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan. Priebe exhibited at the prestigious Perls Galleries in New York in 1943 when he was 28 years old. His subject matter remained consistent throughout his career: exotic animals and birds, magical landscapes, and pictures and portraits of African Americans. The artist had numerous African American friends, students, and intimates who appear in his paintings, “transformed by fantastic guise, amusing themselves in improbable settings” (Rosenberg, karlpriebe.com). Priebe had many notable collectors, and his 1947 painting Miss Chalfont hangs in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.
Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977), the subject of a retrospective exhibition of her painting at the Milwaukee Art Museum, was based in Chicago but was part of the Magical Realist group that included Wilde and Priebe. Called the “Queen of Chicago,” she was a leading figure of the Chicago Hyde Park art and social scene in the mid-20th century. She was also involved in the Chicago jazz scene and was friends with many musicians and artists, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughn. Abercrombie claimed that music inspired her work. Gillespie described her as “the first bop artist. Bop in the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it to another art form.” Influenced by European Surrealism and an admirer of René Magritte, Abercrombie said “Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it. It is almost pretty real. Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All foolishness has been taken out. It becomes my own dream” (quoted from the Art Institute of Chicago). The artist painted self-portraits, “enigmatic paintings of stark interiors and illusory landscapes” (AIC). Her approach was grounded in realism and dreams, not “ersatz Surrealist dreams” (Eric Crosby, “Pictures of Her,” in Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery, New York: Delmonico Books, 2025, p.11). Her art was deeply personal, and she often painted objects she identified with herself. “Some of these like brooms, hats, and cats were associated with a witch’s persona, which she sometimes embraced in her own dress” (AIC). “I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace. I like and like to paint simple things that are a little strange. My work comes directly from my inner consciousness and it must come easily. It is a process of selection and reduction.”
The David Barnett Gallery is pleased to offer several works that could be argued to be inspired by Surrealism and Magical Realism. Apart from our classic Surrealist collection of artists like Dalí, Miró, Masson, and Magritte, the gallery offers works by many contemporary artists who work in a fantastical vein. One of these artists is the Uruguayan painter, sculptor, and printmaker Ignacio Iturria. In Que Alivio (What a Relief), a silkscreen from 1996-98, Iturria creates the strange within the familiar. With a murky brown palette that recalls the muddy Rio de la Plata in his home city of Montevideo, the artist fashions a common brown sofa but inserts tiny figures into the composition. On the left side of the sofa a diminutive figure sits on a miniature sofa soaking his feet in a basin. He must be the person who says, “what a relief.” This scene of domestic banality is interrupted, however, by clawing brown figures who seem to be coming out of the sofa above the sitting figure. Upon closer inspection, other oddities emanate from the large couch. Edward M. Gomez argues that Iturria creates “a surreal … world that is part Fellini and part Bacon” (“Arts Abroad; Uruguayan Artist Creating on a Broader Canvas,” The New York Times, April 14, 1998).
Cynthia Torroll, a Milwaukee-based artist, creates her own strange and tantalizing fantasies with a hyper-realistic attention to detail, collage elements, and the addition of the strange and the familiar. In the graphite drawing Timor Servilis (2010), Torroll presents a beautiful woman sprouting antlers. Both Sides Now (2011) shows two sides of a woman’s face, perhaps indicating a duality in humanity (one face appears to be crying). The artist said “I have always been fascinated by the human state—the odd duality of being both physical and ephemeral simultaneously. This is my core inspiration and obsession.” More recent mixed media works such as Love is Everything (2024) and Bloodlines (2022), are complex and have collage-like elements, juxtaposing the realistic and the fantastic. Like the Surrealists, Torroll’s images present the fantastic and the real with equal precision, causing the viewer to no longer be able to rely on his/her eyes for cues to what is real. This creates a destabilizing and unsettling feeling.
These are just two contemporary artists whose work follows in the footsteps of the Magical Realists and the Surrealists. You can see works by other artists, such as David Barnett, Della Wells, Reginald K. Gee, Karen Hoepting, Michael Knigin, Marvin Hill, Wilfredo Lam, Molly McKee, and Dan Mitchelll Allison at the David Barnett Gallery. Open yourself to the fabulous, the fantastic, the sur-real. As Gertrude Abercrombie said: “The whole world is a mystery.”
By Jennifer McCormick