Magic realism was a distinctly American twentieth century genre in the sense that it constituted a unique merger of European surrealism of the 1920s and ’30s, with the long tradition of realist painting in the United States.
The movement grew out of the work of stateside artists, such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, Jared French, Z. Vanessa Helder, Pasquale “Patsy” Santo, Francis Colburn, Luigi Lucioni, and Pavel Tchelitchew, who adopted the technical refinements of European artists like Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy, and applied them to homegrown visual explorations—from William H. Harnett’s trompel’oeil imagery to the polished compositions of Thomas Eakins and the gritty subject matter favored by Ashcan school artists like John Sloan and William Glackens. Within this group’s experimentations, a genre emerged.
The magic realists often used dream imagery, but in general, unlike their European counterparts, they were not engaged in an exploration of the unconscious or psychosexual analysis. Instead, they aimed to find the transcendental attributes of everyday people, places, and things. They sought to discover and reveal in their works an inherent spiritual quality within the mundane. In 1943 Alfred J. Barr, the Museum of Modern Art’s first director and curator of Realism and Magic Realism, defined magic realism as “the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions.”
This year, the Bennington Museum presents Green Mountain Magic: Uncanny Realism in Vermont, organized by museum director Jamie Franklin. The exhibition features major works by sixteen artists whose works are often associated with magic realism and who had a special and close relationship with the state of Vermont. One of the exhibition’s highlights, the fantastical portrait The Vermonter (If Life Were Life There Would Be No Death) by Chicago native Ivan Albright, shows why he is often dubbed the “Master of the Macabre.” With astounding and unnerving anatomical detail, this meticulously painted portrait underscores the fragility of the human body. Albright’s technical prowess in paintings like The Vermonter, the most significant large-scale oil portrait from his Vermont years (beginning in the late 1960s), has its own kind of specialized beauty in its rendering of decay and the ravages of time.
In such works, the artist would spend an entire day working on one square inch of the composition. Also well represented in the exhibition are works by Cadmus and French, who were part of the collaborative called PaJaMa. The group (so named for the artists’ first names, in addition to that of Margaret French) often summered in Hartland, Vermont, and created photos that became highly influential in later years as pioneering images of queer identity. A superlative example of Cadmus’s work, Shells and Figure, is another of the exhibition’s highlights. Here, a nude male figure reclines in the sand between two outlandish, towering broken seashells that have washed up on shore.
At once incongruous and unabashedly romantic, Cadmus’s painting somehow delivers a plausible and convincing ode to the sea. The haunting works by George Tooker, a close associate of the PaJaMa group, are also well represented in the exhibition. His Sleepers (1963) and Table II show dreamlike, ethereal personages engaged in quiet dramas. His Half-Dozen Eggs (Carton of Eggs) of 1963, filled with multicolor eggs, is a veiled endorsement of racial integration, still a controversial subject at the time. In many ways this work serves as an example of the subtle and elliptical ways in which the works of the magic realists often comment on public and private concerns of the day.
Patsy Santo and Vanessa Helder, who worked extensively in Vermont, could convey a spiritual quality in the everyday in their paintings. In Santo’s Spring (1940), a depopulated rural village scene holds mystery and intrigue in its shadows and empty spaces. Similarly, Helder’s watercolor, Putney-Down by the Dam (1943), imparts a feeling of the uncanny and disquiet in its intense light and deep shadows that define a majestic tree at the center of a village square. By contrast, Luigi Lucioni’s Autumn Echoes (1952), a still life of a white ceramic duck and a single brown oak leaf, offers a bit of quiet reflection and meditative calm.
Magical realism was also an important literary movement in both the US and Latin America. A special section of the exhibition is devoted to the work of Bennington author Shirley Jackson (1916–1965), a master of gothic fiction, renowned for her haunting short stories, such as “The Lottery” and novels like The Haunting of Hill House.
Displays of her manuscripts and a range of documentary material celebrate her brief career and towering achievement.
— David Ebony
Green Mountain Magic: Uncanny Realism in Vermont • BenningtonMuseum, Vermont • to November 2 •
benningtonmuseum.org
