Horror show

‘It is disastrous to name ourselves!’ So Willem de Kooning responded when some of his New York painter buddies elected to call themselves ‘abstract expressionists’. He had a point. Labels for movements — such as pop art, impressionism and baroque — are almost always misleading and seldom invented by the artists themselves. That was certainly the case with the idiom examined in a little exhibition at Tate Modern, Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33.

Actually, this rather heterogeneous assortment of painters has two tags. In 1925, a critic named Franz Roh came up with a nice phrase, magischer Realismus, which was later borrowed to refer to various writers, including Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, whose work has absolutely nothing to do with Germany in the 1920s. Simultaneously a curator, Gustav Hartlaub, dubbed more or less the same sort of stuff Neue Sachlichkeit, or the new objectivity — another term which caught on.