 French magical realist Pierre Roy, who worked and showed successfully in the US, is cited as having "helped spread Franz Roh's formulations" to the United States.When art critic Franz Roh applied the term "magic realism" to visual art in 1925, he was designating a style of visual art that brings extreme realism to the depiction of mundane subject matter, revealing an "interior" mystery, rather than imposing external, overtly magical features onto this everyday reality.Roh explains,

We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world that celebrates the mundane.