The faithful images, RenГ© Magritte, the cinemaphotography and the photography, Midland Group (Nottingham, England), Louis Scutenaire, A. Clarke, Midland Group, 1978, 0950491160, 9780950491165, . .

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Magritte and photography , Patrick Roegiers, Palais des beaux-arts (Brussels, Belgium), Dec 5, 2005, , 167 pages. "Rene Magritte, the great Surrealist painter, begin experimenting with photography at an early age. While still a young student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, he ....

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The piece depicts a scene of nearly identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, who seem to be drops of heavy rain (or to be floating like helium balloons, though there is no actual indication of motion), against a backdrop of buildings and blue sky. The men are spaced in rhombic grids facing the viewpoint and receding back in grid layers.

"Magritte was fascinated by the seductiveness of images. Ordinarily, you see a picture of something and you believe in it, you are seduced by it; you take its honesty for granted. But Magritte knew that representations of things can lie. These images of men aren't men, just pictures of them, so they don't have to follow any rules. This painting is fun, but it also makes us aware of the falsity of representation."[1]

One interpretation is that Magritte is demonstrating the line between individuality and group association, and how it is blurred. All of these men are dressed the same, have the same bodily features and are all floating/falling. This leaves us to look at the men as a group. Whereas if we look at each person, we can predict that they may be completely different to another figure.

As was often the case with Magritte's works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golkonda is a ruined city in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, near Hyderabad, which from the mid-14th century until the end of the 17th was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a synonym for 'mine of wealth'."

Louis Scutenaire is chiefly remembered as a central figure in the Belgian Surrealist movement, along with René Magritte, Paul Nougé, and his own wife Irène Hamoir. He studied law at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and was a criminal lawyer from 1931 to 1944. In 1926 he discovered and was a primary contributor to the Revue surréaliste. He was sympathetic to communism during the 1930s and 1940s but as the truth about 's regime became more apparent, he grew disenchanted with it and became an anarchist. After the Second World War he became a civil servant in the Belgian Ministry of the Interior, a job he kept for the rest of his life.

Scutenaire grew disillusioned with the increasing commercialisation of Surrealism after the Second World War, but this did not apparently impair his close friendship with the most famous Belgian surrealist René Magritte. Scutenaire and his wife would visit the Magritte home on Sundays, where Scutenaire would be invited to give titles to Magritte's recent paintings; 170 of the paintings still bear the titles that Scutenaire suggested. (He is also the model for the figure in Magritte's canvas Universal Gravitation.)

Scutenaire's published works include a series of books entitled Mes Inscriptions, collections of gnomic and mischievous aphorisms, as well as one of the earliest and most entertaining monographs on Magritte. He was awarded in 1985 the Grand Prix spécial de l'Humour noir in recognition of his achievements as a writer with a lifelong distrust of authority and institution.

Between 1926 and 1938 René Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967) developed key strategies and techniques to defamiliarize the familiar—to make, in his words, “everyday objects shriek aloud.― During this period of intense innovation he was closely aligned with the Surrealist movement, and his work of these years constituted an important new approach to Surrealist art.

This exhibition begins with paintings and collages Magritte created in Brussels in 1926 and 1927, in anticipation of and immediately following his solo exhibition at the Galerie Le Centaure—the exhibition that launched his career as Belgium’s leading, indeed only, Surrealist painter—and then follows him to Paris, where he lived from 1927 to 1930, to be closer to the movement’s center. It concludes in 1938, the year he delivered “La Ligne de vie― (“Lifeline―), an autobiographical lecture that provided an account of his career as a Surrealist.

Like the other artists and poets associated with the Surrealist movement, Magritte sought to overthrow what he saw as the oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society. His art during these essential years is at times violent, frequently disturbing, and filled with discontinuities. He consistently interrogated conventions of language and visual representation, using methods that included the misnaming of objects, doubling and repetition, mirroring and concealment, and the depiction of visions seen in half-waking states—all of them devices that cast doubt on the nature of appearances, both in the paintings and in reality itself. The persistent tension Magritte maintained during these years between nature and artifice, truth and fiction, reality and surreality is one of the profound achievements of his art. Magritte’s first solo exhibition, held at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels in 1927, included 12 papiers collés, or collages. Such works were made of printed paper along with watercolor, pencil, and charcoal, juxtaposing mass-produced imagery with the handmade. Most of the printed paper is sheet music, cut from the score of a 1907 English operetta, The Girls of Gottenberg, by George Grossmith, Jr., and L. E. Berman. These early collages include what would become the artist’s signature motifs: bowler hats, theater curtains, mysterious landscapes, and bilboquets (a term that refers to a toy but in Magritte's work evokes many other objects). Among them Le Jockey perdu (The Lost Jockey) has a singular status: In September 1926 the poet Camille Goemans, Magritte’s friend (and later his dealer), compared the figure of the mounted jockey “hurtling recklessly into the void― to the artist himself.

“I like a lot Le Jockey perdu in the world of bowling pins. [...] The papiers collés go back to outdated processes: music paper cut in the form of pins, fashion plates headless and without hands arranged on abstract surfaces.― – Armand Eggermont, Review of Exposition Magritte, Galerie Le Centaure, 1927, in Le Thyrse, May 8, 1927, p. 214

In 1924 André Breton, a poet and the leader of the Surrealist group, wrote that the movement was based in the “omnipotence of the dream.― This is a realm Magritte explored to deliberately mysterious effect in this dramatically lit scene. A motionless, bowler-hatted figure with closed eyes stands upon a beachlike platform strewn with puffy, oddly earthbound clouds. Behind him is another man, his back to us, apparently identically dressed. The pair appear oblivious to the disturbing and erotically suggestive form, half-human and half-fur, that intrudes at the lower right, a hybrid creature that is reminiscent of the commercial catalog illustrations that Magritte produced in 1926 and 1927 for the Brussels furrier La Maison Samuel. Paintings like L’Assassin menacé and Le Sens de la nuit mark the first appearance in his art of the bowler-hatted man, a figure Magritte would later adopt as a signature motif and alter ego.

Painted for his first solo exhibition, in 1927, L’Assassin menacé is one of Magritte’s largest and most theatrical compositions. A prose poem composed the same year by the Belgian Surrealist Paul Nougé, possibly in collaboration with the painter, describes many elements in this sinister scene, among them “an almost naked woman, a corpse of rare perversity.―

The vacantly staring figures and everyday objects, all rendered in Magritte’s flat, deadpan style, underscore what the Belgian abstract artist Pierre Flouquet characterized as the painting’s “banal crime.― Like many of the Surrealists, Magritte was an avid fan of the pre–World War I popular crime fiction series Fantômas; he borrowed the placement of the two detective figures flanking the doorframe from Le Mort qui tue (The Murderous Corpse), a film from the series first released in 1913.

"In this room, amidst a minimal litter of underclothing, there is an almost naked woman, a corspe of rare perversity. Were it not for this dead woman, nothing could disturb so peaceful an interior. Everything in it is neat and tranquil: the spotless floor, the uncluttered table, a tall pedestal table of dark wood. And with the scarf draped softly over the neck, over the shoulder, over the astonishing wound, it would require a certain effort to imagine a severed head. On the table—fittingly enough—a meditative cat observes the corpse. Turning his back on the dead woman, a young man of great beauty dressed with the most restrained elegance, leaning slightly foward, leaning even so slightly over a gramophone, listens.On his lips, perhaps a smile. At his feet, a suitcase. On a chair, his hat and his overcoat. In the background, at the level of the window sill, four heads stare at the murderer. In the corridor, on either side of the wide-open door, two men are approaching, unable as yet to discern the spectacle.They are ugly customers. Crouching, they hug the wall. One of them unfurls a huge net, the other brandishes a sort of club. All this will be called: 'The murderer threatened.'" – Written 1927, Published in Paul Nougé, Histoire de ne pas rire. Brussels: Les Lèvres nues, 1956.

Paul Nougé was a biochemist and the leader of the Brussels Surrealist group, and from 1924 on he and Magritte were close friends and collaborators. Magritte's portrait of Nougé is reminiscent of images made for the stereoscope, a precinematic device in which two slightly overlapping photographs are viewed side by side to create the illusion of depth. Here two seemingly identical, formally dressed men stand in front of a wall perforated by biomorphic shapes that resemble cells, partially separated by fragments of what might be a door. Commenting in 1960 on his use of the doppelgänger, Magritte remarked, "The appearance of the figure assumes its mysterious virtue when it is accompanied by its reflection.― Through the use of doubling, Magritte challenges the conventional idea that a portrait should represent a singular self or an individual. Neither image is Nougé: both are representations.

A theatrical red curtain at right announces the staged and artificial character of this scene. Magritte borrowed and recombined aspects of previous work in this image: the forest of branch-sprouting bilboquets (Magritte’s term for these forms, referring to a cup and ball game that children play) revisits the setting of Le Jockey perdu, a collage from 1926, while the flying tortoise, based on an illustration in the Larousse encyclopedia, appears in an earlier painting. Reassembled in this mysterious open-air drama, these elements contribute to its eerie, discomfiting quality—what Magritte described as a “maximum effect of displacement.―

Doubling was one of Magritte’s favorite strategies for reminding us that pictures of things are not the same as the things themselves. This precisely doubled image, interrupted by three black lines, resembles a card for a stereoscopic viewer, a device that produces the illusion of three-dimensionality from two identical but slightly offset photographs. The twin figures with their stiff posture, bald heads, and round modeling recall shop-window dummies, while the jaggedly cut edges of their faces and torsos suggest a contradictory two-dimensional thinness. This image imitates the cut-and-paste technique of paper collage, and in a rare and whimsical introduction of a nonpainted element, Magritte “attached― the abstract white shapes with 12 actual snap fasteners pushed into the canvas’s surface.

This violent and erotically charged image combines the artist's enduring fascination with popular crime dramas and his more recent experiments with formal metamorphosis. Magritte confirmed that the painting represented "an attempted rape[. . .]. I have treated this subject, this terror that grips the woman, by means of a subterfuge, a reversal of the laws of space[. . .]." The bulky, sculptural bodies of the nude woman and the man who attacks her are superimposed within a single silhouette. Magritte's radical cropping of the man's body performs its own type of violence, as does the exaggerated musculature of the woman's right forearm. Firmly pressed against her attacker's shoulder, it introduces a wedge of space between what might otherwise read as flat images, collaged one upon the other, fundamentally subverting the physical rules of pictorial representation.

A man in an overcoat and fedora hat stands among a cluster of amorphous forms, each inscribed with a single word in carefully lettered script: fusil (gun), nuage (cloud), fauteuil (chair), cheval (horse), horizon (horizon). One of the first word-and-image paintings Magritte completed after moving to Paris, the work recalls one of the propositions Magritte would publish the following year in La Révolution Surrealiste: "Sometimes the names written in a picture indicate definite things and the images indefinite things. Or vice versa." Some of the ambiguous shapes occupy the physical space suggested by their inscription: nuage floats in the sky, and horizon rests at the meeting point of sky and ground. The irregular forms evoke the biomorphic motifs of his Surrealist colleagues Joan Miró and , but Magritte also seems to parody such types of abstraction by attaching specific words to his forms and granting them physical presence through the shadows they cast on the ground.

This image of an artist in the process of depicting a nude woman is one of Magritte's most direct interrogations of the act of painting. The female subject is clearly Magritte's wife, Georgette, and Magritte likely modeled the painter on himself. Like a sculpture, the woman seems to inhabit the same dimensional space as the painter, and yet Magritte points to the powerful artifice of his own pictorial illusionism by leaving the female figure in a partially incomplete state. The painting pays homage to his wife, even as its title invokes the impossibility of fully capturing the object of desire on a canvas surface. Tentative de l'impossible is frequently interpreted as a reimagining of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which a sculptor falls in love with his carving of an ideal woman and solicits the intercession of the goddess Venus, who brings the statue to life. Long recognized as an allegory of artistic creation, it remained a popular theme among the Surrealists for its emphasis on transformation, eros, and desire.

In this work Magritte presents the equivalent visual and verbal signs for the concept ciel (French for “sky―) in two identically shaped panels: on the left in a trompe l’oeil depiction of an atmospheric patch of blue sky, captured and brought down to earth, and on the right with the word ciel in black script, austerely flat and precise. Set in a nondescript interior with a wood-paneled wall and floor, the angular framed panels of this word-image pair recall the backs of stretched canvases leaning against a wall, yet the deep shadows they cast suggest freestanding objects, propped up by some invisible mechanism. In combination, these puzzling components probe the complex relationship between words and images, as well as the tropes and conventions of painterly representation.

Magritte was an important contributor to the final issue of the Surrealist journal La Révolution Surréaliste, which was published in December 1929. This issue opened with Surrealist leader André Breton’s “Second Manifeste du Surréalisme― (“Second Surrealist Manifesto―), which began to orient Surrealism away from the escape of rational control and toward social issues and self-observation during the artistic process. It was within this new atmosphere that Magritte’s contributions appeared, announcing his new prominence within the Surrealist movement.

One of Magritte’s contributions was a word-image essay entitled “Les Mots et les images― (“Words and Images―). This essay summed up his two years of intense exploration into how language and images function. He began his essay, “An object is not so possessed of its name that one cannot find for it another which suits it better.― Below this appears a drawing of a leaf labeled with the words “le canon― (“the canon―). This sets up the idea, developed throughout the essay, that reality as we know it is not fixed but constructed. He later explained that the pairing of words with images and the misnaming of objects were “means devised to force objects out of the ordinary, to become sensational, and so establish a profound link between consciousness and the external world.―

Magritte’s second major contribution comprised photo-booth portraits of 16 Surrealists arranged around a reproduction of Magritte’s 1929 painting La Femme cachée (The Hidden Woman). This painting depicts a nude woman with the words “je ne vois pas la…cachée dans le foret― (“I do not see the…hidden in the forest―) written above and below her. The 16 Surrealists were photographed with their eyes closed, evoking the worlds of dreams and the unconscious. Magritte is pictured on the right, in the second row from the bottom.

The two sections of this divided image juxtapose the painting’s representational tricks with the flat artificiality of icons. Below the schematic silhouettes of four common objects on the right section, a trompe l’oeil tear appears to rip through the canvas, penetrating it to reveal a black space like that of the section adjoining. The skillful naturalism of the painted tear and faux-bois edging makes a stark contrast with the abstract, indecipherable form of the tangled wire on the left and the flat, cut-out silhouettes.

"The marvelous extends insidiously to more familiar objects and here they take on a disturbing and unusual air.... "The alphabet of revelations" truly gives new meaning to things, draws attention to everyday objects so that one loses the habit of considering them, a glass, a key, and suddenly illuminating them, at the instant when one least expects it, tears them from their quotidian character and imposes them on our spirit, heavy with a mysterious weight. This with such persuasive power that we forget the names of these objects and their essence, to only see in them a new form, a form truly "strange", free from habit, whose the destination will reveal itself." – Guy Mangeot. "Après la peinture: Dalí, , Chirico, Picasso, René Magritte." Documents 33, no. 1, April 1933. p. 20

Le Faux miroir presents an enormous lashless eye with a luminous cloud-swept blue sky filling the iris and an opaque, dead-black disc for a pupil. The allusive title, provided by the Belgian Surrealist writer Paul Nougé, seems to insinuate limits to the authority of optical vision: a mirror provides a mechanical reflection, but the eye is selective and subjective. Magritte’s single eye functions on multiple enigmatic levels: the viewer both looks through it, as through a window, and is looked at by it, thus seeing and being seen simultaneously. The Surrealist photographer , who owned the work from 1933 to 1936, recognized this compelling duality when he memorably described Le Faux miroir as a painting that “sees as much as it itself is seen.―

"Tell Rene Magritte that I'm delighted he wants a photograph of mine, and I await with great curiosity the drawing he is sending me. His 'eye of the sky' is hanging in my apartment, and it sees many things! For once, a picture sees as much as it is seen itself." Letter from Man Ray to E.L.T. Mesens, July 12, 1933. E.L.T. Mesens Papers, The Getty Research Institute Special Collections http://edufb.net/63.pdf http://edufb.net/83.pdf http://edufb.net/37.pdf http://edufb.net/79.pdf http://edufb.net/35.pdf http://edufb.net/83.pdf http://edufb.net/52.pdf http://edufb.net/92.pdf