‘His objective was to disturb, to provoke’: Magritte unmasked in first in-depth Australian retrospective
The Beatles and Steve Jobs loved his art so much they ended up in court over it. Now, The Art Gallery of NSW unveils a ground-breaking exhibition dedicated to this surrealist master.
A suited man and two well-dressed women appear from under the cover of a white bed sheet as though conjured as assistants ready for the opening of a magic act. With childlike humour they aimlessly proceed to exchange, in a pass-the-parcel manner, ordinary household objects: a bowler hat, an ornamental statue bust, a mantel clock, a smoking pipe.
This sequence is the first in what appears to be an amateur home movie like any other.
Its homemade quality is evident in the unsteadiness of its excitable filmmaker’s hand. The black-and-white footage, dating back to the earlier days of handheld videography, is grainy at best.
With every cut between skits, the scenes become even more strangely absurd – sheets double as ghostly dress-ups and statuettes mask faces from the camera’s view.
The end result is nothing short of unadulterated frivolity. An obsession with the absurdity of the utterly ordinary, turning everyday tools into a source of bizarre wonder.
But these seldom-seen snippets are not just an interior look into the activities of the middle class. They form a project from the mind of one history’s most lauded surrealist artists, Belgian Rene Magritte.
Entitled Masks (1956-57), the silent movie informs a grander picture of Magritte’s distinctly Belgian brand of surrealism, a move he made to differentiate himself from the likes of Spanish painter Salvador Dalí and French poet Andre Breton.
A master of deception and lifelong trickster, the Lessines-born and Brussels-reared painter had a subversive humour that never quite belonged among the ranks of artists who took themselves more seriously. He was deeply practical, always painting in his suit and slippers, easel in the corner of his dining room, with no traces of paint stains left behind. Yet he was an impractical joker in every other sense.
Art historian Julie Waseige, who specialises in Belgian surrealism and worked as a researcher at the Musee Magritte in Brussels, writes: “Though he cultivated the upright air of a petit bourgeois who puts on a suit every day and leads a well-ordered life, Magritte was a prankster and always had been. This subversive humour was inherent to his personality from the beginning to the end.” Even she admits Magritte was not one of her favourite artists in the early days of her career.
“I learnt to love him in a way,” Waseige says. “Perhaps it’s good for an art historian not to be completely fascinated by an artist at the beginning. It allows you to keep your critical spirit.”
She adds: “I think the main reason Magritte may not be as well known as some other surrealists is because people don’t really understand his works. People will often ask: ‘Why?’ But it’s not a question easily answered when it comes to Magritte.
“He was a genius.”
Even those who do not know Magritte by name will have encountered the ubiquitous force of his images in some aspect of daily life. His undated painting of an apple with the handwritten phrase “Au Revoir” across it was so deeply admired by Paul McCartney he named the Beatles’ record label in honour of it in 1966. It was also the subsequent inspiration for Apple’s logo, which landed chief executive and founder Steve Jobs in three years-long trademark disputes with the Beatles over the forbidden fruit’s use.
Apple won. And so Magritte’s invention worked its way into modern, everyday usage.
Although Dali can claim to be perhaps the most famous surrealist, Magritte is notable for the pervasiveness of his images. The Treachery of Images (1929) presents the oft-recognised wooden smoking pipe with a French inscription underneath that translates as “This is not a pipe”.
Like Magritte’s apple, the enigmatic bowler-hatted man makes regular appearances in his paintings. He is, however, a haunting motif with his face regularly obstructed from view. This masking of identity has raised intrigue surrounding Magritte’s own life: was the man in the bowler hat a self-portrait all along?
In a conversation with his friend and fellow Belgian surrealist Louis Scutenaire, he was quoted to have said: “It can happen that a portrait tries to resemble its model. However, one can hope that this model will try to resemble its portrait.”
The Art Gallery of NSW will remove the mysterious mask that has followed Magritte for so long with Australia’s first retrospective exhibition on the artist across his five-decade career.
It was recently reported that a rare painting from his esteemed Empire of Light series could sell for more than $US95m ($141m) at the auction house Christie’s in New York next month. This estimated sale price would be almost triple the amount another painting from the series was sold for at Sotheby’s in London in 2022. The series consists of 27 paintings that depict dimly lit street landscapes beneath a sunlit sky.
While Review talks via Zoom with Nicholas Chambers, senior curator of modern and contemporary international art at AGNSW, it becomes evident surrealism is enjoying a resurgence. What is it about bowler hats and dissonant landscapes that continues to resonate with audiences globally?
“We initially had these discussions around artists that we thought would connect with a contemporary moment of interest in Australia, and Magritte’s name came up about five years ago,” Chambers says.
Chambers was surprised to learn Australia had never presented a large-scale survey of Magritte’s work, including his painting, drawing, cinematography and photography.
It can happen that a portrait tries to resemble its model. However, one can hope that this model will try to resemble its portrait - Magritte
The retrospective also includes a significant number of works from the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas. The foundation was started by Dominique and John de Menil and has since grown to become the largest private Magritte collection outside of Europe.
“This month [of October] actually marks 100 years since the publishing of the Surrealist Manifesto,” Chambers says. “So, the timing is quite incredible.”
This significant anniversary means Sydney is not the only city putting surrealism back on the map. Art institutions globally from Paris to Munich and Shanghai also will be mounting shows dedicated to elevating the movement.
Initially published in 1924 by Paris-based writer and poet Andre Breton, the manifesto articulated the main objectives of the surrealist movement. The leader of the Parisian faction of surrealists, Breton argued “the reign of logic” that had played a vital part in World War I could be defied by the notion of surrealism. “Breton very much wanted to ‘transform life, transform the world’ just like any other surrealist,” Waseige says. “The objective was the same across the groups but it manifested quite differently.”
Though Breton intended the manifesto to be a guiding document for the movement at large, surrealist artists who were dotted across international borders brought their own aspirations to their practice: Dalí and Joan Miro from Spain, Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera in Mexico, Leonora Carrington in Britain, and the influential Giorgio de Chirico from Italy.
In 1927, Magritte left his home in Brussels for a taste of Paris’s burgeoning surrealism scene.
Yet as critic and writer Deborah Solomon observed in her review of Alex Danchev’s biography with Sarah Whitfield, Magritte: A Life, in The New York Times in 2021: “Magritte remained an awkward interloper among the [Parisian] Surrealists.”
Even where Breton held him in high esteem, personally collecting many of his works, Magritte was rarely mentioned in his many writings.
Although many surrealists were invested in controversial Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud’s theories of the subconscious, Magritte remained sceptical.
“Magritte was not terribly interested in ideas around the subconscious,” Chambers says. “He was more interested in language, images and reality. The same sorts of questions that trouble us in the social media space in the 21st century.”
Some accounts suggest it was his mother’s suicide in 1912 when Magritte was 13 that played a role in his rejection of Freud. It was a matter he declined to discuss even with his wife Georgette, who had been his childhood sweetheart and artistic muse.
“There’s this discussion of his mother’s head being veiled when she was discovered. Connections can be made between that image and then two of his most famous artworks, The Lovers.”
However, Waseige says: “I always have people asking me about whether his difficult childhood impacted his work. I’d say that if you attempt to understand Magritte’s work through his biography, you put all his works in a prison.
“If he had allowed people to understand his work through his personal history, his art would have been completely different.”
It is for this reason AGNSW’s Magritte exhibition is not structured around the man’s personal life so much as it is by the periods that informed his style.
While his time in Paris resulted in the development of some of his most celebrated images, the exhibition also will showcase Magritte’s practice on his return to Brussels in late 1929. It was back there that he was fully able to realise his vision of finding the surreal in the everyday, offering a different perspective to Miro’s abstraction or Dali’s otherworldly dreamscapes.
“The power of Magritte is his ability to bring strangeness and unfamiliarity to familiar objects. One of his objectives would have been to disturb, to provoke,” Waseige says.
With the horrors of World War II unfolding in the late 1930s, Chambers says Magritte’s position on his practice was forced to soften.
“He rethinks what surrealism should be,” Chambers says. “He sees it should be more about pleasure instead of the dark visions he had in previous decades.”
In the wake of this period, Magritte published four manifestos on the subject of sunlit surrealism. While his iconography remained strange – pigs in suits and pears morphing into bodies – his painting began to follow a more impressionist pattern in a Renoir-esque fashion with touches of warmth.
It is perhaps this reinvention of Magritte that speaks most significantly to the man behind the bowler hat.
“In this period, he realised he didn’t want surrealism to just become this bridge between two wars – two periods of absurd violence. He saw its original revolutionary aspirations had failed and reinvented surrealism.”
His wide-spanning career indicates Magritte was a man of many masks, adapting in style and form as the eras shifted from World War I through to his death in 1967.
Why then does he continue to speak to audiences today?
Chambers puts it best: “Very late in life, he has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Steve Schapiro, the photographer for Time Magazine, is there to take his photo. Magritte puts on his bowler hat straight away because he understands what it means to be actively engaged in his own image making.
“He’s an artist who was far ahead of his time.”
Magritte, Australia’s first retrospective of the celebrated surrealist, opens at the Art Gallery of NSW on October 26. More: artgallery.nsw.gov.au
