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Magritte: Revolution By Stealth
| Article
# : |
19952 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
1,709 Words |
| Author
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Jane Addams Allen
Jane Addams Allen is an award-winning art critic who now
resides in Cornwall, England. |
Picasso was more famous; Salvador Dali was more outrageous. But of all the surrealist painters, the most successful revolutionary was the Belgian Rene Magritte (1898-1967). Like a stealthy thief who rearranges your possessions so cleverly you don't notice that anything's missing, Magritte recreated the modern world in his own unsettling idiom. His images are everywhere, although his name is not attached. Variations on Magritte's pictures have appeared in whiskey ads and car commercials, record jackets and wallpaper, billboards and fabrics. A few years back CBS adapted Le Faux Miroir (The false mirror), Magritte's image of a transparent eye superimposed over a cumulus-laden blue sky, for its logo. Advertisers love his images because they are so eye-catching and durable. But each startling juxtapostion of objects insinuates a subversive idea that can turn certainty into doubt and reassurance into anxiety.
At least a dozen of Magritte's pictures are so famous they evoke instant visual recognition. Some have entered into the public domain of visual clich?, like La Condition Humaine (The human condition), where the landscape on an easel replaces and obscures the view through the window behind it. Others, like Le Viol (The rape)--his image of a woman's face with breasts for eyes and the public triangle for a mouth, still have the power to shock after hundredth viewing. This static image has probably done more to raise consciousness about the vulnerability of violated women than reams of feminist tracts.
Yet in many respects Magritte is a neglected modern master. His name is less familiar than his images. Painted almost photographically with crisp edges and carefully rendered textures, his pictures do not evoke an image of their maker as do Picasso's and Dali's. His habitual style is anonymous, even journalistic. In part because of his meticulous realism, he never had an assured place in the Modernist canon. The last major U.S. exhibition of his works was mounted in 1965; the last in Great Britain, in 1969. Only a few scholars are familiar with the total range of his eclectic oeuvre.
Anyone who believes that the famous pictures are the sum total of Magritte's contribution to twentieth-century art is in for a surprise. A major retrospective mounted by London's Hayward Gallery--in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Houston Menil collection, and the Art Institute of Chicago--now brings together works in a large range of media from all periods of his life, from his early Cubist paintings to his rarely seen flirtations with erotic Impressionism and raunchy Expressionism. His sculpture is represented too by
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