Magritte

Introduction
 
Reneé Magritte is the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. His paintings and his propositions are part of our culture. His personal iconography, his surreal sensibility, his deadpan melodrama, his trompe l’oeil effects, his cleverness, his outrageousness, his subversiveness (he is one of the great subversives of our time): all this is now inescapable. Contemporary life is replete with Magritte and his sensibility. His paintings are legends. La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images): a pipe, captioned “This is not a pipe.” L’ Empire des lumières (The Dominion of Light): a street in darkness under a daylight sky. L’Évidence éternelle (The Eternally Obvious): five panels showing parts of a naked woman, from head to foot. La Durée poignardée (Time Transfixed): a train coming out of a fireplace [color plate 1]. La Modèle rouge (The Red Model): a pair of boots-turned-feet, complete with toes. Le Domaine d’Arnheim (The Domain of Arnheim): a shattered window, the shards of glass showing the view outside. La Clef des songes (The Interpretation of Dreams): objects labeled, as in a bag (“The sky”), a penknife (“The bird”), a leaf (“The table”), and a sponge (“The sponge”). Golconde (Golconda): is it raining men in bowler hats and overcoats—or are they ascending to heaven?
 
The fruits of Magritte’s stunning imagination have revolutionized what we see and how we understand. He was always on the lookout for what had never been seen, as he put it, and he was intensely interested in the relations of word and image: “An object is never so closely attached to its name that another cannot be found for it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations are not so far from Magritte’s. Some of their propositions are remarkably similar. Magritte’s art is a cross between Wittgenstein’s thought and Alice in Wonderland, with a seasoning of surrealism, a pinch of eroticism, and a sizzle of dread.
 
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Born in Lessines, Belgium, in 1898, Magritte was a man of many parts. To all outward appearances, he was a placid petit bourgeois who kept a modest house in a nondescript Brussels suburb. As a young man, he worked full-time designing wallpaper; he also created posters and designs for the Brussels couture house Norine. He married his childhood sweetheart, Georgette Berger, and they socialized mainly at home. He had no studio. He set up his easel in a corner of the dining room. He painted in suit and tie and slippers. He made no noise. He was the epitome of respectability. At the appointed hour he walked the dog. He cooked (cheese fondue, chocolate mousse), religiously following the recipes. He was solicitous to his wife. He played chess each week at the Café Greenwich. He read.
 
Yet Magritte, who produced his first surrealist paintings and collages in 1925, was fundamental to surrealism, and surrealism was fundamental to him. He and Georgette passed three turbulent years in Paris, between 1927 and 1930, at the height of the surrealist fever—an experiment that was not entirely a success. Magritte was out of place in Paris. When he fell out with André Breton, “the Pope of Surrealism,” at an evening gathering, Magritte was excommunicated for years. Nonetheless, he maintained an arm’s-length dialogue with Breton, who began collecting Magritte’s paintings as early as 1928; this was a dialogue of crucial importance for surrealism and for modernism in general.
 
Magritte was more comfortable as the king of the Belgians. He represented an antipode to Paris and metropolitan hegemony. From the tables of the Café Flore, Brussels was a backwater and Magritte a provincial. He spoke with a heavy Walloon accent, as Parisian intellectuals could not fail to notice. But Magritte had his own gang. In Paul Nougé he discovered a literary guru akin to Valéry; in the writer Louis Scutenaire a kind of Boswell; in the young surrealist acolyte Marcel Mariën a collaborator and disciple. Magritte and his group gained a certain independence. The importance of this devoted band of accomplices, referred to as “la bande à Magritte” (all of whom wrote about him, each in their idiosyncratic fashion),1 was vital to the artist, who was at once their director and their fascinator.
 
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By the early 1930s Magritte was already a major artist, though he still had difficulty making ends meet. His first one-man show in the United States was at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1936. He had fourteen works in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London the same year. In 1939 he designed a poster for the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes. Five days after the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, fearful that he would be picked up for his political statements, he left Brussels for France, traveling first to Paris and then to Carcassonne. He returned to Brussels in August. There he painted out the war. In 1943 he entered his “Renoir period,” in which he adopted the manner (and palette) of late Renoir, in order to bring a little pleasure into the world, as he claimed. These “sunlit” paintings, as he called them, were intensely disliked by a number of his admirers, including Georgette; the period ended four years later. In 1945, Le Drapeau rouge (The Red Flag) announced that Magritte had joined the Belgian Communist Party. After about eighteen months his enthusiasm for the party and its people waned, but not his faith in communism itself.
 
In 1948, for his first one-man show in Paris, he exhibited works done for the occasion in five weeks flat—aided and abetted by Scutenaire—in a flamboyant caricatural style dubbed “vache” (cow): a provocation aimed at the high-and-mighty Parisians. The exhibition was coolly received; nothing was sold.
 
But Magritte remained true to his vision, and over the next twenty years the word spread to the United States. In 1965 a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York traveled all over the country; two year later another major retrospective was held at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Magritte himself visited the Gibiesse foundry in Verona to correct the wax models for sculptures of a selection of his signature works. In 1967 he died suddenly of pancreatic cancer. The sculptures were cast after his death.
 
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Along this long road to recognition as a major artist, Magritte remained a multipurpose master, whose practice embraced fine and graphic design. He produced commercial artwork under the imprint of Studio Dongo, which was simply a shed at the bottom of the garden. Studio Dongo specialized in “Stands, Displays, Publicity Objects, Posters, Drawings, Photomontages, Advertising Copy.” He created posters for Alfa Romeo, wallpaper for Peters-Lacroix, catalogs for fashion houses, shop window displays, sheet music covers for his brother Paul, and book covers. His cover design for Breton’s What Is Surrealism? (1934) was based on his subversive image Le Viol (The Rape), in which a woman’s face is replaced by her sex.
 
The urge to analyze or preferably to psychoanalyze Magritte has proved hard to resist. The closest thing to a founding myth derives from Magritte’s mother’s disappearance when he was thirteen, and especially from the description of her body, pulled from the River Sambre seventeen days later, with her face covered by her nightdress. Magritte had a consuming interest in revealment and concealment. In a rare unscripted radio interview, discoursing on mystery—his favorite subject—he mentioned a painting called La Grande Guerre (The Great War), a portrait of a bowler-hatted man whose face is hidden by an apple. “At least it hides the face partly,” explained Magritte. “So you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible doesn’t show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is apparent.” Magritte’s art is full of the visible that is hidden.
 
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Magritte was well defended, but he was also something of a showman, punctiliously rehearsed. His public life was a kind of performance art—a model for Gilbert and George—the suit, the bowler hat, the unvarying regime: always the same dog (a Pomeranian), always the same name (Loulou or Jackie), always the same walk, immortalized in a Paul Simon song. He played chess with Marcel Duchamp—almost an allegory of modern art. The squares on his chessboard were marked with handwritten comments such as “escape square,” “lost square,” “square of salvation,” “square of no hope.” He enjoyed scandalizing his friends with pranks and practical jokes: he would kick a visitor from behind and pretend nothing had happened; he would lie down on the floor of a taxi, like a dog; he would let each plate crash to the floor while washing up, until Georgette objected. Magritte was ostentatiously devoted to his dogs. Where he went, they went; where they could not go, he would not go. If they were not permitted in the restaurant, he dined in the kitchen. When he flew to the United States, Loulou was on board.
 
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Magritte’s painting borrows freely from both film and photography, genres that influenced him deeply, and in which he participated. His paintings share the deadpan of silent films; his silent films share the bizarrerie of the paintings. The films animate the paintings, as if splicing them together into a kind of tragi-comic strip. As home movies, they afford a glimpse of Magritte at play. Like John Ford, he had his own stock company. In total, more than three hours of his short films have been preserved, in the archives of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts and the Film Museum in Brussels, and the Flemish Broadcasting Company. Jef Cornelis has made a compilation of extracts, A Weekend with Mr. Magritte (1997); and there is also a documentary, René Magritte, cinéaste (1974), by Catherine de Croës and Francis de Lulle. Other documentaries were made about him, with his collaboration, notably Magritte, ou la leçon des choses (Magritte, or the Lesson of Things, 1960), by the anthropologist Luc de Heusch, and Magritte: The Middle Class Magician (1964), by George Melly and Jonathan Miller, for the BBC.
 
Magritte lent himself to portraiture, by some of the most adventurous photographers of the day, including Bill Brandt, Georges Thiry, Raoul Ubac, and Man Ray himself. In 1965 he colluded in a suitably off-beat series in his own home, by Duane Michals. A selection of his own photographs from 1928 to 1955 was published in 1976, bearing the quintessentially Magrittian title La Fidelité des images (The Faithfulness of Images)—a title supplied by Scutenaire, who also furnished the captions. Magritte continued to play with the possibilities of the medium all his life.8 Sometimes photographs echo paintings; sometimes they testify to the nature of his relationship with Georgette; sometimes both. “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it,” said Isidore Ducasse, alias the Comte de Lautréamont, and Magritte certainly knew his Lautréamont: his illustrated edition of Les Chants de Maldoror is a classic—but he gave much more than he took. Marcel Broodthaers madeno fewer than eight films featuring the signature pipe, including one called This Wouldn’t Be a Pipe (1970). Magritte haunts the imagination of filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock to David Lynch. He feeds The Simpsons: one episode features his painting Le Fils de l’homme (The Son of Man), an earlier version of La Grande Guerre, the face masked by an apple; the title sequence of another has a Magrittian couch gag, captioned “Ceci n’est pas un couch gag.” Like all great artists, his posthumous productivity knows no bounds. A collaboration with Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Fair Captive, was issued first in a novel (1975) and then as a film (1983), both of them punctuated by Magrittian images and pervaded by that familiar yet disturbing atmosphere (“steeped in a surreal eroticism,” according to the Independent Film Quarterly).
 
Magritte, with his photographic memory and photographic eye, would never have called himself a philosopher, but he did call himself a thinker—a thinker in paint. When Foucault suggested an affinity with the writer Raymond Roussel, Magritte responded, “I am pleased that you recognize a resemblance between Roussel and whatever is worthwhile in my own thought. What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner.” Magritte could be a little Delphic, but for the most part his writing is admirably direct. He wrote a great deal: hundreds of letters, many of them published (in French) or available in the archives; a variety of short texts, including detective stories; revolutionary thoughts on the relations between words and images; and an intriguing essay in autobiography—probably inspired by his surrealist stablemate Max Ernst, and more distantly by Edgar Allan Poe. His Écrits complets (1979) run to more than seven hundred pages.
 
When an American correspondent asked what lay behind a certain image, he replied, “There is nothing ‘behind’ this image. (Behind the paint of the painting there is the canvas. Behind the canvas there is a wall, behind the wall, there is . . . etc. Visible things always hide other visible things, but a visible image hides nothing.)” Images may have nothing to hide, but they are not innocent. La Trahison des images is one of Magritte’s basic propositions. It is matched by a kind of picture-object, Ceci est un morceau de fromage (This Is a Piece of Cheese), a painting of a piece of cheese, the tasty morsel on a pedestal, under a glass dome: a readymade and a cheese board, all in one. This piece of cheese looks too good to be true, like pop art Gorgonzola, while an earlier version looks exactly like a quarter of Brie. A cheese is a cheese is a cheese, but a pipe is not always a pipe. In Liberté de l’esprit (Freedom of Mind), it is one of the most eroticized objects ever held in the palm of the hand.
 
A measure of Magritte’s influence is the fascination he holds for artists of all sorts. Mark Rothko once said, “Magritte, of course, is a case apart, but there’s a certain quality in his work which I find in all the abstract painting that I like. And I hope that my own painting has that quality.” He was an inspiration for Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; both collected his work. In the mid-1960s Johns acquired La Clef des songes, a word painting, and a page of sketches; he received Les Deux Mystères (The Two Mysteries), a ballpoint-pen drawing of the pipe motif, as a gift from the artist himself. Andy Warhol was a devotee. Marcel Broodthaers appropriated his iconography and copied what he was trying to do: “Magritte aimed at the development of a poetic language to undermine that upon which we depend.” Henri Michaux wrote a brilliant analysis of his art. Jeff Koons is another admirer and collector. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) begins and ends with Magritte: from The Key of Dreams (Le Clef des songes) to On the Threshold of Liberty (Au seuil de la liberté) [color plate 2].
 
And in the wider “pop” culture, the Beatles were fans. When John Lennon invited Yoko Ono to his house for the first time, the first thing he said when she arrived was, “I think of myself as Magritte.” Yoko herself is reported to have a fine collection. Paul McCartney bought his first Magrittes from the New York art dealer Alexander Iolas in 1966; he continues to collect to this day. When the contents of Magritte’s studio were auctioned, after Georgette’s death, Linda McCartney acquired his easel, work table, palette, paintboxes, paints, brushes, and other paraphernalia, including a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles, for Paul. Magritte’s apple—perhaps a descendant of the apple that fell on the head of Isaac Newton—takes its place in a symbolic lineage that carries through to the ubiquitous logo of the Apple Corps, just as the sky bird logo of Sabena Airlines derived from his Oiseau de Ciel (Sky Bird)—“a contract which put a good deal of butter on my spinach,” as the artist reported—and the CBS logo of an eye in the sky bore an uncanny resemblance to his Le Faux Miroir (False Mirror); not to mention countless book covers, album covers, posters, and commercials of all kinds.20 The canny advertiser has launched countless advertising campaigns. He is the man who brought the frisson of the surreal to Madison Avenue. Magritte sells cars and cartoons, sex and subversion. He is high-concept and low-toned. His influence on our culture is all-pervasive. In ways that we now take for granted, René Magritte is the dream merchant of our time.
 
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