During the Nazi regime, he was isolated and briefly put in jail for his book Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye); he used his jail time he used to write the book Der Verkannte Künstler: Geschichte und Theorie des kulturellen Mißverstehens ("The unrecognized artist: history and theory of cultural misunderstanding").
But, though the lineage is direct, his magic realism has a very different meaning from the one used to describe the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende that dominates our current understanding of the term.
Roh, celebrating the post-expressionist return of the visual arts to figural representation, utilized the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to emphasize that "the autonomy of the objective world around us was once more to be enjoyed; the wonder of matter that could crystallize into objects was to be seen anew.
Roh himself, writing in the 1950s and perhaps already seeing the confusion his term had caused in this regard, emphasized that his use of the word magic was, "of course not in the religious-psychological sense of ethnology.
"[2] Roh's magic realism, though not often written about in recent years, is nonetheless an important contribution to a phenomenological or existential theory of aesthetics.