As is well known, the term ‘magical realism’ was first applied to the visual arts in 1925, when the German art critic Franz Roh used it to describe a group of painters whom we now categorize generally as Post-Expressionists. The term had been coined more than a century earlier by the German Romantic philosopher Novalis to describe an idealized philosophical protagonist capable of integrating ordinary phenomena and magical meanings. Novalis may have been Roh's source for the term, given certain marked similarities in their arguments, most particularly in their refusal of the either/or structures of instrumental reason and their shared emphasis on the complementarity of opposites. Besides Novalis, there was the great art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, with whom Roh studied in Munich between 1915 and 1919. Wölfflin was the first to define the Baroque as an artistic style, a salient feature of which was its manipulation of antitheses. According to Wölfflin, the play of contradictions is inherent in Baroque aesthetics, whether in the tension between nature and artifice, sensuality and spirit, absence and abundance, surface and depth or, I am tempted to add, magic and real. It seems to me likely that both Novalis and Wölfflin informed Roh's conception of magical realism, but my focus here at the outset will be on Roh, because it was he who served as the conduit between the European uses of the term and its Latin American literary revisions.

In a work entitled Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei, published in German in 1925, Roh offered the term ‘magical realism’ to describe (and celebrate) the Post-Expressionists’ return to realism after a decade or more of abstraction. In the preface to the expanded Spanishlanguage book based on Roh's essay, published two years later by José Ortega y Gasset's influential Revista de Occidente with the terms of the title tellingly reversed,5 Roh again emphasized these painters’ realistic engagement of the ‘everyday’, the ‘commonplace’. He wrote that ‘with the word “magic” as opposed to “mystic”, I wish to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it’.