German artist, critic, and art historian Franz Roh (1890-1965) was born in present-day Thuringia and studied at universities in Leipzig, Berlin, Basel, and Munich, where he received his Ph.D. in 1920 for work on Dutch paintings of the 17th century. In 1925, he published his landmark book Nach Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (Post-Expressionism: Magical Realism: Problems of Recent European Painting), for which he is credited with having coined the term “magical realism.”
In 1929, Roh and graphic designer Jan Tschichold co-published and co-edited the book Foto-Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit (Photo-Eye: 76 Photos of the Times) to accompany the exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart. The book showcased work from the world’s leading modernist artists and photographers, including Max Ernst, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Dziga Vertov, Edward Weston, and El Lissitzky, whose now-famous self-portrait was chosen for the cover.
Roh had experienced the Goldene Zwanziger (Golden Twenties) of Weimar Germany and became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime as it gained power in the 1930s. During the war, Roh was banned from working and was briefly jailed by government censors due to the progressive nature of Foto-Auge. While in jail, he wrote the book Der Verkannte Künstler: Geschichte und Theorie des kulturellen Mißverstehens (The Unrecognized Artist: History and Theory of Cultural Misunderstanding").
In 1946, Roh was awarded a professorship at the University of Munich, a position he held for the rest of his life. Art historian Lucy Watling of the Tate writes that Roh “came to play a key role in the country’s intellectual rehabilitation after the war, publishing widely on German art until his death in 1965.” Today, his work can be found in the collections of, among many other public and private institutions, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Tate, London; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which recognizes him as “one of the chief theoreticians of the New Vision…Franz Roh advocated photography's abstraction of the real world into flat black-and-white forms as a way to revolutionize one's perspective on the world.”
