Rene Magritte

BY TODD ALDEN
 U.S.A. $12.95
Canada $16.95

THE ESSENTIAL RENE MAGRITTE

by Todd Alden

The Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte is

a master of optical illusion. His influence

on pop culture is felt everywhere —from
advertising and corporate logos, to consumer
products and design. Magritte s paintings
are witty and easy to enter, but their eerie
calm can be unnerving and leave us with
a feeling of Let's get out of^herei'We end up
wondering if what we're looking at is what

we're supposed to be seeing.

Here's the story behind Magritte's:

Shrouded lovers kissing

Trains roaring out of fireplaces

Bowler-hatted men floating through

the air

Giant apples that fill entire rooms

Pipes that aren't pipes... or are they?

On the jacket:
Rene Magritte. The Treason of Images ("This is Not a
Pipe") (detail), 1929.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Giraudon/
Art Resource, NY
66 illustrations, including 54 plates in full color
 *«£!*£

Rene Magritte
BY TODD ALDEN

the Wonderland
PRESS

Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers

 the Wonderland
PRESS
The Essential™ is a trademark
of The Wonderland Press, New York
The Essential™ series has been created by The Wonderland Press

Series Producer: John Campbell

Series Editor: Julia Moore
Project Manager: Adrienne Moucheraud
Series Design: The Wonderland Press

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-074612

ISBN 0-8362-1936-8 (Andrews McMeel)
ISBN 0-8109-5803-1 (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.)

Copyright ©1999 The Wonderland Press

All works of Rene Magritte © 1999 Succession Rene Magritte
C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain ©
1999 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/The Estate of Marcel Duchamp

Published in 1999 by Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, New York

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may
be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher

Distributed by Andrews McMeel Publishing

Kansas City, Missouri 64111-7701

Unless caption notes otherwise, works are oil on canvas

Printed in Hong Kong

Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

H 100 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10011
www.abramsbooks.com
Contents

Who is/was/is Magritte? 5

Quiet little boy? 13

Momma exits 15
Dada enters 24
Bowler hats, Sir! 31

Jockeying for position 34

Everything clicks: 1926 36
Not-so-gay Paris! 37
Poetic effect: in the mirror, darkly 41

Hooded figures play with fear 50

Magritte from A to Z 52
Words and pictures 60
This is not a pipe (is it)? 62
Surrealist hanky-panky 69
Time for a commercial break 72
Bottles, sunshine, and cows 82
Paintings wrapped in paintings 94
The godfather of Pop? 102

The last word 108

The False Mirror
OPPOSITE
Imagine this: You're out for a walk one afternoon and you notice the The Rape. 1934
.73 x 54"
powder-blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. Suddenly it feels like Qg 4 x^ cm \
midnight, even though it's only 3:00 PM, and when you look up, there,
hanging above you —oh jeez! — is a 20-ton boulder with a castle on top
of it! Hundreds of bowler- hatted men float through the air, accompanied
by a band of flaming tubas. Let s get out of here! You race back to your
house, screaming for help... and there's a 600-lb. green apple in your

living room! You streak down the hall and are sideswiped by a train

charging out of the fireplace. What's going on here?

Welcome to the world of Rene Magritte. You recognize the apple, the
bowler-hatted men, the train, and the massive boulder. But why are

these familiar objects in such unfamiliar places?

Rene Magritte (1898-1967) is not a household name, as is his fame-

obsessed fellow Surrealist, Salvador Dali (1904-1989), but almost
everyone has seen Magritte's uncanny, strangely familiar images.
Many of us recognize Magritte not through his art but through the
presence of his images in ads used to sell virtually everything from

compact discs to credit cards. In 1952, the CBS television network

transformed Magritte's False Mirror (on the next page) into the eye of
its still- recognizable corporate logo, and imitators have followed suit
 TOP
CBS Eye
Logo by William
Golden for CBS
Television
1952

BOTTOM
The False Mirror
1928
21 74x3178"
(54 x 80.9 cm)

>f Modern An. Newl

ever since. But if, to paraphrase the artist, this is not the essence of
Rene Magritte, then who is the essential Magritte?

The Enchanted Domain

This book will help you look squarely into the Belgian Surrealist's

idiosyncratic eyes and penetrate to the unique vision that makes him
the most accessible and durable of all the Surrealist painters.

Magritte's appeal is relevant and universal because his dreams have the

power to awaken the viewer to the silent splendor of the real world and
to its enduring mystery. So, for a few moments, trash your television
and throw away your credit cards, and let's explore Magritte's secret

passage into an enchanted domain.

Who was Rene Magritte?

Magritte was a deeply private man, and when he did speak about his past,

he was often provocative, cryptic, and befuddling, as in his art. Some

artists, such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Dali, lead "glamorous"
lives that fill pages of popular magazines; but others —such as Rene
Magritte and Edward Hopper (1882-1967) —connect with their viewers

almost exclusively on the canvas. Its their work, not their life, that

grips us and changes the way we view the world. So let's find out who
Magritte was, then have fun with his work so that the next time you're
in a museum, you'll know more about Magritte than anyone there.
 —

What gives in his Paintings?

The great thing about Magritte is that his paintings draw us in. They
puzzle and intrigue us, but they also disturb us. Whether they're

"words-and-images" paintings or painted bottles or gouaches {gouache

is an opaque, water-based paint often used to make studies for larger
works on canvas; it is easier to manipulate than oil paint) or collages (a

form of art where various materials not normally associated with each
other, such as newspaper clippings, bits of thread, theater tickets, etc.,

are pasted onto a single surface) or the dozens of oil paintings that

form the bulk of his oeuvre, Magritte's works are puzzles —enigmas
that invite multiple interpretations.

Unlike Surrealists who delved into the murky realms of the uncon-

scious, Magritte sought to create lucid images. Put off by the inter-

pretation of his paintings as dreams, he pointed out in his many writ-

ings that his paintings —unlike those of other Surrealists —were clear

and accessible. He consciously crafted an intellectual world of "dreams

that are not intended to make you sleep but to wake you up." Even his

titles reinforce the enigmatic quality of his paintings: Magritte's friends

were mostly poets and he would often sit around with them, making a

Surrealist game of inventing titles that were more poetic than "explana-
tory" — thus, the titles reflect his affinity to poetry rather than to

descriptive captions and usually have nothing to do with the physical

subject of the painting.
ABOVE
Magritte behind
Signature in Blank
1965
Duane Michals (New York)

LEFT
Signature in Blank
1965
31 7
Ax25 A"5

(81 x 65 cm)
 The Man with the Bowler Hat

Magritte preferred a suit, a collared shirt, and a tie to the usual paint-

OPPOSITE splattered smock adopted by artist-bohemians. For most of his life, he

The Schoolmaster lived in a middle-class household in Brussels, Belgium (bourgeois
1955
capital of Europe), painting in his living room rather than renting an

art studio. Yet Magritte defied conventionality at every turn. A man

of many guises, he was a painter, writer, thinker, chess player, graphic
designer, ad-man, magazine editor, Charlie Chaplin-lover, occasional

Communist, anti-Fascist, infrequent traveler, classical music buff, and

avid pulp mystery reader.

But who is this man in the bowler hat, really? Rene-Francois-

Ghislain Magritte is born on November 21, 1898 fa Scorpio!) in a

white, one-story house in Lessines, Belgium, a homesite now occupied

by a red-brick freight building. The eldest of three brothers — the other

two being Raymond (1900-1970) and Paul (1902-1975)— Rene is

baptized into a lower-middle-class Catholic family, the son of

Leopold Magritte, a hardworking tailor, and of Regina Bertin-
champ (c. 1870-1912), a milliner.

Sound Byte:

"It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to true life.

—ANDRE BRETON, in the first Surrealist Manifesto

 Magritte's Scrapbook: Missing Memories
When Magritte is about a year old, his family moves
from Lessines to the small Belgian town of Gilly. (For
unexplained reasons, the family will move often for the
next eleven or twelve years. This may account for the
missing photos, which no one has ever explained.) It is

in Gilly that Magritte experiences the first of a series

of bizarre childhood events that later produce vivid

memories, a subject in which the Surrealists take great
interest. After a large hot-air balloon unexpectedly
crashes onto his rooftop, two balloonists, dressed in

leather and helmets, suddenly appear before him in the

stairwell of his house, dragging a deflated balloon down

the stairs. This surreal encounter imbues Magritte for
the first time, he later recalls, with "the sensation of

mystery." (The Magrittes move out shortly thereafter.)

Aside from a few such snippets of childhood memories,

Magritte, on the
right,with his two Magritte has little to say about his early years. The truth
younger brothers
is, the secretive artist does not like to talk about the
Paul and Raymond
c. 1905
troubled aspects of his childhood. Here, though, are a
few additional snapshots of Magritte's first ten years:

He lives in various Belgian towns where the working

 population consists largely of steelworkers, miners,
and glass-factory workers. In 1904, the family
moves to Chatelet.

He uses a pen name, "Renghis, Detective" (a short-

ening of his Christian name: ifoze-Francois-G^wlain),

in his first written works, detective stories. Clearly

the young Magritte already has a penchant for

disguise. (The stories subsequently disappear, never

to be published.)

He spends his vacations with his grandmother and

Aunt Flora at Soignies (no two places in tiny Belgium

are far apart). Portrait. 1923

17 x 14 7/'
He likes to dress up as a priest, holding mock masses (43 x 36 cm)
in earnest before a self-made altar (and presumably Private Collection
Art Resource, NY
finding mystery in the Roman Catholic ritual).

Quiet Boy, or.. .Curmudgeon Next Door?

In 1910, at the age of 12, Magritte attends his first

painting classes, which are held on Sunday mornings

above a candy store in Chatelet. As the only boy in the

class (or as Magritte puts it, "the sole representative of

male humanity in the ad hoc studio"), he is, well, like a

i3
kid in a candy store, studying painting as well as the fine art of umbrella-

stand decoration.

Sound Byte:
"I detest my past and anyone elses. I detest resignation, patience, professional

heroism, and obligatory beautifulfeelings. I also detest the decorative arts,

folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts,

the smell of mothballs, events of the moment, and drunken people."

—Magritte

Most accounts of Magritte's childhood say nothing about his early

temperament, other than to suggest that he was a quiet boy. There are

indications that his family might have been dysfunctional and that,

if indeed he was a quiet boy, then at least a part of him was already a
curmudgeon, as revealed by his later attraction to "systematic provoca-

tion." Though it is rarely mentioned, his mother suffers from depression.

As a youngster, Magritte delights in neighborhood pranksterism, such

as hanging cats on the doorbells of respectable citizens. Belgium's old-

fashioned pull cords allow you to do this without hurting the feline too
much: You merely wrap the pull cord around the cat's legs, causing the

bell to ring and ring and ring when the cat wriggles.

'4
For Reasons that Remain Unexplained...

One of the most disturbing events of Magritte's life occurs on

February 24, 1912. His depressed mother throws herself off a bridge
into the Sambre River in the middle of the night. (It is not her first

suicide attempt.) According to Magritte's handpicked historians,

Rene and his two brothers, upon noticing her absence, set out to look
for Regina in the dark of the Belgian night. It is said that the brothers

discover her almost completely naked corpse with her wet nightdress

pulled up over her face like a shroud. The truth, however, is that her

body is missing almost three weeks before it is discovered on March

12, when she is found with her nightdress pulled above her head.
Later in life, Magritte makes the rather unbelievable statement that it

is impossible to say whether his mother's death had any influence on

him or not. One does not have to believe in Freudian psychoanalysis

(as the Surrealist Magritte, curiously, did not) to challenge his wishy-

washy denial of the extent of the impact of his mother's death. The
fact of her suicide —not to mention seeing her naked body — must have
had an unspeakably traumatic effect on his 14-year-old psyche.

A Morbid Result

The big question is: How much did her suicide influence Magritte's art?
Since Magritte refused to talk about it or admit to its impact, it's

difficult to know. It is important to respect the complexity of the

 Surrealist's aesthetic intentions and to resist the temptation —which
some critics do not — to regard this event as the master key that opens
all the locks to Magritte's psychic vault or, worse yet, that explains the

symbolic order of his paintings. (With Magritte's "hooded figures,"

which we'll get to, it is hard to disagree entirely with the critics.) Let's

say this: We won't be in over our heads if we suggest that Regina's

suicide and the discovery of her half-naked body are the most con-
spicuous influences on the formation of the sensitive Magritte's identity.

FYI: Morbida — Magritte recalls that the suicide brought him some

schoolhouse notoriety with schoolmates, who anointed him "the boy

whose mother killed herself." Magritte loved to play in graveyards as a

child and nurtured a keen fascination for the morbid — an interest that is

evident in his motifs of fragmented body parts, female corpses, coffins,

gravestones, and the like. Check out The Balcony of Manet on page 59.

M agntte at An Age of Anxiety

age 16
In 1913, the Magrittes move to Charleroi, where, in the absence of his

depressed mother, Magritte is raised by his grandmother and a governess.

In 1914, three months before he turns 16, the Germans occupy

Belgium for the first time. After the invasion, the Magrittes move back
to their home in Chatelet. Two years later, in 1916, Magritte begins

16
 The Symmetry
Trick.1928
21 74x28 Y/'
(53.55 x 72.45 cm;
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

his first serious artistic study at the prestigious Academie des Beaux-
Arts (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Brussels. But art school's
conventional classes on aesthetics and history leave him bored, and

there are indications that he cuts classes at the Academy. What does
conventional beauty matter when your mother is dead, your country is

occupied, and the most brutal war in history is well under way? For

Magritte, the choice is fairly obvious.

 BACKTRACK: After a number of moves between Brussels and
WORLD WAR I (July 28, 1914
Chatelet, Magritte remains in Brussels in April 1917
to November 11, 1918)
and proceeds to paint his first commercial poster, an
The times they were
advertisement for Pot au Feu Derbaix, which is released
a-changin', and fast. The
nightmare of WW I brought
in 1918. By 1919, he is publishing drawings in the

Europe four turbulent years journal Au Volant, and in early 1920, he exhibits his
of bloody conflict — and poster designs at the Centre d'Art, founded by his
unprecedented social and
friends Victor and Pierre Bourgeois.
political upheaval after it

was over. WWI was the first

Two influences on Magritte 's early painting are Cubism
"modern" war, and it brought
atrocities previously unimagin-
(the movement co-developed in France from 1907-14
able. Machine guns, tanks, air by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in which natural
raids, gas and trench warfare forms are reduced to their geometric equivalents) and
left millions of people dead,
Futurism (a literary and artistic movement developed
senselessly. In France, ten
percent of the active pop- in Italy from 1910-16 by the artists and poets Umberto
ulation was lost. Mutilated Boccioni, Filippo Marinetti, and Gino Severini that
survivors, saved by modern expresses violence, power, speed, mechanization, and
medicine, became highly
hostility to the past and to traditional forms of
visible reminders of the horror
and displacement brought expression, and replaces the old forms with the "new
on by the war. It was not beauty" of machines and, especially, motion).
a pretty picture.

He dabbles in the other -isms of avant-garde art, too,

but it's not essential to get into the nitty-gritty

distinctions among all of them. The bottom line is that

his relation to each of these modern movements shares

 "

Sound Byte:
"In a state ofpositive intoxication, I painted a whole series of Futurist
pictures. However, Idont think I have ever been an orthodox Futurist,
because the lyricism I wanted to achieve had an unvarying center unrelated

to the artistic Futurism. It was a pure and powerfulfeeling: Eroticism.

—Magritte

the following essential characteristics:

Abstraction: He experiments with objects that appear in varying

degrees of recognizability, but that are rarely completely abstract.

Brushwork: He employs visibly loose brushwork, including the

technique of impasto (the build-up or thickening of paint on the
surface, as in Van Gogh's paintings). Contrast this early brushwork
and its thick, swirling, opaque surfaces to his later, more transparent,

lean, "polished" surfaces.

Space: Surfaces are flat, forms are unmodeled (or crudely modeled)
and lack illusionist perspective or the illusion of depth that will
appear in works after 1925.

Subject matter: Magritte sticks to the conventional subjects of

landscapes, portraits, and nudes.

19
Love Comes to Town: 1920

Things start to look up for Magritte in 1920. Seven years earlier, he

had met Georgette Berger (1901-1986), his future wife, on a carousel

at the Charleroi town fair. Now, in 1920, he runs into her by chance
in the botanical gardens in Brussels, where he has moved a couple of
years earlier. The 19-year-old Georgette, a bourgeoise at heart (her
later taste in home furnishings, Magritte admits, is typically middle
class), is a strikingly beautiful, artsy teen who works at the Cooperative
Artistique with her sister. The day of this chance meeting, Magritte
is accompanied by his longtime friend and the future Surrealist
impresario, E. L.T. Mesens (1903-1970), whose interest in avant-garde

music and composition will bring him (and later Magritte) into contact

with the Paris Surrealists. (Magritte had first met Mesens in 1920
when the latter was giving piano lessons to Magritte s brother Paul.)

Unlike the French Surrealists, the Belgian Surrealists do not shy away
from the pleasures of music.

FYI: Magritte and Music — Magritte's taste in music is generally not

avant-garde, (nor did he like jazz), but rather middlebrow. His modest

record collection includes works by Bach, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart,

Beethoven, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky. After their marriage, the Magrittes

rarely attend public concerts, but Georgette sometimes plays for Rene

on their baby grand piano.

2
In the Army: 1921-22

Having spent a detested ten months in the army in

1921 in Brussels, Antwerp, Leopoldsburg, and at a

camp near Aachen, Germany, Magritte paints little

during this year besides a few portraits of officers. Once

free from army obligations, he and Georgette marry on
June 28, 1922 in Brussels, where they will remain for
the rest of their lives, except for three years in Paris. In

summer 1922, they move into a rented apartment for

which Magritte designs much of the furniture. (The

groom is an excellent carpenter.)

FYI: Georgette will serve as the model for most of Magritte and
Georgette at the
Magritte's paintings of women, usually nude. Although time of their
she may seem idealized in the paintings, she in fact marriage, 1922

possesses a radiant, movie-star beauty. Georgette and

Rene have no children (Georgette will keep canaries

and the couple will share a Pomeranian named Loulou)

and remain deeply devoted to each other, inseparable

even, until Magritte's death.

Magritte supports himself during these lean years, first

by taking a job in late 1921 as a wallpaper designer at

 a

the Peters-Lacroix wallpaper factory, then, after finding the factory

"as unbearable as the barracks," by "doing idiotic jobs: posters and

publicity designs." OPPOSITE
The Castle in
1959
the Pyrenees.
Magritte's Magical Mystery Tour
79 x 55"
(31.35x21.83 cm)
Magritte is not, as it is often said, a painter of slumbering dreams. His

are eye-opening visions, lucid dreams that plumb the depths of the
invisible while exploring the world of hidden and concealed things —
world, Magritte felt, that most people do not see because they are

unwilling to open their eyes. Magritte's dreams seek to wake up and

provoke the viewer's disturbing secrets, and to issue an invitation (to

those who dare) to enter an enchanted domain, to discover a nether-

world of mystery.

Sound Byte:
"The word dream is often misused concerning my painting. We certainly

wish the realm of dreams to be respectable

—but our works are not oneiric

[about dreams]. On the contrary. If dreams' are concerned in this context,

they are very differentfrom those we have while sleeping. It is a question

of self-willed dreams'— dreams' that are not intended to make you sleep,

"
but to wake you up.
—Magritte

23
Understanding Magritte is sometimes difficult because he intention-
ally frustrates stable, rational thought. A paradox-loving master of
contradiction, Magritte is the Confucius of Confusion. We really start
to get Magritte when (1) we accept that his images are constructed like

a hall of mirrors that have no fixed, anchored meaning; and (2) when
we begin to hear the silence of his world and start to feel the mystery
of the unknown.

Smells like Dada Spirit: Writing and Publishing

As you've probably guessed by now, Magritte is known as a Surrealist

painter. But before Surrealism becomes the major force in his work,

he is influenced by the Dada movement, to which he is introduced

by his friend E. L. T. Mesens around 1923. It is Mesens who has

connections to the Paris Dadaists (the core of whom establish the

Surrealist movement), whom Mesens meets through the avant-garde

composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). Through this connection, Magritte
and Mesens contribute some witty aphorisms in 1924 to the last issue

of the important Dada review, 391. The publishing activities of the

Paris Dadaists and Surrealists inspire them to cofound Oesophage, a

late Dada-esque review, in 1925, followed by Marie, "a bimonthly
paper for beautiful people" (of which only three issues are published).
Shortly thereafter, Mesens and Magritte join poets Paul Nouge
(1895-1967) and Marcel Lecomte (1900-1966) and art dealer Camille
Goemans (1900-1960), director of the first gallery in Paris to show

24
Surrealist painting, in a venture to publish yet another monthly review,
Correspondence. Most of these men will become a part of Magritte's life-

long circle of friends.

From the ruins of Dada, Magritte and his pals give birth to Belgian

Surrealism in late 1926, an occasion that is heralded by three collectively

signed texts. Even more than the Dadaists, the Surrealists are passionate

about publishing reviews and 'zines. These forms allow them to distribute

their message of shock, and later of revolution, in a made-for-the-masses

format. Magritte takes from Dada its provocative attitude and absurdist,

anticonventional spirit. This unorthodox spirit will flow through his veins,

and thus his art, for the rest of his life.

Sound Byte:
"
"The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.
—Tristan Tzara, poet

Poetic Painting

Dada and Surrealism do not find expression in Magritte's painting until

1925, after Magritte falls under the spell of Max Ernst, and especially of
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). If Dada's rejection of traditional

painting contributes to Magritte's revolutionary attitude, then it is

25
 DADA & SURREALISM

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain. 1917

Porcelain plumbing fixture and enamel paint, 24 Vs" high (62.23 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Dada was a movement of artists and poets in the early 1920s — first in Zurich, then later in Paris,

Berlin, New York, and elsewhere —who revolted against traditional forms of art, such as easel
painting. While mocking the technological "advances" of a smug bourgeoisie, the Dadaists
produced "anti-art" that focused more on what it was not than on what it was. Using provoca-
tion as a deliberate aesthetic strategy, they protested against bourgeois values and against
the turbulent disorder brought about by World War I. is a good
Marcel Duchamp's Fountain
example ofDada art: It's a men's urinal signed, spuriously, "R. Mutt." Major Dada figures included
artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), poet Paul Eluard (1895-1952), photographer Man Ray
(1890-1976), and poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963).

26
The literary and artistic movement of Surrealism began in about 1922 in Paris as an outgrowth
of Dada. Led by the French poet and theorist Andre Breton (1 896 -1 966), the Surrealists pur-

sued the "true functioning of the mind" (Breton's words) by lodging a "lawsuit against reality."

All the Surrealist leaders — Breton, Eluard, and novelist Louis Aragon (1897-1982) among
others —were twenty-something poets and veterans of World War who had been profoundly
I

affected by the war; all had been members of the French Dada group until 1922. The seeds of
Surrealist revolt and its distrust of rationalism were sown during the age of anxiety, World War
I. Surrealism was a more grown-up version of Dada protest that sought to provoke in order to
build a new social and aesthetic order. Surrealism turned away from Dada's largely negative

aesthetics and tone in favor of a more positive search for "the new society."

The Surrealists sought to unleash the instincts and impulses of the unconscious mind by means
of automatic writing and painting (which Breton called pure psychic automatism), whereby the
artist bypasses his/her conscious willpower and lets unconscious impulses guide the hand in

matters of line, color, and structure, without rational or planned "interference." The movement
was more suited to writers than to artists, since the free flow of impulses could be channeled
more quickly onto the page than onto a canvas. Besides Magritte and Duchamp, major
Surrealists included artists Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), Max Ernst (1891-1976),
and film director Luis Bunuel (1900-1983).

Historians generally give Surrealism a shelf life of 1 924-47, the period between World War I and
World War II. Breton presided as the Surrealists' controversial chief spokesman in a sometimes
dictatorial style, organizing exhibitions and promoting Surrealist invention internationally until

his death. In 1924, he wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto—-the declaration that formally initiat-

ed the Surrealist movement — pledging allegiance to "the superior reality of certain forms of
association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of
thought." Breton's purpose was also ethical: He believed that if people could wake up to their

unconscious thoughts and to the world of the imagination, they could change their lives and the
world, too. The first person to use the word Surrealism was the French poet and art critic
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) in a short program note written in 1917 for Diaghilev's
production of the ballet Parade, a production whose collaborators included composer Erik
Satie, choreographer Leonide Massine (1896-1979), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who

designed the set and costumes. Surrealism found expression not only in painting, but in 'zines

and reviews, photography, and, most importantly (the Surrealists hoped), in everyday life.

27
 BACKTRACK:
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
(1888-1978)

Italian painter of illusionistic

"metaphysical landscapes"
that juxtapose the classical
world with contemporary
motifs. In The Song of
Love (1914), for example,
the head of a classical
statue hangs next to a
modern surgeon's rubber
glove, nailed to a wall.
De Chirico's work looks
Surrealistic because of such
pairings of incongruous
elements and his discom-
bobulated use of perspec-
tive. He is not, however, a

Surrealist. De Chirico falls

deeply out of favor with

the core Surrealists after
he turns to academic
painting; but Magritte's
admiration never falters.

He sometimes refers to the

Italian simply as "Chirico."

The Museum o) Modern \... V» York he Museum of Modern \n. New York
m \ Roc kefellei Bi i

© 1999 The Museum ol Modern to.NewYork

 " "

de Chirico who gives Magritte "triumphant poetry, a new vision

through which the spectator might recognize his own isolation and hear
the silence of the world." By his own account, Magritte is moved to

tears when, in 1925, a friend shows him de Chirico's painting, The

Song of Love.

Sound Byte:

"Afriend then showed me a reproduction of his painting, The Song of Love,

which I always consider to be a work by the greatest painter of our time in

the sense that it deals with poetry s ascendancy over painting. Chirico was
the first to dream of what must be painted and not how to paint.

—Magritte

De Chirico's influence on Magritte leads him to focus on poetic

content in his paintings (the juxtaposition of the incongruous, for
OPPOSITE
example) instead of on painting's formal problems. It also moves him Giorgio de Chirico
to adopt de Chirico's illusionistic style and to depict recognizable The Song of Love

objects. Magritte s use of this illusionistic style goes against the ~q 3/ 7

y\
fashionable trends in modern painting, which, from the teens until (73 x 59.1 cm)
Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s, emphasize the evolving
languages of abstraction. (Jackson Pollock said, Ifyou want to see aface,

go look at a face) It is not until the rise of Pop Art in the 1960s that
there is a full-fledged return to the object (think Andy Warhol's

Campbell's Soup Cans) and that fashion catches up with Magritte.

29
Surrealism is an Enigma Wrapped in a Riddle

Okay, by now you get the point: Surrealism can be bewildering stuff,

a kind of enigma wrapped in a riddle. Magritte and the Surrealists OPPOSITE

love games, and we're rewarded if we let ourselves play with the The Domain of
Arnheim. 1962
limits of the visible and the knowable. But we must always remember
57 72 x 44 7s"
that it's the haunted, enchanted domain of mystery that interests (145 x113 cm)
Magritte. His magical mystery tour is dying to take us away. Ready?

Bowler Hats Everywhere

Magritte, the man, is a walking contradiction: While deliberately and

systematically provoking scandal in his works, he seeks to remain

inconspicuous in his everyday appearances. For Magritte, the bowler

hat that he wears until his death — a symbol of the bourgeois
Everyman — is reminiscent of the mask worn by his favorite pulp novel
anti-hero, Fantomas. It is a prop that conceals his identity beneath the
guise of everyday life.

Sound Byte:
"He is a secret agent. His object is to bring into disrepute the whole apparatus

of bourgeois reality. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and

"
behaving like everyone else.

—GEORGE MEALLY, scriptwriter for the film

"Rene Magritte, Middle-Class Magician" (1965)

The Masterpiece,
or The Mysteries
of the Horizon
1955

Courtesj Christie's [mages

Although tempting, it is inappropriate to equate the bowler-hatted

men in Magritte's paintings with the artist himself, even though, like

Magritte, the bowler-hatted man's face is almost always turned away

from the viewer, his thoughts forever unknown to us. Observer of the
world, he is a modern version of the solitary Romantic poet, contem-

plative and in tune with the silence of the world. By turning the man
away from us, Magritte invites the viewer to wear the subject's hat, to
identify with his gaze upon the mysteries of the horizon, and to create

the image and meaning that are generated by our own imagination.

32
 "

Sound Byte:

"[Magritte] leads, ifI may say so, the most bourgeois kind oj
doesnt necessarily imply a rowdy, tempestuous existence. It is possible to be

a Surrealist even when one pays ones taxes and obeys the traffic regulations.

—CAMILLE GOEMANS, art dealer

For his entire career, Magritte fills his paintings with men wearing
bowler hats, which are commonplace, essential accessories in every
middle-class gentleman's wardrobe of the 1920s and 1930s. But the
bowler becomes old-fashioned as time passes. It has come to serve as a

trademark, however, of Magritte's mythic presence, just as the blond

wig has for Andy Warhol.

A Transitional Year: 1925

Magritte's first breakthrough comes in 1925 with The Window (see

page 34), which he describes as his "first painting." It is, in fact, very de

Chirico and shows Magritte beginning to abandon abstraction in favor

of de Chirico's illusionistic style, as well as painting "objects only with
their visible details." What is fresh and interesting about this work,
comparatively speaking, is its odd juxtaposition of a severed hand and
a fluttering bird. Notice also the abstract elements —the colorful

33
 triangular sphere, for example — that typically appear in paintings dur-

ing this transitional year. Though he has almost achieved the full

Surrealist voice that will last an entire career, Magritte is not quite
^^ there. He paints 60 some canvases (not including collages and draw-
ings) in the years 1925-26. Although he states that "in the art of
painting, as I perceive it, technique plays only an incidental role," the

truth is that Magritte is not yet the skillful painter he will become by

The Window
mid-1928. His earliest works — many of them painted at the rate of

1925. 25x20" one a day —show his inexperience, as with the loosely modeled figures
(63 x 50 cm) (e.g., the hand in The Window) that appear amateurish in comparison
Private Collection.
Gir.uidon/Art Resource, NY with the strongly focused images of his later, more "polished" pictures.

It's not until 1926 that he makes what he considers his first successful

Surrealist work, The Lost Jockey.

Sound Byte:
"So I decided, around 1925, thatfrom then on, I would only paint objects
"
with all their visible details.
—Magritte

The Lost Jockey

The Lost Jockey —shown in the collage version here — is, in Magritte s

eyes, his first "successful" Surrealist work, since its gains power from a

poetic idea rather than from technical virtuosity. It is in this work that

J4
The Lost Jockey
1926
Gouache collage
15 l
h
x 21 Vi"
(39.3 x 54 cm)
Magritte discovers a sense of mystery and the unknown, and he will
return to the theme of The Lost Jockey many times throughout his

career. Pasted on top of the paper's surface are bizarre shapes cut out
of sheet music that resemble a combination of forms, such as chess

pieces and the legs of a table turned upside down, creating a bizarre
unity of incongruous elements. (Like Marcel Duchamp, the godfather

of Dada and Surrealism, Magritte is passionate about chess, though

not as skilled at it as Duchamp.) One of the lyrics in the collage reads

"Sprechen sie Deutsch, mein Herr?" ("Do you speak German, Sir?"). Lost
along with the jockey, the viewer is struck with that eerie sensation

aroused by so many of Magritte's subsequent pictures: Lets scram!

FYI: Collage — Surrealists loved creating collages. Although Magritte

does not make a large number of collages during his career — he produces
a dozen or so between 1925 and 1927 and a sporadic smattering there-

after —what is important is his use of the principle of collage, the idea

of cutting up familiar forms, juxtaposing or rearranging them in a new,

mysterious way, a principle that characterizes virtually his entire output

of paintings.

Suddenly Everything Clicks: 1926

In 1926, Magritte signs a contract with the foremost art impresario of

Brussels, P.-G. Van Hecke (1887-1977), that guarantees the purchase

j6
of his output. This vote of confidence and the financial stability it

represents redoubles Magritte's sense of purpose. From here on, he hits

his stride. During the four years (1926-30) that Magritte is under
contract to Van Hecke, he produces 280 oil paintings — a quarter of his
lifetime output in this medium, averaging about one work every six

days. While Magritte is creating at this extraordinary rate, Van Hecke

attempts to build a market for his art, but has only occasional success.

Au Revoir, Brussels. ...Hello Paris!

Magritte gets his first one-artist exhibition in 1927 with Van Hecke at

Galerie Le Centaure, Brussels. The critical response to his 49 oil

paintings and dozen collages is mostly hostile. But this does not deter
him and Georgette from packing their bags and taking a shot at the

big time — Paris —headquarters of the Surrealists.

In September 1927, the Magrittes rent a fifth-floor apartment at 101,

avenue de Rosny in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, just east of Paris. His

brother Paul joins them, renting an apartment nearby and singing in

neighborhood piano bars.

The year 1928 is a tumultuous but prolific one for Magritte, who
produces more than 100 paintings (most of which are not exhibited
until years later). It is also the year in which:

His father dies on August 24th of a stroke back home in Brussels.

37
J8
 THE MENACED ASSASSIN, 1926
59 'A x6'4 Vs" (150.4 x 195.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kay Sage Tanguy Fund. Photograph © 1999 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Menaced Assassin is one of Magritte's first masterpieces.

Narrative: Two virtually identical-looking men wearing bowler hats (the device of "doubling")
lie in wait for the killer with a limblike club and a net. Meanwhile, three other identical-looking
men (doubling again) spy through the window at the killer, who has turned his back on the
naked, bloody body of his victim, a woman lying on a sofa. The killer's hat, his coat (casually

draped over a chair), and a valise suggest a disguise, or imminent getaway. But why is the killer

listening to the Gramophone with such apparent detachment? (Wouldn't you love to know what
song he is listening to?) Will he escape? Are the menacing pursuers really after the assassin or is

this an imaginary scene depicting the killer's inner conflict?

Light: The bright light cast upon the killer and his pursuers contrasts with the dark, sinister (not
to mention erotic and necrophilic) undertones of this painting: Like the notion of the "uncanny"
itself (see text on page 41), Magritte sheds light (literally and figuratively) on some things that
we might prefer had remained hidden.

Confinement: Magritte's composition of receding planes (walls in the foreground and back-
ground) intensifies and focuses the drama of confinement and entrapment.

Effect: Like a morbid Rorschach test, Magritte invites the viewer to make up the story for him-
self, leaving us without answers. Narrative uncertainty —which Magritte plays upon so expertly
and so often — pushes us into the disquieting domain of fear and dread.
Pop culture: Magritte's sources of inspiration are often drawn from popular culture. The
Menaced Assassin is highly reminiscent of Fantomas, a popular series of French pulp crime novels
that feature a popular anti-hero, Fantomas (see page 40), whose criminal hijinks Magritte and
other Surrealists hold in the highest regard. A man of infinite disguises, Fantomas always man-
ages to outwit the police, invariably escaping at the last possible moment and freeing himself
from the most precarious situations.
 RIGHT
The Return of
the Flame. 1943
25 V< x 19 Vs"
(65 x 50 cm)
Private Collection
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

FAR RIGHT

TOP
Magritte in 1938
with The Savage
(painted in 1928,
but since
destroyed). The
painting was
inspired by
Fantomas: Magritte expresses his fascination with the character of Fantomas
Magritte's love of
in numerous paintings, although the pictorial references are almost always
pulp thriller novels.
altered in some way. One exception is The Return of the Flame, in which
BOTTOM Magritte more or less copies a Fantomas novel's dust jacket featuring the
Fantomas book character of the same name. Magritte is so fascinated by this character that,
jacket, 1912
in 1928, he publishes his own dramatic scenario of a Fantomas encounter in

a Belgian Surrealist review. Writing about Fantomas, Magritte says, ""He is

never entirely invisible. One can see his portrait through his face. When memories
pursue him, he follows his arm, which drags him away. His movements are
those of an automaton; he brushes aside any furniture or walls that are in his

way. We do not guess, and we cannot doubt his powers."

 Magritte is omitted from two major Surrealist events in the spring
of 1928: He is excluded from Andre Breton's book, Surrealism and
Painting, and from Breton's important Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.

Breton changes his mind about Magritte later in the year. When
Breton buys several of Magritte s paintings, the artist becomes a

card-carrying member of the Paris Surrealist Group.

The Search for Disturbing Poetic Effect

Magritte s "systematic search for disturbing poetic effect" bears a

striking resemblance to Sigmund Freud's investigation into the uncanny.

In a 1919 essay, Freud defines the uncanny as a realm of aesthetics that

pertains not to a theory of beauty, but rather to a theory offeeling — in

particular, to the feelings of repulsion and distress. (Forget for a minute

that Magritte is sometimes critical of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud,

who is central to the germination of Surrealist thought, has little

patience himself for the Surrealists.) "The uncanny," Freud writes, "is

that class of the terrifying that leads back to something long known to

us, once very familiar" — in other words, something that is once

hidden, but that subsequently, and disturbingly, comes to light. Sound

familiar? Freud's examples of uncanny things read like a laundry list of

Magritte's disturbing pictorial imagery: doubles, automatons, the
return of the dead, dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off
at the wrist, things that suggest "doubts whether an apparently

41
animate being is really alive, or, conversely, whether a lifeless object

might not be in fact animate." Finally, Freud notes that "an uncanny
effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between

imagination and reality." It is this concept of the uncanny that best

describes the aesthetic field and poetic operations of Magritte's
endeavors.

How does he create Optical Illusions?

This use of optical illusions (which the French call trompe Voeil) forms
the basis of Magritte's style, known as Surrealist illusionistn. He creates

optical illusions by using such pictorial techniques as perspective,

foreshortening, and modeling that try to deceive the eye into accepting

the painted image as a real image. He uses the simple method of making
the familiar unfamiliar in order to provoke surprise and invite the

unexpected. He isolates objects out of context, as with "a Louis-

Philippe table on an ice floe"; he juxtaposes elements that don't gener-

ally go together, such as a flaming tuba (see page 45); he deforms or

modifies the substance of things, such as a woman without a head or
feet that double as a pair of boots (see page 44); and he changes the
scale of objects and their usual relationship to their contexts, as with
a giant green apple that fills an entire room (see page 104V

Unlike Surrealists such as Dali, who paint seemingly incoherent dream

worlds, Magritte creates a universe that is almost always recognizable

4-
The Magician
(aka The Sorcerer)
1951. 12x17 72"

(35 x 46 cm)
 RIGHT
The Red Model
1935. Gouache on
X
paper, 19 x 22 IT
(48 x 57 cm)

OPPOSITE
The Discovery of
Fire. 1934-35
13 x 16 7/'
(33 X 41 cm)
as our own. He presents familiar objects — an apple, a window, a pipe,

a suitcase —but transforms them into something mysterious and

unfamiliar. His spaces are shallow and have simplified backgrounds.
The picture's depth is deliberately interrupted with horizontal planes

that deny the viewer a "safe distance" from the work. Inspired by the
directors of film not?', he employs bright lights and harsh shadows to
suggest the dark and sinister, or to imply the unknown and mysterious.

One of Magritte's most fascinating techniques is to crop and fragment

compositions through the use of "scissors," or the placement of an
internal frame: It's as if he inserts a framed painting into the actual
painting itself and thereby heightens the dislocation of both the object

and the viewer's perception of the image.

Sound Byte:
"Given my attention to make the most everyday objects shriek aloud, they

had to be arranged in a new order and take on a disturbing significance.

Afemale body floating above a town was a distinct improvement on the

"
angels who never appeared to me.
—Magritte

46
 The Musings of a
Solitary Walker
1926. 55x42"
(139 x 105 cm)

Only Darkness has the Power

There is an extraordinary darkness in Magritte's paintings from the

period 1926-36. One of the first appearances of a bowler-hatted man
in his paintings can be found in The Musings of a Solitary Walker. The
man faces away from the viewer, but that doesn't prevent us from see-
ing the naked body (corpse?) of an emaciated woman, her head
strangely shaven, her lips unnaturally rouged. Is she really levitating

47
 Gintudon An Resource, NY
Young Girl Eating
a Bird. 1926
l
29 /2 x 39 V."
(74.34 x 99.04 cm)
under a dark, rainy sky near a river and a bridge? How can we not
think of this picture, along with Magritte's Freudian critics, in the

powerfully dark light of his mother's suicide by drowning? Notice the

disquieting and piercingly disturbing mood and uncertain narrative.

What's going on in this painting, anyway? Is she dead or alive? And

what are we to make of the confusing title, The Musings of a Solitary

Walker?

Girl Eating a Bird

Young Girl Eating a Birdhzs the morbid, uncanny atmosphere of the

darker tales and poems by Edgar Allan Poe, whom Magritte admired
tremendously: Within sight of other birds, a clean, blonde, "proper"
girl dressed in lace rips open the body of a freshly killed bird with her

teeth. Notice:

The jarring contrast between the "civilized" girl (she's wearing lace)

and her animalistic dining manners. (Is she really chewing on the
raw flesh of a freshly killed bird?)

The background is foreshortened by a white, foglike mist.

Magrittean space is almost always shallow, close-up, and confining.

This effect confronts the viewer, denying us a safe distance.

The pictorial fragmentation: Magritte's close cropping of the

image serves to break "its ties with the rest of the world in a more

49
 or less brutal or in a more or less insidious manner" (Magritte).

Magritte s paint handling, frankly, is at times still a little rough.

Notice the almost sloppy job on the holes making up the girl's lace

or the almost clumsy way Magritte paints her hand in a flat,

unmodeled tone.

Contrast his paint handling here with that in any painting made after
mid- 1929, when the work becomes dramatically more polished. Not
surprisingly, this quality coincides with an abrupt decrease in the quantity
of his output and a temporary increase in collector interest.

Hooded Figures: 1927-30

Among his most haunting series of paintings are the hooded figures.

Produced between 1927 and 1930, they reflect his intrigue with

disguise and secrecy. In The Symmetry Trick (see page 17), a hood
conceals the top part of a naked female torso, provoking nervous

questions in the minds of the viewer, now a participant, whom

Magritte cagily has drawn into this morbid game of hide-and-seek
gone terribly wrong. What is the symbolic meaning of these truncat-
ed, hooded figures that frighten us? What, exactly, is being hidden?
Why are the otherwise postcardlike figures in The hovers covered
with those menacing hoods? Do Magritte's hooded figures redress — in

some unspeakable way — the artist's childhood trauma of seeing his

mother's wet nightdress pulled up over her dead body? We can only

50
TOP
The Lovers II
1928. 21 V2 x 29'
(54 x 73 cm)
National Library of Australia
Canberra, Australia. Giraudon
Art Resource. NY

BOTTOM
The Lovers. 1928
21 /2 x 29"
l

(54 x 73 cm)

Richard S. Zeisler Collection

New York
state with certainty that Magritte's hooded figures arouse within
us eerily disturbing feelings.

Playing with Fear

Perhaps Magritte is turning over in his grave when he hears these

questions. He always protested against any symbolic interpretation of

his paintings that might explicitly explain the poetics of mysterv. He

contrived his works so that thev would defv attempts to return them to

the realm of the rational and the knowable. In this regard, Magritte
strictly adheres to the magician's code: Never reveal the secret of your

tricks to the audience. The artist confronts us with our fears and the

difficulty we often have in facing them.

Sound Byte:
"People who look for symbolic meaningsfail to grasp the inherent poetry and
mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get

rid of it. They are afraid. By asking, 'What does it mean? they express a
"
wish that everything be understandable.
—Magritte

Poetic Strategies

During the first ten years of his mature career (1926-36), Magritte

develops most of the poetic strategies that he will rework tor the rest
of his career. From now on, he never gives us a single static image (a

tuba, for example), but always one in some state of contradiction (such
as a flaming tuba). His poetic strategy will always include two or more
features that achieve their mysterious effect through various forms of

poetic association.

Here's a menu of all the poetic strategies to which Magritte constantly

returns throughout his career. Even if you only glance at it now and
come back to it later, it's the backbone of his artistic technique and will

be useful to you in really getting Magritte's work:

Juxtaposition: He links two (or more) unrelated, everyday objects that,

combined, appear somehow strange. Example: the tuba, the valise,

and the hooded woman in The Heart of the Matter (see page 66).

Dislocation: He puts familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts to

The Flowers of
evoke a new, unexpected response and a new order of beauty.
the Abyss. 1928
Example: Sleigh bells float in the sky in The Flowers of the Abyss 16 /4 x 10 SA"
l

(41 x 21 cm)
(at right).
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

Hybridization: He combines two familiar things to make a third,

confounding one. Example: A woman's lower body is fused with a

fish's head in Collective Invention.

Metamorphosis: He "magically" transforms objects — as in fairy

tales —from one thing into another. Example: The plants in

Treasure Island are also birds.

53
Elective affinities: He juxtaposes two related objects

based on affinities or associative relationships

between them. Example: In Elective Affinities (see

pages 74-75), the painting of a giant egg inside a

bird cage, the most obvious affinity between the two
being a bird.

The play of opposites: (Okay, this is general and

incorporates some of the other sleights of hand, but

it characterizes some of Magritte's favorite traps and
snares.) Two opposite aspects are joined together

antithetically. For example, the mysterious lumines-

cence in The Dominion of Light (see page 89) is gen-
erated by an atmosphere that is both day and night.
ABOVE
Fossilization: He transforms people, animals, words, Homage to Mack
Sennett. 1937
and things into stone. Example: the stone man, lion,
29 x 21 7:"
and painting in Memory of a Voyage (at left). (73 x 54 cm)
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY
Animism: He exploits the uncertainty about
OPPOSITE
whether a "living" thing is dead, or whether an inan- Memory of a
Voyage. 1955
imate object is alive. Example: A full-breasted
63 7s x 51 7/'
blouse hangs in the closet in Homage to Mack (162.2x130.2 cm:
Sennett (above right).

Doubling: He duplicates or multiplies objects and

55
 1 •
M »• 't
(

it |t i it i
| i It it i|tt t

f
t
r
i
ft », t it f Hi i

i t 4 1 t t t

On, llou-ton. T\. I'.S. \ Giiaudoi) Art Resource

figures, sometimes in the form of a visual pun. Example: Dozens
of bowler-hatted men float across the canvas in Golconda.

Paintings within paintings: He places paintings within paintings, opposite

disrupting our familiar patterns of understanding objects, paintings, Golconda

and meaning in general. Example: In The Human Condition (see

32 x 40"
page 97), our view of the landscape beyond the window is blocked (80.7 x 100.6 cm)

by a painting that depicts the view of a landscape beyond the window.

Words and things: Perhaps Magritte's most important contribution

to art history is his use of linguistic contradiction — i.e., his use of
words that contradict or do not necessarily correspond to a desig-

nated image. The effect is to loosen the "fixed" mooring between

word and image. The classic example is the infamous text, "This is

Not a Pipe," written beneath the image of a pipe in The Treason of

Images (see page 63). Magritte's foray into the linguistic terrain

echoes the ideas of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure

(1857-1913), whose writings on the connection between language
and the thoughts underlying it paved the way to the linguistic

theories of Structuralism in the 1970s.

Change of scale: He increases (or decreases) an object's (or subject's)

size in relation to its context. Example: A giant green apple

occupies the space of virtually an entire room in The Listening

Chamber (see page 104).

57
The Seducer. 1955
95 74x116"
(38 x 46 cm)
Private Collection
Herscovici/Art Resource, NY

Simultaneism: He merges the contradictory presence of two dis-

tinct structures so that both are figured simultaneously. Example:

In The Seducer (above), the image of a schooner is shaped like a sea

vessel but is simultaneously formed by the waves of the sea.

Copying: Magritte imitates the known work of other artists

(including his own), modifying it in such a way as to render the

familiar image unfamiliar. Example: In The Balcony of Manet
(at right), he produces his variation of Manet's famous painting,
The Balcony, substituting coffins for the figures on the balcony.

^s
ABOVE
Edouard Manet
The Balcony
1868-69
66 V2 x 49 7;'
(169 x 125 cm)

The Balcony of
Manet. 1949
"
31 72x23 7 2

(80 x 60 cm)
Sound Byte:
"Surrealist thought is revolutionary because it is relentlessly hostile to all

those bourgeois ideological values that keep the world in the appalling
"
condition it is in today.

—MAGRJTTE, November 20, 1938

Words and Images

It is during Magritte's time in Paris (1927-30) that he really hits upon
one of his most important series: the "Words-and-Images" paintings.

In autumn 1927, he makes his first word-painting, The Interpretation

ofDreams, whose title refers to Sigmund Freud's most important book

of the same name. The following features are typical of Magritte's

word paintings:

The designation of familiar objects with unfamiliar, contradictory

names: For example, in The Interpretation of Dreams, the image of a
suitcase is accompanied by the word "sky" and the image of a leaf is
paired with the word "table." While this method prevails, it is not
Magritte's absolute rule. Sometimes the everyday object is desig-

nated with its familiar name: He labels the sponge with the word
"sponge."

The use of brush-script lettering typically found in a children's

primer: The words that accompany each image are written in a

6o
The Interpretation
of Dreams. 1927
15 x 21 Y/'
(38 x 55 cm)
 kind of stylized manner as taught in elementary school; this reflects
the Surrealists' interest in the innocence of childhood, in the world

of dreams, and in the disruptive promise of art.

The foggy syntax of dreams: Magritte creates an arbitrary language

in which a pipe is not always a pipe and a cigar is not always a cigar.

His statement to the viewer is: Just because you believe this to be a pipe
does not mean it is a pipe.

Sound Byte:
"
"In a painting, words are of the same substance as images.
—Magritte

This is Not a Pipe

opposite The most celebrated of paintings that incorporates words and images is,

reas
°!L°-t without a doubt, The Treason ofImages, better known by the painting's

is Not a Pipe") inscription, "This Is Not a Pipe" (Ceci. nest pas une pipe). Beneath the
1929 painted image of a pipe, the cheeky Magritte writes in the words,
"This is not a pipe." Language is employed to contradict the viewer's
(60 x 81 cm)
habitual response to images, which in this case would otherwise be to

say, "This is a pipe." The most important thing to look for in these

paintings is the way Magritte questions our understanding of the

62
J&cL n'ZbtfWbb turn ftifie,.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY
relationship between objects and images and between words and
things. Using the interplay between language and images, he seeks to

shake up our bourgeois acceptance of status quo and of the unques-

tioning importance or meaning we give to everyday objects and events.

Between October 1927 and the end of 1931, Magritte produces 42

word paintings. Although he will ultimately produce 22 more word
paintings, they are mostly variations and reworkings of ideas he estab-
lishes early on.

What is Magritte Smoking?

A little confused, we might ask: What is Magritte smoking? Fortunately,

he spells out the lessons of his paradox in an article published in La

Revolution surrealiste in 1929:

Lesson number one: "There is little connection between an object

and what represents it." Magritte attacks Platonic assumptions that
an image of a pipe is identical with the essence of the pipe. He thus

assaults our habit of saying "This is a pipe" when we see the paint-

ed image of a pipe, laying bare the arbitrary relation between the

object (in this case, a pipe) and that which represents it (the word
pipe, or the painting of a pipe).

Lesson number two: "An object never fulfills the same function as

its name or image." Here, Magritte distinguishes objects from their

64
 a

representations by reminding us that real pipes have a usefulpurpose,

while a painting of a pipe or even the word "pipe" does not —

lesson we would easily confirm if ever we tried to smoke one of
Magritte's paintings!

That Magritte returns to The Treason ofImages over and over through-

out his career testifies to the importance he places on its concepts. For

Magritte, the function of his pipe is more aesthetic than useful: He

only enjoys painting pipes, not smoking them! (He is, however, an avid
smoker of cigarettes, les noires.)

Magritte's Titles

The problematic relationship between word and image extends beyond

the 60 or so paintings in which words appear. In most cases, the titles

of Magritte's paintings complicate the interpretation of images and the

understanding of objects. Rather than making the paintings more
understandable (which titles generally do), Magritte's titles expand the
horizon of meaning and mystify the viewer in much the same way
that words do when they appear within the space of his paintings. The
misleading title of The Heart of the Matter (see page 66), for example,
points toward the opposite of the caption's narrative certitude: What
could possibly be the heart of the matter in a picture in which a tuba
and a valise are juxtaposed with the figure of a hooded woman?
Beware of Magritte's titles: They re often red herrings!

65
 The Heart of
the Matter. 1928
45 72 x 32"
(116x81 cm)
Sound Byte:

"The titles are chosen in such a way as to keep anyone from assigning my
paintings to the familiar region that habitual thought appeals to in order
"
to escape perplexity.

—Magritte

Attempting the Impossible

One of the few childhood recollections that Magritte wrote down is

his memory of having come upon a painter one day at the abandoned

cemetery in Soignies, where he liked to play It was here that Magritte

made his "discovery of painting." One afternoon, after lifting up the

iron gates and entering the underground vaults, he returned to the

light of day to find a scene that amazed him. Magritte recalled seeing
an out-of-town painter among the broken stone columns and piles of
leaves "who seemed to me to be performing magic." He noted that "the
memory of that enchanted encounter with painting oriented my
efforts in a direction having little to do with common sense."

This sense of the artist as magician is evident in Attempting the

Impossible (see page 68), Magritte s first self-portrait (though Georgette

is also the subject whom Magritte is painting). The theme is a varia-

tion on the myth of Pygmalion, who brings to life his sculpture of

67
 ABOVE
Magritte with
Attempting the
Impossible. 1928
Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia
Scala/Art Resource, NY

RIGHT
Attempting the
Impossible. 1928
46 x 32 7s"
(116x81 cm)
beloved Galatea, with Aphrodite's divine assistance. In BACKTRACK:
SIGMUND FREUD
Magritte's painting, of course, the painter himself seems
(1856-1939)
to be "gifted with superior powers" as he brings his love
If Magritte's on-and-off-again
to life.
friend, Andre Breton, is

remembered as the great

Surrealist Soap Opera popularizer and proselytizer
of Surrealism, then the true
In July 1929, Magritte's contract with his Brussels intellectual hero of Surrealism
gallery is terminated (bad news), but Goemans's sales of is Sigmund Freud, founder
of psychoanalysis and author
Magritte's paintings are on the rise (good news: collectors
of the seminal work The
are responding to Magritte's crisper and more polished Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
surfaces) and the dealer plans to show Magritte's work In Vienna, Freud pioneered the

in Paris. exploration of the neglected

realm of dreams —the uncon-
At the recommendation of Dali (whom Magritte meets scious — and of childhood sex-
uality. Magritte's ambivalence
when Dali is in Paris filming the classic Surrealist film,
toward Freud (some argue that
Un Chien andalou), the Magrittes spend the month of he rejects Freud altogether)
August with Dali at Cadaques, on the Catalonian coast makes Magritte something
of Spain, where they rent a house with other Surrealists: of an outcast among the
Surrealists, who rank Freud
Goemans and his mistress; Luis Bunuel (co-director
among the greatest of
with Dali of Un Chien andalou); the artist Joan Miro; modern thinkers.

the poet Paul Eluard and his wife, Gala. The holiday
turns into a Surrealist Soap Opera, however, when Gala
abandons her husband for Dali, whom she later marries.
Magritte's loyal friendship with Eluard has its roots in

these dog days of August.

 THE HIDDEN WOMAN, 1929
Photomontage in La Revolution surrealiste, no. 12, December 15, 1929

Thisphotomontage of the Paris Surrealist Who: The model for the woman is Georgette
Group surrounding a Magritte painting Magritte. Surrounding her is the inner circle of
appears in the important Surrealist review, the Paris Surrealist group (yes, they are all

La Revolution surrealiste men): (top row) Maxime

(No. 12), 1929. Alexandre, Andre Breton,
C^\ Luis Buhuel, Louis Aragon,
Translation of the text
rW^T'W Jean Capuenne; (second
in the painting: "I do J^ row) Salvador Dalf and Paul
not see the (woman)
fe^ Eluard; (third row) Max
hidden in the forest."
J&M
^™™
Ernst and Marcel Fournier;

What: The (fourth row) Camille

central image
is a painting by Magritte rg$ Goemans and Rene
in which the figure of a ^Lfc Magritte; (bottom row) Paul

woman substitutes for

Nouge, Georges Sadoul,
the word, as in a rebus
&i Yves Tanguy, Andre Thirion,

or children's game. The JSm Albert Valentin.

woman is

photographs of members
framed by
o Subtext one: Magritte
least for now) is a card-car-
(at

of the Surrealist group

rying member of the Paris
with their eyes closed (no
Surrealist Group.
peek-a-boo here), each
of whom is a contributor to this twelfth issue Subtext two: The sexual mystery plumbed
of La Revolution surrealiste. by Magritte and the Surrealists is definitely

male heterosexual desire.

Theme: Woman as embodiment of mystery (a

major Surrealist leitmotif) and the ineffable

dance between the visible and the invisible,

the knowable and the unknowable.

-o
Magritte exhibits in a group show (with Dali and Yves Tanguy) in
Goemans's new gallery, which has the misfortune of opening in

October 1929 —the same time as the Great Stock Market Crash. In
December, Magritte designs the cover of La Revolution surrealiste, in

which he also publishes one of his most important writings, the illus-

trated text called Words and Images. Ironically, this publication coin-

cides with Magritte's falling out with the Paris Surrealists. At a

December dinner party in Breton's apartment, Breton, a notorious

bully, asks Georgette to remove the cross she is wearing around her
neck. Magritte defends Georgette and they leave in protest. This

incident precipitates Magritte's break with the Paris Surrealist Group.

Not a Movable Feast

Magritte discovers that Paris is not always a joyous movable feast.

Goemans's gallery folds after his mistress leaves him for the gallery's

Dutch backer, thereby cutting Magritte off from his financial support.

He is turned off by many of the Surrealists' methods, such as Breton's

automatic writing (the purported capturing of unconscious thoughts in

words) and Dalf's paranoiac-critical method, finding them artificial and

premeditated. Down and out in Paris, he and Georgette pack their
valises again and return to Brussels in July 1930. His tempestuous
relationship with the Paris Surrealists will continue on and off
throughout his life.
Return to Commercial Art

To make ends meet back in Brussels, Magritte opens Studio Dongo,

an advertising and publicity firm he runs out of his backyard shed with
the business assistance of his brothers, Paul and Raymond. Although
he claims to loathe advertising, Magritte produces a significant num-
ber of posters and advertisements (cigarettes and alcohol, for example)

and creates the art for musical scores (of which some 60 are known
today). Unlike his earlier commercial work, which had been produced
for art-loving clients and in which he had taken some pride, these

designs are created for a more general public and, therefore, are con-

ceived with more compromise and less art. As Magritte puts it, "The
only problem is that, for the public, it is absolutely necessary to have

mediocre things. It is only on very rare occasions that one may hope
to have a remarkable idea accepted."

Because of these commercial art activities, Magritte's output dwindles

over the next four years (from mid- 1930 until the end of 1934) to

fewer than 50 oil paintings and 12 gouaches. Paradoxically, it is not

Magritte's advertising posters but his Surrealist paintings — his fine

art — that have exerted an unparalleled and extraordinarily pervasive

th
influence on late-20 -century advertising and popular culture.

Magritte's Politics: No to Fascism

Like many of the Surrealists, Magritte sympathizes with leftist

72
 ANTOINE Tonnys
Antoine.
Toffee
1931
Poster lithograph
4 "
10 7* x 17 /5

(26 x 45 cm)

«B«® ,v
iiL

struggles his entire

'

life.

the tide of Fascism was on the

Recall: In 1934, Hitler

rise.
Private Collection.

had assumed power and

In response, Magritte edits and
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

contributes a powerful anti-Fascist tract to the Belgian review

Documents in 1934, calling for "immediate action" against Fascist
oppression. Further, he designs propaganda posters in the late 1930s

for The Vigilance Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, the

Communist Party, and the Belgian Textile Workers Union. Plus, he

joins the Communist Party in 1945, even though he is too much of an
individualist to remain a member for long. He does, however, remain

73
 ELECTIVE AFFINITIES, 1933
16 x 13" (41 x 33 cm)
Collection E. Perier, Paris

What: Magritte invents a new method for composing images based on affinities or
associative relationships between objects —the most obvious affinity between the
cage and the egg being a bird. This discovery leads to an important change in the
direction of Magritte's work: From here on, almost all of Magritte's objects are iden-
tifiable.

Confinement: The cage and the egg are both structures of confinement. Note the
shallow, Magrittean space in which close-up planes really put the egg in the view-
er's face.

Change of scale: Magritte changes the egg's familiar relationship to its context by
dramatically enlarging it.

The artist speaks: "One night, I awoke in a room where a cage and the bird

[Georgette's canary] sleeping in it had been placed. A magnificent error caused me

to see an egg in the cage instead of the bird. I then grasped a new and astonish-
ing poetic secret, because the shock I experienced had been provoked precisely by
the affinity of two objects, the cage and the egg, whereas previously, I used to pro-
voke this shock by bringing together objects that were unrelated."

The title: The name of the painting comes from an 1809 novel by the German
Romantic writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).

74
 '

^ i\W
i

M
B!

^
\

« ,.;*•
a
sympathetic to Communism his entire life. What's more, he refuses to

lose his fairly pronounced Walloon accent (a regional dialect), since he

considers it a barometer of his own class-consciousness and of his

particular Belgian identity.

Magritte Copies Himself (and Others!)

Magritte begins to produce more paintings in 1935, encouraged by an

avid collector and by the prospect of a one-artist exhibition in New
York at the innovative Julian Levy Gallery With America in mind, he
produces several replicas and variations of earlier works, including The
Discovery of Fire and the English version of This Is Not a Pipe. (Not a

single painting from this exhibition finds a buyer, unless we count

Levy's customary purchases.)

Magritte almost never copies paintings stroke for stroke. He generally

changes the scale or varies the composition. But his willingness to

rework previous themes incites his critics to charge him with lacking

inventiveness and submitting to the demands of the market, just as

Dali and the late de Chirico were accused of doing.

Fastforward: Since the 1960s, as Magritte 's reputation continues to

rise, it is clear that his original critics didn't understand what the idio-

syncratic artist was about. Bear in mind that in Europe the dominant
art of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s was abstract art. Abstraction's

crowning achievement was Abstract Expressionism (Jackson Pollock,

76
 The Sky
(aka The Curse)
1941

Gir.uul.>n/Art Resource, NY

Willem de Kooning, et al.), with heroic canvases and free brushwork

that made Magritte's painting appear (to some critics) as small-scale,

illustrational, and, worse yet, "inartistic." Magritte was not out of step
with abstract painting; it's just that the only army he marches with is

his own!

Those dreamy, cloud-filled Skies: Magritte's

Bread & Butter

The years prior to and including World War II are financially difficult

for the Magrittes. One of the types of paintings he knocks off more

77
than a few times to earn extra money are his miniature versions of The
Sky, also entitled, delightfully, The Curse, since the cheery blue skies

and puffy clouds made him scowl. (He had already made more than a
dozen of the large-scale versions in 1929-31.) These trompe Uoeil

paintings depict dreamy white clouds floating across a blue sky, which
we might refer to now as a Magrittean sky. Like The Dominion ofLight
series, The Sky is one of the few compositions that Magritte does not
noticeably alter using his bag of Surrealist tricks, except perhaps for

cropping —hardly a technique unique to Surrealism. (Note: When

Magritte reworks pre-existing themes, he often gives all the works in

the series the same title, whether he makes the paintings in the 1930s
or 1960s. This is unusual for artists, who are expected to create origi-

nal works. Just as Magritte provokes and thumbs his nose at collectors

who value art for its uniqueness and originality at the time, he contin-
ues to befuddle art historians and art lovers over the trajectory of his

artistic "development.")

Time keeps on Slipping, Slipping, Slipping...

Magritte spends a fair amount of time in London in 1938. His first

visit — for a major Surrealism exhibition — is followed by a longer trip

for a retrospective of his own work at a gallery run by Mesens. While

staying at the home of one of his collectors, Edward F. W. James
(1907-1984), godson of King Edward VII, he paints what will become
one of his most widely reproduced images, Time Transfixed, the

78
Time Transfixed
1938
58 Vs x 39 7s"
(147 x 98.7 cm)
painting in which a steaming locomotive emerges from the mouth of
a dining-room fireplace. The train is shown, as Magritte indicates, "in
place of the usual stove-pipe," which at the time is commonly found in

London fireplaces, such as the one in James's apartment.

Although Magritte usually creates his images only after an elaborate

process of invention assisted by drawings, this image apparently comes

to him immediately. It evokes wonder and puzzlement in the viewer,

however, because even when we understand its elective affinities — its

intended associations —we are willingly transported to an enchanted

domain.

War Breaks Out

The timing of historical events outside of Magritte s control continues to

be bad for the Belgian. On the heels of good success with solo exhibitions
in New York, London, and Brussels, war breaks out in 1939. It's like a

rerun often years earlier, when the stock market crashed and Goemans's

gallery folded. To help out with their finances, Georgette begins work-

ing at the artist's supply store where Magritte buys his supplies (she

gets him a discount!) and continues to work until the mid-1950s, even
after Magritte 's commissions have increased substantially.

In response to the German occupation of Belgium in 1940, Magritte

flees to Carcassonne, in southern France, with his friend, the lawyer
and writer Louis Scutenaire (b. 1905). Curiously, Georgette stays

8o
 Homesickness
1940

behind. Given the context, his choice of the title Homesickness seems
uncharacteristically straightforward. The lion — a figure often recycled

by Magritte from his lexicon of childhood images — appears before a

suit-wearing angel that casts its gaze across what appears to be a

French bridge. Is he thinking of Georgette back home in Belgium?
Does the second German invasion of Belgium remind him of the

81
 horror and displacement that followed shortly after his

mother's death?

The Painted Bottles

After three months in Carcassonne, Magritte returns to

the deprivations of occupied Belgium, where it is

increasingly difficult to pay for art supplies, even with

the discount Georgette gets for him. Since canvas is

scarce (and therefore expensive), he earns a little extra

bread and butter by painting wine bottles on demand

for sympathetic collectors. He had painted the delight-
fully satirical Pork Beer on a beer bottle in 1937, and
now Edward James encourages him to paint more bot-
tles, suggesting that "it's New York taste exactly, and
Hollywood's too." The war prevents this market from

being exploited, however, and most of the bottles are

commissioned by local collectors or given away as gifts

to friends. About 25 painted bottles are known today,

"Pork Beer." 1937
painted mostly on Bordeaux and Burgundy bottles.
Painted bottle
(77.5 x 35 x 19.3 cm) Some incorporate reworkings of Magrittean themes

Coll. Christine Brachot, Brussels such as the trademark cloud-and-sky motif and the fly-
Belgium. Her.
Resource, NY
ing bird in a mysterious sky (the image later adopted as

the logo of Sabena Airlines) —whereas others, like Pork

Beer, are unique motifs. The most frequent subject of

the painted bottles is a nude woman whose body shape fol-

lows the contours of the bottle. (Some of these are titled

Woman-bottle.) The bottles now sell at auction for hun-

dreds of thousands of dollars.

Breaking with his Familiar Style: 1943-48

An invitation announcing Magritte's 1943 exhibition in

Brussels heralds the astonishing news that "Rene Magritte

has broken with his usual technique." These aberrant and

quirky works, which deviate from Magritte's typical

Surrealist illusionism, consist of two distinct bodies of

work:
Magritte with
painted bottle
"Surrealism in the Sun": a.k.a. Magritte's "Renoir" or 1961
"Impressionist" period (1943-47)

The "Vache" period: Garishly colored, cartoonlike

paintings created during a period of only a few months
(1947-48).

Important: At no time does Magritte completely abandon

his mature style (which he later calls "the Magritte of
yore"). He paints a number of canvases during these same
years in his usual manner.

83
Surrealism in the Sun

The expression "Surrealism in the Sun" is Magritte's reference to the

th
19 -century Impressionist painters of light who practiced their art en

plein air (i.e., outdoors). It is also the title of a manifesto he publishes

in 1946 that triggers a volatile dispute among Surrealists over whether
or not the Impressionist technique can be reconciled with Surrealist

imagery. Magritte's total output of "Surrealism in the Sun" art is about

70 oils and 50 gouaches.

Sound Byte:

"Since the beginning of this war, I have a strong desire to achieve a new
poetic effectiveness which would bring us both charm and pleasure. I leave
"
to others the business of causing anxiety and terror.
—MAGRITTE, in a letter to Belgian artist Pol Bury, 1945

"Surrealism in the Sun" brings new energy to Magritte's "systematic

search for a disturbing poetic effect." It's sometimes called his "Impres-
sionist" period because of the obvious use of Impressionism's pleasing
brushstrokes, bright pastel colors, and insipidly pleasant imagery.

Magritte's debt to Renoir is obvious in The First Day. According to

Magritte, these "alwavs-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life" works are a

reaction against the hardship and horrors of the German Occupation,

which causes severe food shortages and low morale in Brussels.

84
 The First Day
1943
23 A x 21 3 A"
3

(60 x 55 cm)
Private Collection
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

Magritte's Revenge: Mooooooo!

For another unorthodox encore, Magritte conjures up his Vache
pictures, setting aside his earlier style one more time for a quirky, near-
Expressionist palette of garish, vivid colors and loose brushwork that

depict quirky, cartoonlike scenes of absurd imagery that is caricatural.

But there is no Expressionist angst in these pictures. They wallow joy-

fully in the iconographic muck of cartoons, mounting a "low," comic
assault on serious or "high" art. By giving them the name "Vache"
(French for cow), Magritte has fun with the term Fauve, or "wild animal,"

used to describe the style of Matisse and his circle of friends about 40
years earlier. The Ellipsis is typical of his brash, idiosyncratic Vache
works, of which there are only about 15 oils and 10 gouaches.

85
 TOP
The Cripple
1948
23 3 Axl9 V:"
(60 x 50 cm)

Private Collection
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

BOTTOM
The Ellipsis
1948
19 74x29"
(50 x 73 cm)
Finally, a Solo Exhibition in Paris

The Vache works are produced explicitly for Magritte's first one-artist

show, to be held in Paris at the Galerie du Faubourg. This makes him

the last major Surrealist painter to have a one-person exhibition in

Paris. Magritte does not try to impress the Parisians (with whom
Belgians share widespread mutual antipathy).

He does not polish up the favorites —one of his old pipes or something
similarly appropriate. Rather, in a move that bears out his still-linger-

ing Dada spirit, Magritte goes Vache and exacts revenge on the Paris
art world —revenge for the meager attention it has paid him over the

years, revenge for its vocal rejection of his "Surrealism in the Sun"
works, and revenge for all its high-art pretensions.

Last Laugh

So who gets the last laugh? Magritte's first Paris exhibition, as might
be expected, is a massive critical failure. Not one painting sells. After
telling the Parisians "to step in it," he abandons the colorful Vache
series and returns quietly to his familiar "well-made pictures of yore,"
apparently at the request of Georgette. Although brushstrokes from
the Impressionist period occasionally re-emerge in his paintings,

Magritte leaves these jewels behind for latter-day audiences "to step in"

and to decide for themselves.

87
 Les Chants de Maldoror

In 1948, seventy-seven of Magritte's wonderfully strange

VtMWMflMN pen-and-ink drawings are published in a new edition of

1 funessm Les Chants de Maldoror, a novel-length prose poem by the

19th-century French writer Le Comte de Lautreamont

(1846-1870), which the Surrealists worship as a Bible. It is

a darkly absurd and sadistic poem of bizarre psychological

iflB EDITIONS "LA BOET1E..

power that no doubt was well thumbed by Magritte. As
historian Suzi Gablik points out, its iconography of dislo-
art

cation, amputation, decapitation, fragmentation of human

flesh, somnambulism, putrefaction, vegetalization, and meta-

Lautreamont's
morphosis suggests analogies with Magritte's imagery.
Les Chants de
Maldoror. 1948
Engraving/book Drawings — such as the ones he does for Les Chants de
cover Maldoror — an are important part of Magritte's working
Private Collection
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY method. They play a significant role in the development of
his images and themes. Magritte is particularly attracted

to the greater spontaneity of drawing, which allows him to

make fortuitous new discoveries of unthought-of images.

Let There Be Light

Between 1949 and 1964, Magritte produces 16 variations

of The Dominion ofLight in oil and 10 gouache versions.

No other image sells as well during his lifetime.
The Dominion
of Light. 1954
58 x 45 'A"
(146 x114 cm)
Compositionally, it is Magritte at his most conventional: This world of
light is as close to the one we live in as Magritte ever comes. Why is
it, then, a classic Magrittean success? Well, as you might guess by now,

he once again makes the familiar unfamiliar, and he reconciles oppo-

sites. Although we might be tempted to praise Magritte 's convincing

technical illusionism, these paintings succeed because they destabilize

the relationship between familiar and unfamiliar. The strange, in

Magritte's world, almost always begins with something familiar. What

could be more familiar than the image of a home? The Surrealists in

general (and Magritte in particular) love this device. What amazes us

is the effect of the contradictory light sources that simultaneously

evoke both night and day. Neither dominion of light — either of nature

(the luminous sky) or of culture (the lamp-lit home) — seems to prevail.

Rather, we are transported to an uncertain domain of mystery.

Sound Byte:
"The landscape suggests night and the sky suggests day. This evocation of
night and day seems to me to be endowed with the power to delight and
surprise us. I call that power—poetry. This great interest in night and in
"
day is a feeling of admiration and amazement.
—Magritte

90
Large-Scale Commissions

For a change of pace, Magritte creates four large murals between 1951
and 1961. These projects are undertaken as commissions, providing OVERLEAF
The Enchanted
him with income and recognition during years when his paintings are
Domain, panel VI
not fetching high prices. Magritte is said to have painted his familiar 1953
cloudy blue sky motif himself for the ceiling murals at the Theatre
Royal des Galeries Saint-Hubert in Brussels (1951), one of which
is illuminated by a gigantic chandelier. (Magritte's skies, charming
here, have devolved into artless interior decoration elsewhere in the

imitations by lesser artistes.)

The Surrealists love games of chance, and Magritte revels in the idea

of the site of his second mural — a casino in Knokke-Heist, on the

Belgian coast. The Enchanted Domain (on the following pages) is the

most ambitious in scale of Magritte's murals: Its circumference of 72

meters (238 feet) wraps around the casino's main gaming room in

a spectacular manner.

Magritte's third mural, The Fairy Who Knew Nothing, is executed at

the Palais des Beaux- Arts in Charleroi, the cultural center of the

region where he spent most of his childhood. The title of his final

mural at the Palais des Congres in Brussels, Mysterious Barricades, may

reflect the awkward space allocated to Magritte by the Belgian
Ministry of Works. Magritte's final three murals are known for their

monumental scale (in contrast with his usual, small-scale format),

9i
 ^

k
their reorganization of images drawn from the artist's catalogue of

better-known works (thus creating a panoramic spectacle of Magritte's

greatest hits), and for the collaboration of assistants who execute the
works on location based on Magritte's own drawings and plans. He
sometimes permits the assistants to use mechanical transfers — an act

that anticipates one of the crucial aspects of Conceptual Art of the

1960s, which values concept over craftsmanship.

Are these Magritte's greatest works? Absolutely not. Technically success-

ful, the scale and recycling of images transport the viewer into a world

more like a Magrittean theme park than an enchanted domain. He

does them for money and for the local prestige they confer upon him.

Paintings within Paintings

Have you noticed the large number of windows in Magritte's paintings?

He loves to play with the idea of painting as window, with the picture
plane as window onto the world. As we have since learned, he brings

us "visions glimpsed between sleeping and waking" by disrupting the

familiar world order with a variety of techniques designed to create

contradiction on the canvas. He uses one of these — the painting within

a painting (a device he learned from de Chirico) — to dissolve the

frames that mark the distinctions between inside and outside, between
"real space" and represented space. The paradox is delightfully simple

in Where Euclid Walked (see page 96): A painting placed on an easel

94
blocks our view onto the exterior landscape. But is the cityscape in the

painting within the painting identical to the view from the window?
What is real and what is "represented?" Once again, Magritte's paint-

ing turns on its head the familiar order of things, assaulting our habits
of seeing and the way we understand objects and paintings.

Sound Byte:
"
"Visible things always hide other visible things.

—Magritte

The title, Where Euclid Walked, refers to the famous Alexandrian math-
ematician Euclid (c. 300 B.C.), to whom Magritte himself makes a
punning reference in the geometric mirroring of the tower's cone (a

foreground "presence") and the perspectival cone of the road within the
painting that vanishes into the horizon. Magritte values these optical

illusions, as we see in works such as The Human Condition (see page

97): They induce a sudden shock or panic in the viewer.

Magritte's Amateur Films

A number of Surrealists, Magritte included, experiment in the medi-
um of film. He makes a short film in 1930 and collaborates on another
two shot by his friend, Paul Nouge (all are now lost). Magritte's most

95
 Where Euclid
Walked. 1965
64 Vsx51 Vs"
(163 x 130 cm)
The Human
Condition. 1934
10 x 7 7A"
(25.5 x 20 cm)
 more personal genre of amateur film, of which he
makes some 40 or so between 1956 and 1960. Filmed
in handheld black-and-white and color 8mm and
Super 8, Magritte's films (all silent) are unstaged,

unedited, often unscripted, and technically convention-

al. Never originally intended for public reception, they

are homemade, do-it-yourself productions generally

created in playful collaboration with Georgette and

close friends. Some of the images in the films mirror

Magritte's more memorable painted images, such as a

flaming tuba or two hooded figures kissing. More than

anything else, however, the amateur films reflect the
Magritte's house
artist s pursuit of the spirit ofplay and dedication to col-
at 97, rue des
Mimosas, Brussels lective invention. Like his own amateur films,

Magritte's taste in film is more middle-class than

avant-garde: He owns a collection of Charlie Chaplin's

silent films and also enjoys war films and westerns,

particularly those of John Wayne.

A Day in the Life of Rene Magritte

A typical day in Magritte's life is uneventful, at least

from outside appearances. It consists of regular habits,

such as walking his Pomeranian dog, Loulou, to the
store to buy groceries, or spending the afternoon with
 This is a Piece of
Cheese. 1963-64
Oil on masonite
(under glass dome)
2
4 / x 6
5 W
(11.1x15.1 cm)
in gilded wooden
frame

friends, perhaps at the Greenwich Cafe, where he sits for hours with
the chess players. On Saturdays, Magritte and his Belgian Surrealist

friends regularly gather salon-style.

His younger friend, Marcel Marien, recounts the story of going to the
grocer's one day with Magritte to buy some Dutch cheese. After the
shopkeeper bends over the window display to pick up a round of cut
cheese, Magritte stops her: "No, Madame. Not that one. Give me some
of the other one instead" (pointing to a second round of cut cheese not
far from the first). "But it's the same cheese!" exclaims the grocer. "No,

99
 THE SON OF MAN, 1964
45 Vsx 35" (116x89 cm)
Private Collection. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

What: Magritte as the bowler-hatted man.

One of only four oil self-portraits that
Magritte identifies as self-portraits and the
only painting in which he explicitly identifies

the bowler-hatted man with himself.

Why: Magritte paints it for one of his most

important collectors, Harry Torczyner, who
commissions it. After Torczyner's death in

1997, the painting sold at the 1998 Christie's

auction for $5.3 million to an unidentified
American collector bidding by telephone.

Subject: A floating green apple conceals the

face of a bowler-hatted man (yes, it is

Magritte!) standing under a stormy sky before

a waterfront. As always, the horizontal stone
wall behind the man keeps the space shallow
and perspective immediate.

Speculation: Although Magritte vehemently

objects to any symbolic interpretation of his
paintings, art historian David Sylvester notes
that "the fact is that the objects he chose
to attach to the bowler-hatted men are often
irredeemably symbolic objects. The son of
man has the symbol of the Fall before his
eyes."
Madame," Magritte insists, "the one in the window has BACKTRACK:
POP ART
been looked at all day long by people passing by." In his

everyday life, as in his art, Magritte casts the most com- Where: New York

monplace, quotidian things in an unsettling and unfa- Peak years: 1960s

miliar light, which points toward hidden and new ways
Artists: Jim Dine (b. 1935);
of seeing the world.
Jasper Johns, (b. 1930);
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997);
Magritte s friend and lawyer during the later years of
Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929);
his life, Harry Torczyner (d. 1997), describes Magritte Robert Rauschenberg
as curious, voyeuristic, analytical, often negative, opin- (b. 1925);
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
ionated, and willing to confront those "who attempted
to impose the conventionalities upon mankind." He Subjects: Advertisements,

also describes Magritte as a shy, solitary man, and as a

comic strips, everyday objects,
images drawn from popular
hypochondriac who likes neatness and is on time for
(i.e., "Pop") culture.
appointments.
Characteristics: Pop is char-
acterized by its acceptance of
Georgette and the Objects of Bourgeois the contemporary and popular
Desire world of mass culture (e.g., an
image of a soup can as a
Magritte defers to Georgette's taste in home furnishings, work of art). Stylistically, Pop
which, at least in the later years, includes department Art turns away from the
expressive, abstract styles
store antiques, sofas, armchairs, Oriental rugs, and a
dominant in the 1950s to
baby grand piano. Ironically, her taste borders on Pop embrace the return of "real"
esthetics. Harry Torczyner recalls strolling with objects and recognizable

Magritte one day in Nice (France) in 1964, when the images belonging to
contemporary culture.
artist spotted a porcelain rooster: "I must buy that for Georgette,"

Magritte told him. "Are you still courting her, Rene?" Torczyner asked.
"It's true," Magritte replied, smiling.

Is "The Painter of Objects" the Godfather of Pop?

Magritte s international recognition and fame emerge in the 1960s at

the same time as the rising fortunes of Pop artists who claim a kinship
with him. Some even claim Magritte as the Father of Pop. Jasper

Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol all

acquire works by Magritte. The crowning achievement of Magritte's

international ^o^-ularity is the 1965 Magritte exhibition at The
Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Pop artists' admiration,

however, is not returned by Magritte, who finds Pop — its soup cans
and Coke bottles — too accepting of the contemporary world.
"Something rather miserable inspires them," Magritte remarks in
1964, adding: "I myself think the present reeks of mediocrity and the
atom bomb."

Sound Byte:

"The humor ofDadaism was violent and scandalous. The humor of Pop Art
is rather orthodox; its within the reach of any successful window-dresser. Are
we permitted to expectfrom Pop Art anything more than a sugar-coated
Dadaism?"
—MAGRITTE, appearing on Belgian television in 1964

102
 Gir.mdon/Art Resource, XV
Personal Values
1952
31 7
Ax39 V "
8

(81 x 100 cm)

 »

been expected to fetch between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.)

Changes of scale: Although this is not a new device for Magritte,

there are two great examples, The Listening Room and The opposite
Wrestlers' Tomb (see page 106), in which a familiar object (a giant The Listening

green apple and a giant red rose, respectively) are dramatically ic {o y

enlarged in relation to the scale of the room each occupies. (38 x 46 cm)

Magritte's luxurious indulgence in bright pigments: Although

bright colors are not typical of most of Magritte's major works

(except for the brief Impressionist and Vache periods), his palette

does brighten from time to time in later years, most strikingly in

The Listening Room and The Wrestlers' Tomb. This element would
have appealed to a number of Pop artists who also experimented in
bright and Day-Glo colors.

Pictorial wit: This is the manner in which the framing of an object

can dislocate it from the world, rendering its meaning arbitrary, as

in The Interpretation ofDreams, which is organized by a windowlike

frame. (Pop artist Jasper Johns owns a 1935 version of this picture.)

Although the prominence of Magritte's fame coincides with the rise of

Pop Art, Magritte never shares Warhol's wish that everyone be

"famous for fifteen minutes." On the contrary, Magritte never seeks

the fame that comes to him late in life and which, as his friend

Scutenaire points out, makes Magritte "more tormented than he [has]

105
 The Wrestlers'
Tomb. 1960
35 x 46 Vs"
.20x116.42 cm)
Private Collection
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

been by incomprehension and misunderstanding. The more honors

and money —he receive [s], the more uneasy he [feels]."

Other Influences: Then and Now

If Magritte's paintings of objects influence the Pop artists, it is his

linguistic understanding of art (his notion that in a picture "words are

of the same substance as the images") that influences the development
of another major 1960s art movement — Conceptual Art—popularized
by a less commercially driven group of artists who share Magritte's

priority of idea over painting and its execution. Internationally

106
acclaimed Conceptualist artists, such as the Belgian Marcel
Broodthaers (1924-1976) and the American Joseph
Kosuth (b.1945), explicitly acknowledge the importance

of Magritte's work to their own pioneering investigations,

and even recycle his imagery in their own work.

In the 1990s, it became increasingly difficult to speak

about contemporary art without invoking the name of

Magritte, whose umbrella of influence continued to grow

as major 1990s artists, such as Robert Gober (b. 1954),

continued to rummage through the leftovers of Surrealism

and Conceptual Art.

Lajoconde
The Sculptures (Mona Lisa)
1967. Bronze
Shortly before his death in 1967, Magritte is encouraged by 97 Va x 69 Va x
his dealer, Alexandre Iolas, to have a go at making sculpture 36 Va"
(250 x177 x97 cm)
for the first time in his career. The plan is to create three-
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY
dimensional sculpture based on images borrowed from
existing paintings and to produce the sculpture in the

traditional (and market-friendly) medium of bronze.

Unlike paintings, sculpture can be viewed in the round.

Magritte visits the foundry near Verona, Italy, in June

1967, where he signs eight wax models to be used to cast

the bronze sculptures. Shortly after returning to Belgium

IO7
around the end of the month, however, he becomes ill. After spend-
ing a short time in the hospital, Magritte dies at home on August 15,

1967, from cancer of the pancreas. He never sees the realization of the
bronzes, some of which are table-size, others furniture -size. Notes
and drawings left behind by the artist show that for at least one sculp-

ture, La Joconde, it was his plan to paint one of the curtains with his

trademark clouds-and-sky motif.

So are the sculptures, in fact "completed" works? Magritte s dealers

clearly thought so, seeing fit to exhibit them the following year in

Brussels and London (1968) and again in Zurich (1972). Still, they
have attracted little serious critical attention. The bronze medium of
these luxurious sculptures is too loaded with the gravity of valuable art

trophies: It weighs down the ethereal "ascendancy of poetry" that mys-

tifies us so effortlessly in their two-dimensional predecessors.

Last Words
One of Magritte's final works is the prophetically titled, The Last
Word (see page 112). Against a background of dizzying mountains
depicted in many of Magritte's paintings, we see a large, floating leaf

that contains the image of a tree. Magritte's placement of the tree (the

whole) within the leaf (a fragment of the whole) confounds us once

again with a contradictory vision of the impossible. The Last Word

summons up the abyss that lies below the tree of life. It is the gap

108
 "

between objects and images, words and things, life and death. Perhaps
this invisible unknown will always escape those who seek to apprehend

it, as the Belgian Master of Surrealism surely did. "Our only duty,"
Magritte implores us, "is to try to grasp this enigma."

So Why is he Great?

Defiant of status quo and of all received ideas, especially those that deal
with what it means to be a painter and artist, Magritte takes great plea-
sure in defying expectations and efforts to categorize him and his work.
Unlike the heroic, protean Picasso —the archetypal modern artist

whose achievement is measured by stylistic evolution (e.g., Blue

Period, then Rose Period, then Cubism, etc.) —Magritte enjoys con-
founding the tidy, heroic narratives that art historians love to concoct.

Although informed by an avant-garde sensibility, he paints in a style

(illusionism) that, for most modern painters and their champions at the

time, is considered academic and out of step with prevailing trends of

abstraction.

Sound Byte:
"The idea of manipulating paint makes me feel rather sick.
—Magritte

109
What's more, Magritte sticks with illusionism his entire career (with two
brief exceptions), focusing not on how to paint but rather on what to

paint. In terms of pictorial invention, he defies a linear, continuous

narrative. Most of his major themes and pictorial problems are developed

within the first ten years of his mature career (1926-36), so it is not unusual
for him to rework a theme in the 1960s that he first developed thirty vears
earlier, varying it in such a way that it is often more compelling than the
original, earlier one.

Like Matisse and Picasso, Magritte forces a radical change of the

relationship between the viewer and the art. Rather than making "disin-
terested" paintings for aesthetic enjoyment, Magritte aims to provoke,

surprise, and shock his audience. He abandons traditional notions of

beauty and the sublime in favor of the aesthetics of the uncanny and the
mysterious. Although widely misunderstood from the beginning of his

career, Magritte is the most durable and accessible of all the Surrealist

painters. This is largely because he draws from a lexicon of the

commonplace and the familiar —things from the world we recognize— to

conjure up a world of surprise.

His refusal to include fantasy imagery in his mature art sets his work
apart from that of the other Surrealist painters. Moreover, in his scorn for

the swirling, opaque surfaces of abstract painting that read as a giant Keep
Out sign to so many viewers of modern art, Magritte teaches us how to
look at life's private mysteries, at the inexpressible moments and

no
The Philosophy
of the Bedroom
1966
 sensations we all feel. His canvases are worlds into
which the viewer can enter, in part because Magritte is

preoccupied with thoughts, poetry, and philosophy

more than with the act of painting itself. He considers

himself a thinker who happens to paint.

Today's viewers are no longer shocked in the same way

and with the same distress that viewers once were at the

original, early reception of Magritte 's paintings, when

they were widely rejected and discredited. Although
fame and success arrived late in Magritte s life, his rep-

utation and influence continue to grow. If the Magritte

we now admire is idiosyncratic, anti-conventional, and

The Last Word
1967 delightfully puckish, his paintings — his lucid dreams
32 7s x 25 Vs" are astonishingly accessible and relevant today.
(81 x 65 cm)
Private Collection
We value them for their ability to evoke mystery in an
Art Resource, NY increasingly ordinary world. They remind us of the

latent potential of the imagination and of the promise

that imagination might play a vital role in conceiving

the world in new ways.

Todd Alden is an artist and critic living
in New York City. He is a contributor to
Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York
(Whitney Museum of American Art).
Other titles in this series:

The Essential Salvador Dali

(ISBN 0-8362-6996-9)

The Essential Willem de Kooning

(ISBN 0-8362-1933-3)

The Essential Edward Hopper

(ISBN 0-8362-6998-5)

The Essential Henri Matisse

(ISBN 0-8362-1937-6)

The Essential Pablo Picasso

(ISBN 0-8362-1934-1)

The Essential Jackson Pollock

(ISBN 0-8362-6997-7)

The Essential Norman Rockwell

(ISBN 0-8362-1932-5)

The Essential Vincent van Gogh

(ISBN 0-8362-6999-3)

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