Magical Realism in art and literature
On the side of art, the magical elements that the artists choose to put into their work often stands out with a less understated vibrancy than in its literary counterparts, yet the fantastical aspects are still present in many of them. Franz Radziwill (1895 ‐ 1983), was a German artist who studied architecture formally and studied the human figure closely. Turning to art prior to the war, his experiences during the war came out in his art on his return to Germany in 1919. Many of his works, allowed in the state of Weimar Germany and by his membership of Freie Secession , took on elements of both realism and fantasy, with great landscapes displaying apocalyptic skies and unnatural coloration, and his portraits and still life paintings incorporating not only his understanding of the human figure, but also his vibrant imagination. Conversation about a Paragraph (1929) displays two nude young women on a bed,
in perpendicular positions faced in opposite directions. While all of the elements of Radziwill’s painting are plucked from the real world, what sets the work apart as a work of Magical Realism is the element in the centre of the paining: the small angel that flies out of a hole in the wall. The angel, similar to those prevalent in Christian artwork, appears to be surrounded by faint clouds, as if it were from another world. This introduction of a piece of religious symbolism as a physical manifestation in an otherwise wholly realistic world setting aligns it with the trope of Fantastical Elements
that has previously been set out. In a similar vein, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907 ‐ 1954) used her suffering and mental torment, both through her constant struggles with injuries sustained in a car accident in 1925 and polio as a child, as well as her flawed relationships with the artist Diego Rivera, to
create her artworks, as well as a large influence fromMexican folklore. After months in hospitals and the ordeals of many surgeries, Kahlo painted the self-portrait The Broken Column (1944). In it, we see the visage of Kahlo herself, in her personal style, nude from the waist up, wearing a corset like brace. However, the fantastical element in the image is the replacement of her own spine with a crumbing and broken ionic column. Hinting at not only her fervent femininity, but also her broken nature as a person due to her battles with illness and injury, Kahlo’s realistic style combined with the fantastical approach to human nature create a piece of Magical Realism that applies itself to the genre as a whole. While admittedly a superficial aspect to the
idea of Magical Realism, fantastical elements are by no means unimportant, and the addition of an aspect of fantasy into and otherwise completely real world is inherent to the genre. As they apply to both literature and art, and often are born from similar traditional ideas, the additions of fantastical elements allow the two sides of the genre to be considered the same thing. The next trope lends itself more naturally to the literary genre. Authorial reticence requires a narrator to withhold information and elements to lend itself to a logical order of events and to be ostensibly indifferent towards the seemingly supernatural events taking place. Franz Kafka, the acclaimed German author of the early 20 th century, was an author very capable of this trait. In his 1913 short story Being Unhappy, the narrator is visited by a ghost of a boy, and responds as if he has just seen a visiting
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