Magical Realism Painting and Writing The term Magical Realism describes an artistic style of painting and writing. In these paintings and novels the composer "weaves, in an ever-evolving pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements" (Abrams). Some of the writers of Magical Realism are said to be Gabriel Garcia Marques in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany and John Fowls in England. Understanding the history and theory of Magical Realism will help clarify the meaning of the term. No one can truly say who coined the phrase 'Magic Realism', but some say that "in 1925 to advocate a new direction in painting, Franz Roh originated the term Magical Realism to characterize this painting's return to Realism after the more abstract of Expressionism" (Zamora and Faris 15). This art style was also first used after World War I. Franz Roh initially called this new style of painting Post-Expressionism, but later changed it to Magical Realism because he knew that the work "had to have a name that meant something, and the word 'post-expressionism' indicated only ancestry and chronological relationship " (Roh). Roh says he uses the word 'magic' instead of 'mystical' because "the mystery does not descend into the represented world, but rather lurks and palpates behind it." Around the same time that Roh invented the term Magical Realism, a museum director named Gustav Hartlaub called this new artistic style New Objectivity. The word New Objectivity took Roh's title for the artistic style until 1960, when it was used to describe the artistic style of that time in art history. Angel Flores may claim to have coined the term "Magical Realism" in 1935 after reading Jorge Luis Borges' book A Universal History of Infamy, but in reality he was the first to name books and not just paintings. sometimes deciding what is Magical Realism and what is not, but there are many features within Magical Realism that help us decide what it is. One of the characteristics is that "we recognize this world, even if now - not only because we have emerged from a dream - we look at it with new eyes" (Roh). The artist achieves this characteristic "with the fusion of reality and fantasy" (Leal). However, in Magical Realism both the reader and the characters in the novel must accept the unreal as real.