Rene Magritte: The Revealing Image — this is not a snapshot
I remember thinking long ago that Rene Magritte was essentially the favourite painter of people who don’t like painting.
Photographs of Rene Magritte (1898-1967) in the bowler hat that also appears in several of his paintings remind us, even more than group portraits of the other surrealists in their suits and ties, that this movement arose in a social environment that was still, in appearance at least, governed by the conventions and certainties of the 19th century. In reality, all those certainties had been shaken to the core by the calamity of the Great War. The conventions that still obtained in society in the aftermath were increasingly hollow, papering over a sense of dread, guilt and absurdity.
Nonetheless, the surrealist fascination with what lay beneath the surface of social convention, of reason, indeed of the self, could not have been so clearly articulated if that surface had not remained ostensibly largely intact. This was not like the culture of the 1960s and 70s, when the whole distinction between surface and depth began to collapse, or indeed our own time, when social media invites everyone to live in the illusion of a self-made surface.
Dada, the anti-art movement that arose during the war, had expressed anger and scorn for the institutions, including the art and literature, of a civilisation that seemed to be in moral free fall. After the war, many of the dadaists, tiring of the sterility of a purely negative stance, moved on to the surrealist movement, which sought to discover a deeper reality beyond the banality of ostensible reality.
In this they were inspired by the writings of Sigmund Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams, a work of particular relevance to artists, had been published in 1900. Andre Breton, the leader of the surrealists, was a doctor who had worked with patients suffering from shell-shock during the war, and after its conclusion he travelled to Vienna in 1921 to meet Freud. The surrealist program was, however, different from that of the great psychoanalyst, since Freud was trying to heal people of their mental illnesses and the surrealists thought access to the domain of the unconscious would lead to a mental revolution, which could even be conceived as the subjective equivalent of the objective social and economic revolution of the communists.
The early surrealists, initially mostly writers, would gather for sessions of automatic writing. The point is to keep writing without stopping to think consciously or to edit the thoughts that come to mind. The results of this exercise, which can be done at different speeds using a metronome, are always interesting: participants end up being surprised and sometimes even shocked by some of the things they have written and perhaps not even been aware of thinking.
Automatic drawing is the graphic expression of this so-called psychic automatism, and works in this form were exhibited by various surrealist artists, including Andre Masson; one may also see the influence of this practice in the paintings of Joan Miro and Max Ernst. But automatism in painting really came into its own later, in postwar America, with Arshile Gorky and especially Jackson Pollock.
During the heyday of surrealism in the 20s and 30s, the most successful mode of painting was entirely different, as we see in the work of Salvador Dali. His aim was not to register unconscious processes going on beneath the facade of the conscious mind but to reproduce the disturbing visions of dreams. To this end he adopted a style of academic realism, suited to conveying the vividness of the dream illusion.
Magritte, who was in Paris with the surrealists for three years, from 1927 to 1930, but otherwise lived in Belgium, took a rather different approach. He also paints in a style of polished realism, and his works have affinities with dreams, but they are more conceptual, visual conceits such as the famous image of a pipe with the label ceci n’est pas une pipe, since it is not a pipe but a picture of one.
It is not surprising to learn that Magritte worked in advertising because his work is so economically focused on conveying ideas that, although pictorial in form, could be described easily in words, almost like visual gags. The pictures reproduce readily as posters and became ubiquitous from the 60s and 70s.
In fact there is nothing in Magritte’s pictures of the purely painterly apprehension of the world that we admire in the greatest pictures, and I remember thinking long ago that he was essentially the favourite painter of people who don’t like painting.
That was perhaps a little unfair, even if not entirely inaccurate, and in hindsight Magritte can be considered as a forerunner of conceptual art. Some of his most interesting work deals, like the pipe picture, titled La trahison des images (the betrayal of images), with the ambiguity of words as labels for things, or the strange tensions that can be set up by deliberately misnaming objects. Other works deal with the ambiguous relation of images to the seen world — where paintings merge into views, for example.
A couple of his most interesting compositions were made for his English patron, Edward James (1907-84), himself a rather remarkable man and the subject of a television profile by Melvyn Bragg, The Secret Life of Edward James (1978), which can be seen on YouTube.
James was the sitter for the portrait Reproduction interdite (1937) in which a young man in a suit is seen looking into a mirror but the mirror, instead of reflecting his face, reproduces the same view from the back. On the mantelpiece below the mirror is a French translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, greatly admired by the surrealists.
A photograph of this painting appears in the exhibition at the Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morwell, Victoria. This exhibition is essentially a collection of private photographs that belonged to Magritte and his wife, Georgette (1901-86), apparently rediscovered in the 70s and now in a private collection in Brussels. There are also some short homemade film clips.
Most of the photographs are extremely small, as private snaps were between the wars, and indeed many of them are of family and friends rather than directly related to Magritte’s work, let alone to his most famous paintings. In fact the exhibition is altogether rather specialised and the sort of thing one normally would expect to see as part of, or a documentary annex to, a comprehensive survey or retrospective of the artist, rather than presented as an independent exhibition.
To anyone already interested in Magritte or surrealism, some of the material is quite intriguing, but it seems an odd choice to present to the general public, especially in the country and so far from a big city.
The exhibition starts with pictures of Magritte and his family, who were respectable Belgian bourgeois except that his mother committed suicide after many failed attempts when the boy was only 13. Inevitably, critics and psychoanalysts have speculated on how this traumatic event may have affected Magritte’s subsequent work as an artist, and it has been suggested that the frequent theme of veiled heads may recall the fact his mother’s body was pulled from the river with her dress covering her head.
There are numerous pictures of Georgette, whom he married in 1922 although they originally had met a decade or so earlier; for some reason they decided not to have children. Georgette appears in several photos connected with his paintings as well: in one she poses for the figure of the woman in La tentative de l’impossible (1928), Magritte’s picture of a Pygmalion-like artist creating his ideal woman in paint. Oddly, although the figure in the painting is naked, Georgette is rather prudishly dressed in a one-piece swimsuit for the photo.
Pictures of his friends in the Belgian surrealist group, most of whom have been forgotten today, include groups in parks and gardens and are mostly notable for the incongruous titles given to otherwise unremarkable photos: thus one from 1939 is called The Repudiation of Peter — recalling the play of objects and names in several of his paintings. In another from the same year, Magritte, Georgette and three others are posing approximately in the attitudes of Poussin’s first version of the Sacrament of Ordination, painted almost exactly 300 years earlier and recently (2011) acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
Several of the photos are interesting because they show Magritte at work: thus in one he poses painting Clairvoyance (1936), a picture in which he represents himself painting a dove, so the photo creates a picture within a picture. Another shows the artist at work at his easel, a handsome wooden one but set up in the corner of the living room — he never used a dedicated studio — and curiously set on an oriental carpet without a dropsheet. Even if there was usually a dropsheet, which was removed for the photograph, the picture still reminds us how quietly and deliberately Magritte painted.
One of the most poetic photographs is not by Magritte but by Georges Thiry and shows the artist standing on a small balcony, his profile silhouetted against the light beyond, and his features reflected in the french window opposite. The title, l’Oiseleur (The Bird-catcher), makes us think of the tree in the courtyard, the possibility of birds perching in it, and the impossibility of their being caught by the man standing on the balcony with his hands in his pockets: the artist’s bird-catching is entirely interior, within the imagination.
In a separate space there are film clips in which the artist and his wife play various roles in series of more or less surrealist sketches. In one, for example, Georgette pours hot water from a kettle into a bowl, as though to wash her feet, but then instead of taking off shoes and stockings simply puts them straight into the water. At another point she holds up a cardboard sign reading Fin, the end, as in a silent movie. The films are of some interest to anyone deeply versed in Magritte’s work, and we see here and there motifs that appear in his paintings. But they are of slight aesthetic value in themselves, and remind us of an important principle: that artists are artists only when they are working within their own craft.
A novelist is not a writer when chatting at a dinner party, only when settling down in the silence of the study to compose a considered text. And Magritte was not a significant artist when he was playing around with his home movie camera; the particular focus and concentration that made his pictures memorable was achieved only when he stood quietly in the corner of his living room, alone with his easel.
Rene Magritte: The Revealing Image
Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Victoria. Until November 19.
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