Matthew Gale

Katy Wan

This elegant publication draws upon the German and Austrian paintings of the George Economou Collection to explore the vibrant art of magic realism. The term is today comonly associated with the twentieth-century literature of Latin America, but it was first coined (alongside the phrase `post- expressionism') by the German artist and critic Franz Roh in 1926, to describe a shift from the spiritual and anxious art of the Expressionist era, towards something more directly located in actuality. Magic realism can be seen as parallel to, and overlapping with, Neue Sachlichkeit (or `new objectivity'), a movement associated with the likes of Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad. As the term implies, the movement encompassed aspects of the visionary beyond the objective. Beyond the studios of those painters `returning' to realism, lay connections with a dispassionate photographic style as well as realism and satire in literature and theatre, cabaret and cinema.0The Weimar era was a period not only of staggering financial instability, but also of extraordinary artistic creativity. Extreme political and economic conditions seemingly firing imaginative production in the context of mass protests and the rise of popular, public entertainments.00Exhibition: Tate Modern, London, UK (June 2018-June 2019).

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