21 February 1890 – 30 December 1965, was a German art historian, art critic, photographer, and collage artist. He studied philosophy, literature, history, and art history in Leipzig, Berlin, and Basel, and worked from 1916 to 1919 as an assistant to Heinrich Wölfflin at the University of Munich. He received his doctorate in 1920 with a dissertation on seventeenth-century Dutch painting and subsequently taught modern painting in Munich.

During the early 1920s he began exhibiting photographic collages and wrote art criticism for journals such as Der Cicerone and Das Kunstblatt, bringing him into close contact with contemporary artists including George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Willi Baumeister, and Max Ernst. In 1925 he published Post-Expressionism – Magic Realism: Problems of the Most Recent European Painting, introducing the term “Magic Realism” into art discourse.

Photography played a central role in his theoretical work. In connection with the 1929 Werkbund exhibition Film und Foto, he published the photobook Foto-Auge, an influential contribution to the understanding of modern photography and visual perception.

In 1933 he was dismissed from his university position and imprisoned for several months in Dachau concentration camp because of his support for modern art. Although he was able to resume publishing in 1940, much of his work from this period appeared only after 1945. After the war he wrote for the Munich-based Neue Zeitung and for Radio Munich, resumed teaching in 1948, and became the first president of the German section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

From the 1950s onward he published major studies on modern German art and on art under National Socialism. His own collages, produced since the early 1920s, were first exhibited in solo shows in 1961 and 1963. A collage novel assembled in his final years was published posthumously.

Reference
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition. Retrieved February 8, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Roh