Which German art critic coined the term "magic realism" in 1925?

The German art critic who coined the term “magic realism” in 1925 was Franz Roh.

Roh introduced the German phrase “magischer Realismus” in his 1925 book Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei, usually translated as Post-Expressionism: Magical Realism: Problems of the Newest European Painting. He used it to describe a post-Expressionist approach to visual art.

For Roh, the “magic” did not mean depicting supernatural events. He was interested in the uncanny strangeness of ordinary objects when rendered with sharp detail, smooth surfaces, and almost photographic clarity. His ideas were closely associated with the German New Objectivity movement, which reacted against Expressionism’s distortions.

The term later travelled into literary criticism, especially through Spanish translations and discussions in Latin America. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez helped give magical realism its modern literary meaning, in which extraordinary events are presented matter-of-factly within an otherwise recognizable world. That later usage differs from Roh’s original focus on painting.