ABSTRACT
Franz Roh was born in Thuringia, Germany, and studied philosophy, art history, and literature before embarking on his doctoral thesis on Dutch art under Heinrich Wolfflin at the University of Munich. With clear links to later twentieth-century avant-garde experiments in film and ethnography, this chapter explores Roh’s ideas against the preceding artistic movement of Expressionism, and the coterminous emergence of Neue Sachlichkeit – which was popularised through Gustav Hartlaub’s exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit.Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus at the Kunsthalle in the summer of 1925, which eventually eclipsed Magischer Realismus as an art historical term. Emblematic of the confusion in Nach-Expressionismus is Roh’s insistence on Max Ernst’s place in it. Hieronymous Bosch and Ernst are drawn together in their perceived commitment to the bizarre in times of trauma and upheaval, while something of de Chirico’s cool classicism pervades in the statue-like figure, the flattened, stuck-on body parts, and the still landscape.
