Many of the Photographs Displayed Here Relate Directly to the Paintings
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Many of the photographs displayed here relate directly NOTE: to the paintings and objects Magritte created during exterior blue the period covered by this exhibition. Others highlight his interest in performing for the camera in ways that correspond to ideas expressed in his works. In one he poses next to a painting of Fantômas (entitled Le Barbare [The Barbarian, 1927] and subsequently destroyed), a fictional master criminal admired by the Surrealists for his challenge of social taboos. Magritte wears what became his trademark bowler hat, the headpiece of the common man, thereby identifying himself with both the everyday bourgeoisie and the fantastic underbelly of reality. Although the photographers are in most cases uniden- tified, Magritte almost certainly directed the staging of the images or collaborated in their making. The idea of placing a painting of a piece of cheese NOTE:blue under a glass dome came from the Belgian Surrealist case 78% poet Paul Colinet. The title is a joking play on the “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe) inscrip- tion on La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images, 1929) and a humorous reversal of that negative statement into a positive declaration: this is a piece of cheese, although of course it is not. Magritte made three versions of this painting-object, although he likely left the selection of the glass dome and pedestal for this version’s first public appear- ance, in the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition at the London Gallery in November 1937, to the exhibition’s organizers. Magritte produced three of these small, peculiar, meticulously painted objects; shown here are the second and third versions. Each depicts a single eye and partial view of a woman’s face as if seen through NOTE:blue a circular peephole opening. The artist’s patron, the case 78% Belgian playwright Claude Spaak, commissioned the first version (with a brown eye) after admiring a piece of antique jewelry containing a similar eye portrait, perhaps of the type worn as a locket or brooch in the eighteenth century. Magritte produced the second version, with green eyes, as a gift for his own wife, Georgette. He mounted the versions displayed here in custom-made and custom-painted square wooden boxes, confirming their status as the painted objects of the title. Magritte endeavored to give all his works what NOTE: three he considered to be poetic titles. He used these labels:white, frequently mysterious appellations to further blue, and complicate the meanings of his already enigmatic exterior blue images. Many of the titles were the result of bl creative collaboration among those in the artist’s circle. Illogical and irrelevant to the subjects rendered, they abetted the Surrealist goal of subverting viewers’ expectations and redirecting their focus to truly seeing, as Magritte described In his 1938 lecture “La Ligne de vie” (“Lifeline”): “The titles of paintings were chosen in such a way as to inspire in the spectator an appropriate mistrust of any mediocre tendency to facile self- assurance.” Given the significance that Magritte accorded to his titles, this exhibition’s labels privilege his original, multivalent French, with English translations provided in parentheses. In this unsettling image—the first in a series of four NOTE:Two variations of Les Amants that Magritte painted in labels: 1928—the artist invokes the cinematic cliché of a white and close-up kiss but subverts our voyeuristic pleasure blue by shrouding the faces in cloth. The device of a draped cloth or veil to conceal a figure’s identity corresponds to a larger Surrealist interest in masks, disguises, and what lies beyond or beneath visible surfaces. The melodramatic scene may also relate to the graphic illustrations that accompanied pulp fiction and thriller stories, which Magritte’s friend Paul Nougé, in a letter from 1927, encouraged the artist to emulate. A man holding a smoldering (although oddly NOTE: blue smokeless) cigarette focuses intently on an empty tabletop. The notable blankness of the right side of the composition emphasizes the absence of any object for the man’s gaze. X-ray examination of this pain ting has revealed that it originally contained a second figure on the right: another man in a suit, leaning across the table. That Magritte ultimately decided to paint out the right-hand figure sugg ests that he recognized the potential for mystery in absence rather than presence in this particular scenario. By inscribing the word montagne (mountain) across a NOTE: blue woman’s face, Magritte transformed this otherwise conventionally posed portrait, based on a photograph of one of his wife’s friends, into a surprising and curious image. The text appears to hover in front of the woman, parallel to the surface of picture plane, in contrast with the illusory three-dimensional space she occupies. With no clear link between the meaning of the word and the depicted woman, the painting inspires the mind of the viewer to “create new relation- ships between words and objects,” as Magritte said, “and to bring out certain features of language and of objects that are commonly overlooked in the everyday process of living.” Various cropped and distorted body parts, stretched NOTE: blue as if made of rubber, seem to melt and morph in a sinuous, arabesque arrangement; a tuba and a shotgun appear as mysterious props in an ambiguous theatrical space whose architecture opens onto the clouds. Like the ideas evoked in the title, such a vision is only realizable in the realm of painting. Magritte described this painting in 1956 to his friend, the art dealer and collector E. L. T. (Édouard Léon Théodore) Mesens, as “one of the finest pictures that exist and that you possess.” Words replace recognizable objects in this vaguely NOTE: blue cartographical composition. The French phrases for “person losing his (or her) memory” and “woman’s body” occupy two amorphously contoured cell- shaped compartments. At the top of the painting, in capital letters, the word paysage (landscape) arcs across the surface as if to delineate its territory, while a short line links the word cheval (horse) to an irregular black blob at the lower right. The enigmatic arrangement of biomorphic forms in an open field supplemented by writing is countered by the matter- of-fact, descriptive character of Magritte’s words. With its uniform black border and serial imagery, NOTE: blue the gridded format of this composition recalls a photographic contact sheet or the successive frames of a film reel. Magritte rendered the same image— a bourgeois domestic interior—in each of the four frames, except for the upper-left quadrant, where a seated man reading a newspaper appears. Magritte based the image on an engraved illustration from a Dr. Bilz’s household medical encyclopedia of natural remedies, published in 1895. His decision to alter and repeat this image three times over, however, subverts any instructional value the source illustration may once have had. The cast shadow of a mysteriously freestanding NOTE: blue frame with a plaque reading paysage (landscape) suggests that the frame is empty and serves no conventional function. A realistically rendered shotgun leaning abandoned against a saturated red wall contributes to the scene’s unsettling atmosphere. Magritte apparently considered titling the painting Edgar Poe, in homage to his favorite poet, but ultimately settled on the paradoxical title it bears today. Writers, however, have continued to link the image to the passage from Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) that observes, “It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see.” The heavily worked surface of this small painting is NOTE: blue unusual for Magritte. Amorphous blobs of brown paint are built up so thickly that they resemble crumpled paper. Below the vaguely pipe-shaped form on the right, la pipe is rendered in equally textured impasto. This painting is a predecessor of Magritte’s iconic La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images, 1929), on view nearby, which pairs a realistic, clearly legible image of a pipe with the contradictory caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). The form in this painting, however, is almost as abstract as the unidentified blob to its left. Four fluidly connected biomorphic forms, each NOTE: blue containing a word or phrase, float like comic strip thought bubbles across the surface of Magritte’s enigmatically titled Le Miroir vivant. Reading clock- wise from lower left, the words read “wardrobe,” “person roaring with laughter,” “horizon,” and “bird calls.” Despite the absence of recognizable visual imagery, the carefully rendered letters combine in a random-seeming but evocative mixture of objects, sounds, and ideas. With the deceptively straightforward pronouncement NOTE: blue “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), this iconic painting declares that an image is not the same as what it purports to represent. Magritte presents a skillfully realistic likeness of a pipe, rendered with the direct clarity of a shop sign or school primer. The title further focuses attention on the slippery relation- ship between words and images at the heart of Magritte’s work of this period. According to the artist, “This image, which immediately suggests a pipe, shows clearly, because of the words accompanying it, that only through a persistent misuse of language could one say: ‘It is a pipe.’” “Who could smoke the pipe from one of my paintings?” Magritte later wrote. “Nobody. Hence it is not a pipe.“ The two sections of this divided image juxtapose NOTE: blue the painting’s representational tricks with the flat artificiality of icons. Below the schematic silhouettes of four common objects on the right section, a rip through the canvas appears to reveal a black space like that of the section adjoining.