Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The stories and poems in my Sundance and Butch writing (on this blog, the story “Vergissmeinnicht”, here; some history of the project, plus the poems, in “Sundance is an angel when he flies”, here; other stories gradually accumulating on my X blog, with some links here) have been characterized by some readers as “magic realism”, alluding to a modernist literary style most famously associated with Jorge Luis Borges and characterized by (among other things) fantastical content, a baroque layering of elements, multiple planes of reality, metadiscourse, and withholding of explanations about the disconcerting fictional world (Wikipedia entry here). (This characterization isn’t always complimentary, since many people feel that magic realism is passé. Nevertheless, I embrace it.)

Then there’s magic realism in visual art — the use of fantastical or surreal elements to depict realistic scenes — which is where I came across it first, in the work of American painter Jack Frankfurter, though Edward Hopper is a much more familiar artist in this vein, and Paul Cadmus also fits to some extent.

Cadmus’s fantastical-realistic (and frankly homoerotic) The Fleet’s In! of 1934:

Frankfurter, whose work, situated mostly in Baroque Rome (where he has lived and worked since the ’50s), also has a strong homoerotic undercurrent, was born in Vienna in 1929 but grew up and was educated in the United States (website, with tons of paintings reproduced but little other information, here). I got to know his work through Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, who in turn got to know him in Rome during her junior year (1957-58) in France. For some years, Jack sent us announcements, gorgeously illustrated, of his exhibitions.

Three samples of his work — utterly different in tone from Cadmus’s, full of mystical elements, heavy in symbolic and sculptural phallicity, with figures of boys and young men that are suggestive but not openly carnal.

He’s still painting.

This entry was posted on March 28, 2011 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Art/lit/music/film, Gender and sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.