https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rene-magritte
What You Need to Know about René Magritte
Alina Cohen
May 27, 2018 8:00 am
Belgian painter
’s
dreamlike aesthetic and evocative symbols (bowler hats, cloudy
dreamscapes) ensure his enduring legacy, widespread appeal, and
multimillion-dollar auction prices.Yet
these simple associations belie the complexity of the artist’s vision,
political engagements, and important connections to major 20th-century
art movements. By delving further into Magritte’s biography and late
works—as well as one of his most iconic, meme-launching pictures, La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (1929),often called The Treachery of Images
in English—a more complete portrait emerges of an artist who raised
questions about representation and appropriation that are perhaps now
more pertinent than ever.
Who was René Magritte?
René Magritte with Femme-Bouteille, c. 1955. Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images
René Magritte, Son of Man,
1964. © Charly Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Like many of the
,
the Belgian-born Magritte (1898–1967) experienced massive upheavals,
living through both world wars. Yet personal tragedy struck even before
the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand initiated decades of
European angst. When Magritte was 13, his mother Régina committed
suicide by drowning herself in the Sambre River. When she was found, her
nightgown was said to have been wrapped around her head—a fact often
used to explain the cloth-covered visages abound in Magritte’s
paintings. (Notably, Régina worked as a milliner before she was married,
a detail difficult to decouple from her son’s recurrent hat fixation.)
If
it was a morbid way to go, it also offered lyrical potential:
Waterlogged women have long inspired major art (see: Ophelia). Writer
Anne-Gaëlle Saliot posits that memories of the event pervade specific works by Magritte, including Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1926) and The Collective Invention
(1934–35). In the latter, a creature that’s half-woman, half-fish lies
on the beach at the tide’s edge. “The destruction of the human head is a
direct indication of the horror of watery disfigurement, while at the
same time calling up and destroying images of mythical mermaids,” writes
Saliot. If many of Magritte’s images were alluring and fantastic,
gruesomeness also seeped in.
Magritte
began his artistic education early. He started drawing lessons in 1910,
made his first paintings as an adolescent, and enrolled at the Académie
Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1916. He began his career painting
abstractions. Six years later, in 1922, three major events shaped
Magritte’s life and style: He married Georgette Berger, exhibited six
paintings at the Antwerp Congress of Modern Art show, and viewed
’s
work for the first time. The Italian painter’s haunting, shadowy,
symbol-laden scenes convinced Magritte to render his own psychological
landscapes.
Though he began this work in
Brussels, Magritte and Georgette moved to Paris in 1927 so he could
integrate himself into Surrealist circles. His new milieu offered both
inspiration and upset. Though he first thrilled at the ideas of writer
and movement leader
,
they eventually became too dogmatic for him. Despite the Surrealists’
aversion to religion, Georgette once wore a necklace with a gold cross
to a party, causing a disagreement between her husband and Breton. The
couple returned to Brussels in 1930.
Magritte
and Georgette never divorced, though adultery on both sides created
additional turmoil for the artist. In the late 1930s, he had an affair
with fellow Surrealist artist Sheila Legge, and enlisted his friend,
Surrealist poet Paul Colinet, to distract his wife by keeping her
company. The plan worked too well; they started sleeping together. Magritte eventually made amends with his wife, but fell out with Colinet, according to The Economist.
In
1945, Magritte joined the Belgian Communist Party. His political
beliefs distinguished him from many of his Surrealist peers. “Magritte
wanted revolution here and now, and he wanted it tied
to both sunlit surrealism and to communism, on which Breton had firmly
turned his back,” writes art historian Michel Draguet for a catalogue
linked to “The Fifth Season,” a recently opened show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition focuses on the artist’s later work from the 1940s
through the ’60s, which was cruder and harkened back to prior art
movements (
,
)
in a way that distinguished Magritte from his Parisian peers. The
show’s eponymous canvas, from 1943, depicts two men who are themselves
carrying landscape paintings. The metafictional element, the style—at
first glance, one might confuse it for a
—and the men’s dress (suits and bowler hats) help bring Magritte’s greatest themes and symbols together into a single canvas.
Magritte’s
support for Communism also tied neatly to his love for the ubiquitous
bowler hat (which was also a constant fixture of his own wardrobe). The
accessory made him appear just like his fellow comrades—having the
opposite effect of, say,
’s hard-to-miss idiosyncratic mustache.
Nevertheless, Magritte received plenty of individual acclaim through his life, beginning around the 1930s. The Museum of Modern Art
in New York gave him a retrospective in 1965, less than two years
before he died of pancreatic cancer. “Outwardly his life has been
uneventful, but the interior world of imagination revealed in his art
has been varied and extraordinarily inventive and has won him a leading
place among the fantasists of our time,” wrote curator James Thrall Soby in a catalogue essay for that show.
What were Magritte’s accomplishments beyond painting?
René Magritte, The Great Family,
1963. © Charly Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York. Courtesy of the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Japan and the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Like
many Surrealists, Magritte was deeply engaged with literature. He
created drawings for texts by poet Paul Éluard, fiction writer Georges
Bataille, and the Marquis de Sade, the famed S&M chronicler.
Magritte
also worked in advertising, designing ads for clients in industries
from cars to fashion. As in his commercial design, Magritte employed a
neat, flat finish in his art. Just decades afterwards,
would follow a similar trajectory, more clearly infusing his prints,
paintings, and sculptures with evidence of his days as a commercial
draftsman. Magritte also used his professional skills for political
ends, making graphics and posters for the Belgian Communist Party.
Throughout
the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, Magritte produced
photographs and short films. Instead of thematizing the violence and
fascism that infiltrated his country, the artist turned toward more
pleasant sources of inspiration. “I live in a very disagreeable world,
and my work is meant as a counter-offensive,” he once wrote. This quote,
argues art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau in her SFMOMA catalogue
essay, is a bit disingenuous. “His statements need not mean that the war
and occupation did not produce cultural or psychic symptoms in his
oeuvre,” she writes, asserting that his work from this era was in
actuality charmless: She sees plenty of “violence and disgust,” with
references to “fecal, phallic, and castration imagery.” A
counter-offensive, indeed.
Why does his work matter?
René Magritte, The Fifth Season,
1943. © Charly Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York. Courtesy of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique and the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
On
the surface, Magritte’s moody and atmospheric paintings evoke an
appealing sense of mystery and encourage an exploration of one’s own
psyche.
His later work, however, offers
different ideas. From 1943 to 1947, Magritte went through a “Renoir
period,” and, around 1948, a so-called “vache period” (in French, the term means “cow”). During the former, Magritte adopted the brushy Impressionist style of
; in the latter period, he painted in a Fauvist manner and used bright, unrealistic colors, suggesting the canvases of
and
.
Indeed, many of Magritte’s paintings from the 1940s look like they were
cribbed from someone else’s oeuvre. There’s a cartoonish element to his
vache compositions, as well; they fall into the framework of “bad painting,” an aesthetic that resonates today in the work of artists like
and
.
And, of course, there’s Magritte’s most famous work, which many will recognize even if they don’t know the artist’s name. La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe),
from 1929, linked Magritte’s art to important philosophies of
representation. The artist simply painted a brown-and-black tobacco pipe
above words that, in English, mean “this is not a pipe.” The canvas
highlights the fact that the viewer isn’t looking at a pipe, but a
picture of a pipe. Far from a petty provocation, the distinction gets at
the difference between art and reality. This became a major concern for
the
in the 1970s and ’80s, who similarly highlighted the fictions evident
in photography: Snapshots weren’t representations of truth, but of an
artist’s contrived viewpoints.
As curator
Caitlin Haskell writes in the SFMOMA catalogue, “Magritte, more than any
other artist of the past century, made it his project to subvert our
faith in visual similitude.” He lived through violent periods that
inspired many Europeans to question their governments, religion, and
human decency; his artwork similarly asks viewers to reevaluate their
acceptance of what they see. As rapidly improving technology amplifies
our ability to realistically distort images, it’s more important than
ever to consider what is a pipe, and what’s not.
Alina Cohen is a Staff Writer at Artsy.
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