Magical Realism, New Objectivity, and the Return of Representation: A Reevaluation

2025 marks the 100th anniversary of two key commentaries on interwar painting and the broader “return of representation” in modernism: the book Post-Expressionism: Magical Realism, by Franz Roh, and the exhibition New Objectivity, curated by Gustav Hartlaub at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Targeting a small, if stylistically diverse, subset of post-Expressionist realism—from the socially critical portraiture of Otto Dix to the placid still lifes of Alexander Kanoldt—the titular terms quickly outgrew their immediate contexts. Hartlaub’s term found wide application in the late 1920s, eventually characterizing a certain “sobriety” in other art forms; since the 1927 translation of Roh’s book into Spanish, its subtitle, “Magical Realism,” has likewise expanded, applying to Hispanophone and other forms of art and literature. More recently, a surge of academic and curatorial interest in these movements has occasioned genealogies of figurative aesthetics overall, prompted in part by new waves of representational painting.

Building on such efforts, this panel seeks to gather new approaches to Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and modernist realism. We seek papers that work both immanently—by attending to the conditions that structured Hartlaub’s and Roh’s claims—and expansively, by tracking the afterlife of each term within the art of Europe and Latin America. Contributions might also address the development of fascist and socialist aesthetics among these milieux, dialectics of documentary and fantasy, caricature and typology, and the longue durée of figurative aesthetics into today. Assessing these formations and their (overlooked) signal texts alongside their wide receptions will both clarify and reactivate them at this centennial moment.