N 6300.6 UL

FACULTE DES LETTRES T/ (

RENÉ MAGRITTE. A CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION

MICHELINE JÔEMETS

Mémoire présenté pour F obtention du grade de maître ès arts (M.A.)

ÉCOLE DES GRADUÉS UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL

AVRIL 1991

(c) droits réservés de Micheline Jôemets 1991 SUMMARY

This essay examines René Magritte’s works from 1925 to 1933. It posits that Magritte’s paintings underwent two distinct stages of resistance to commodity relations, one around 1925-1927, the other starting in 1933 with the development of a work process known as objet-réponse. It suggests that the two stages of resistance to commodity relations were founded on opposite modes of construction. The works dating from the early years are understood as being the result of a constant effort to negate the structural principles of the 'organic’ work of art, while the works dating from 1933, are understood as aiming for the creation of a new value system, one which transcends the rational and quantitative norms imposed by reified society.

Cet ouvrage examine les oeuvres de René Magritte datant de 1925 à 1933. L’auteur considère les oeuvres crées au cours de ces années comme appartenant à deux moments distincts d’un même cheminement critique des relations marchandes. Le premier moment est situé de 1925 à 1927, le second en 1933, au seuil de la découverte d’un processus de formation d’images appelé "objet- réponse". Ces deux périodes sont considérées comme étant basées sur des modes de construction opposés. Les oeuvres datant de la première période sont perçues comme étant le résultat d’une volonté de nier les principes structurels de l’oeuvre "organique". Les oeuvres construites d’après le modèle de T objet- réponse sont, quant à elles, interprétées en tant que tentative de transcender les limites strictement quantitatives et rationelles imposées à tout objet par les rapports marchands. Cette poursuite vers un dépassement de la valeur d’échange s’établit grâce à la construction de liens et d’images qui débordent toutes considérations pratiques.

Signatures: Micheline Jôemets,

Elliott Moore; _ I would like to thank all those who have given me their support during the time of research leading up to the completion of this work:

Elliott Moore, Mariette G arceau and Elmar Jôemets, Viivi Jôemets and Pierre Jôemets, Valérie Perrault and Barry Holms, Jacinta Ferrari and Calvin Meiklejohn, Angèle Boulay m

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SUMMARY ...... I TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... Ill LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... V

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 I. MAGRITTE, 1925 TO 1927 ...... 4 Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur...... 4 Le Jockey perdu ...... 8 The organic and non organic work of art...... 12 The 1927 show...... 18 A neutral style ...... 20 The use of space...... 22 Collages ...... 26 The notion of space: Magritte and Brecht...... 28 Le retour à l’ordre and Magritte’s destruction of spatial and semantic unity...... 31 A reaction to modernism...... 38

H. THE YEARS 1928 TO 1930 ...... 44 A move to Paris ...... 44 A shift in tension from space to objects...... 47 Les Mots et les images ...... 48 Vague figures have a meaning as necessary and perfect as precise ones ...... 49 A word can take the place of an object in reality .... 51 The irrational combination of objects as a criticism of reification...... 52 a) Lukâcs’ theory of reification...... 53 The construction of an image through negation ...... 57

HI. THE DISCOVERY OF THEOBJET-RÉPONSE - 1933 . . 61 Les Affinités électives ...... 61 Les Vacances de Hegel...... 63 The two versions...... 66 The relationship between title and work...... 68 Use value, exchange value, poetic value...... 71 The objects ...... 74 Isolation as a means of intensifying effect...... 75 Détournement...... 76 The objet-réponse as a form of détournement ...... 79 The inclusion of space in the formation of objet-réponse...... 83 La Condition humaine ...... 84 CONCLUSION...... 89

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... i ILLUSTRATIONS...... vii V

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur. 1924. Oil on canvas, 55 x 40 cm. Mrs Magritte collection.

Fig. 2. Le Jockey perdu. 1926. Oil on canvas, 63,5 x 73,5 cm. Mrs. R. Michel collection.

Fig. 3. Femmes. 1922. Oil on canvas, 70,2 x 100,2 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 4. Femmes. 1923. Oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 5. La Traversée difficile. 1926. Oil on canvas, 80 x 65,3 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 6. Le Supplice de la vestale. 1926-1927. Oil on canvas, 97,5 x 74,5 cm. Isy Brachot Gallery, Brussels-Paris.

Fig. 7. Le Jockey perdu. 1926. Paper, wash, ink, 39,5 x 60 cm. Harry Torczyner collection, New York

Fig. 8. Untitled. 1926. Paper, wash, ink, 55 x 40 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 9. Untitled. 1926. Paper, wash, ink, 40 x 55,5 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 10. Le Groupe silencieux. 1926. Oil on canvas, 120 x 80 cm. Isy Brachot Gallery, Brussels-Paris.

Fig. 11. Entracte. 1927. Oil on canvas, 114 x 161 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 12. Le Double secret. 1927. Oil on canvas, 114 x 162,5 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 13. Les Mots et les images. La révolution surréaliste. Paris, n° 12-15, 1929, p 32-33. VI

Fig. 14. La Sortie de l’école. 1927. Oil on canvas, 75 x 100 cm. Claude Spaak collection.

Fig. 15. Le Sens propre. 1928-1929. Oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm. Robert Rauschenberg collection, New York.

Fig. 16. Le Corps bleu. 1928-1929. Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. Mr. & Mrs. Orvalet collection, Brussels.

Fig. 17. Le Miroir vivant. 1926. Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm. Mrs Sonabend-Binder collection, Brussels.

Fig. 18. L’Usage de la parole. 1928. Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm. Rudolf Zwimer Gallery, Kôln.

Fig. 19. La Trahison des images. 1929. Oil on canvas, 62,2 x 81 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Fig. 20. Les Affinités électives. 1933-1934. Oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm. Etienne Périer collection, Paris.

Fig. 21. Les Vacances de Hegel. 1958. Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm. Isy Brachot Gallery, Brussels-Paris.

Fig. 22. Les Vacances de Hegel. 1959. Oil on canvas, 48 x 38 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 23. Le Modèle rouge. 1935. Oil on canvas, 55,9 x 45,8 cm. Collection Musée National d’Art Moderne; Centre National d’Art et Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Fig. 24. Letter written by René Magritte to Suzi Gablik, May 19, 1958.

Fig. 25. Le Mariage de minuit. 1926-1927. Oil on canvas, 139,5 x 105,5 cm. Musées Royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels.

Fig. 26. La Réponse imprévue. 1933. Oil on canvas, 82 x 54,5 cm. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. vn

Fig. 27. La Condition humaine. 1934. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Private collection, Paris.

Fig. 28. Le Chant de Corage. 1937. Oil on canvas, 66,2 x 54,9 cm. Scottish National Gallery of Art.

Fig. 29. L’Empire des lumières. 1954. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. 1 INTRODUCTION

In this text I propose an interpretation of René Magritte’s works as a criticism of reification. Reification is the concretization of inter-human relations into materially definable instances and thence into commodities. Georg Lukâcs defined reification as follows:

Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a "phantom objectivity," an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.1

As a direct consequence of the division of labour and of specific dominant relations regulating the work force in the interest of a ruling class, a perfectly closed and quantitative system developed under capitalism which, by the end of World War I, had led to an extreme segmentation of life and had reduced it to a series of commercial transactions. The fundamental social relations which were at the heart of the production process had been transformed and distorted into relations between objects and goods, thereby obliterating their social origin. Commodity relations had, by this time, become the universal category of society as a whole and they began to permeate all spheres of human activity. René Magritte (1898-1967) was a member of the Belgian surrealist movement. I believe that Magritte’s works underwent two distinct stages of resistance to commodity relations, one around 1925-1927 and the other starting in 1933 with the development of a work process known as objet-réponse. I will attempt to

1 Georg Lukâcs, History and Class Consciousness, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1968), p 83. 2

give a detailed account of the ways in which both of these stages could, at the same time, propose a criticism of reification and differ significantly from one another in their critical approaches. It will further be suggested that the two stages of resistance to commodity relations were actually founded on opposite modes of construction.

I will attempt to demonstrate that the works produced in the 1925-1927 period were the result of a constant effort to negate the very notion of the "work of art" and that this attitude expressed itself, in part, through a conflictive representation of space.

Peter Bürger understands the development of the non organic work of art (a term which he uses to define the works produced by the historical avant-garde movements) as a moment in which art enters into self-criticism. For him, the non organic work of art developed in reaction to the autonomous and socially irrelevant status which characterized the institution of art in late modernism.

I will suggest that Bürger’s analysis of the non organic work of art can indeed serve as a basic theme with which it may be possible to approach the kind of negative processes observed in Magritte’s works of the 1925-1927 period. I

I will also argue that the works dating from 1933 were based on a constructive principle. Starting in 1928, the conflict and tension observed in the representation of space will be abandoned or rather transposed onto the representation of objects. The year 1933 will appear as the beginning of Magritte’s constructive work process known as objet-réponse. 3

It is my view that the construction principle upon which the objet-réponse depends implies an active resistance to the hegemonic commodity relations. In the initial part of the third chapter, I will attempt to demonstrate that by constructing images based on the complex and poetically expressive unification of two unrelated objects, Magritte refused to adhere to an externally defined exchange value. Instead, he proposed to transcend this purely quantitative attitude through the creation of a new value system based on poetic expression. If, by creating this new value system, which I define as poetic, Magritte can be said to distance his image from the concept of exchange value, it must also be observed that this criticism of reification is nevertheless restricted to the artistic sphere. In the subsequent part of the third chapter, I will compare the activity of the Situationist International and Magritte’s construction of an objet-réponse in order to demonstrate how, given similar goals, Magritte’s criticism remained nonetheless isolated within a specialized form of expression.

As a final note, I will also attempt to demonstrate that the changes observed in Magritte’s evolution from a destructive to a constructive approach can actually be traced back to specific historical developments in the evolution of the surrealist movement. MAGRITTE, 1925 TO 1927

La révolte contre le monde actuel signifie le refus de participer volontairement à l’activité de ce monde qui est au pouvoir de voyous et d’imbéciles. Elle signifie également la volonté d’agir contre ce monde et la recherche des moyens de le faire changer.

René Magritte, "La révolte en question", Le Soleil Noir, Paris, 1952.

Jeune fille avant une rose à la place du coeur

Magritte arrived in Brussels in the middle of the First World War (1916) at the age of 18. He entered VAcadémie des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles that year and remained there until 1918. It is in 1919 that he was first introduced to cubism and futurism. This first contact with the Italian movement occurred through a catalogue. Although Magritte never specified the source of this catalogue, it has been suggested that the exhibition to which it referred was the Grande Esposizi- one nationale futurista held in Milan in 1919, the preface to which had been 5 written by Marinetti.2 For Magritte, the exposure to this movement sparked the beginning of a series of futurist experiments which lasted until 1925.

In 1924 Magritte painted Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur (fig. 1). This painting depicts a young woman, nude but for stockings, leaning on the comer of a table in an otherwise empty room with no visible windows or doors. A drawn curtain is in the foreground, on the right side of the work. The figure is composed of flat uniform sections with little specific details. The featureless head is represented in profile. The hands, where they are not partially hidden, are represented as fiat curved forms. In the lower part of the body the curves and volumes are lightly modeled by chiaroscuro. Some parts of the upper body (arms, breast) are segmented by the opposition of tonal planes. Different shades of orange, brown, and yellow are used across the entire surface. With the exception of the floor and the stockings, which are respectively rendered in dark brown and black, the same limited palette is used for figure, room, table, walls, and curtains. In fact, the dark tones which define both the floor and the stockings isolate these areas from the rest of the image, particularly in the case of the floor, which can thereby be read both as part of the room and as an independent vertical plane serving as a partial background to the figure. A rose is painted below the woman’s right breast in a nuance of pink that highlights it against the otherwise drab surface.

In a text written in 1938, "Ligne de Vie I", Magritte described the years leading to 1925 as a period characterized by an abstract vision of the world. It was

2 René Magritte, Écrits Complets, (Paris, Flammarion, 1979), p. 125, footnote 13. 6

towards the end of this period, recalled Magritte, that he gradually awakened to the connections existing between the abstract style of his early futurist works and the abstract way that he perceived the world. He recollected how, for example, detailed and nuanced sceneries would suddenly appear to him as flat and void of any physical distance and depth, as if curtains had been placed before his eyes.3 He qualified this state as one of complete innocence, similar to that of a child mistakenly attempting to grasp objects situated beyond his reach. Referring to his futurist works, Magritte says:

Je fis alors des tableaux représentant des objets immobiles, dépouillés de leurs détails et de leurs particularités essentielles. Ces objets ne révélaient au regard que l’essentiel d’eux-mêmes et par opposition à l’image que nous voyons d’eux dans la vie réelle, où ils sont concrets, l’image peinte signifiait un sentiment très vif d’une existence abstraite. Or, cette opposition fut réduite; je finis par trouver dans l’apparence du monde réel lui-même la même abstraction que dans les tableaux; car malgré les combinaisons compliquées de détails et de nuances d’un paysage réel, je pouvais le voir comme s’il n’était qu’un rideau placé devant mes yeux. Je devins peu certain de la profondeur des campagnes, très peu persuadé de l’éloignement du bleu léger de l’horizon, l’expérience immédiate le situant simplement à la hauteur de mes yeux. J’étais dans le même état d’innocence que l’enfant qui croit pouvoir saisir de son berceau l’oiseau qui vole dans le ciel.4

In his book The Society of Spectacle, Guy Debord comments on the degree of abstraction and alienation endured by men in advanced capitalism. He says:

3 Magritte, p. 106.

4 Magritte, p. 106. 7

Toute la vie des sociétés dans lesquelles régnent les conditions modernes de production s’annonce comme une immense accumulation de spectacle. Tout ce qui est directement vécu s’est éloigné dans une représentation.5

Le concept de spectacle unifie et explique une grande diversité de phénomènes apparents. Leurs diversités et contrastes sont les apparences de cette apparence organisée socialement, qui doit être elle- même reconnue dans sa vérité générale considéré selon ses propres termes, le spectacle est l’affirmation de l’apparence et l’affirmation de toute vie humaine, c’est-à-dire sociale, comme simple apparence. Mais la critique qui atteint la vérité du spectacle le découvre comme la négation visible de la vie; comme une négation de la vie qui est devenue visible.6

In 1925 Magritte decided to break away from what he considered a passive attitude in order to adopt a more active stance towards reality in the hope of transforming life.

En trouvant la même volonté, avec, en plus, une méthode et une doctrine supérieures, dans les ouvrages de Karl Marx et de Frederic Engels, et en faisant vers la même époque la connaissance des Surréalistes qui manifestaient avec violence leur dégoût pour toutes les valeurs bourgeoises, idéologiques et sociales qui retiennent le monde dans ses ignobles conditions actuelles, j’acquis la certitude qu’il me faudrait vivre avec le danger, pour que le monde, que la vie répondent davantage à la pensée, aux sentiments.7

Magritte associated his change of attitude to an intense emotional experience he had in a pub in Brussels one evening in 1925. He recalled being terrified by

5 Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle, (Paris, Editions Gérard Lebovici, 1987), p. 11.

6 Debord, p. 12.

7 Magritte, p. 143. 8 the mystery with which the mouldings of a door seemed to have been invested8. This encounter triggered his departure from an abstract mode to one imbued with a greater power of confrontation. Speaking of this transitory period, Magritte says:

Par la suite, j’introduis dans mes tableaux des éléments avec tous les détails qu’ils nous montrent dans la réalité et je vis bientôt que ces éléments, représentés de cette façon mettaient directement en cause leurs répondants du monde réel.9

Le Jockey perdu

In late 1925 to early 1926, Magritte painted Le Jockey perdu (fig. 2). This work depicts an outdoor scene, structured around two intersecting alleyways. A frontal view is given onto the intersection of the two perpendicular alleys. One is shown sharply receding to a centrally located point on the horizon, while the other runs the length of the canvas. A racing horse mounted by a jockey occupies the foreground of the picture, at the intersection point of the two alleys. The composition is such that the head of the jockey directly overlaps the perspective point. The trees bordering the alleys have been metamorphosed into a combination of bilboquets and tree branches. The bilboquets serve as tree

8 "En 1925, je pris la décision de rompre avec cette attitude passive à la suite précisément d’une contemplation intolérable que j’eus dans une brasserie populaire de Bruxelles : les moulures d’une porte me parurent douées d’une mystérieuse existence et je fus longtemps en contact avec leur réalité. Un sentiment voisin de la terreur fut le point de départ d’une volonté d’action sur le réel, de transformation de la vie." Magritte, pp. 142-143.

9 Magritte, p. 143. 9 trunks to the few branches which sprout out of their upper parts. A dark drawn- back curtain is painted on the right side of the scene.

Before we begin to compare these two works, we must first specify that the 1924 painting differed from earlier futurist works insofar as it announced a shift in interest towards the representation of objects. As can be witnessed in two paintings dating from 1922 and 1923 both entitled Femmes (figs. 3 & 4), the works preceding the creation of Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur were more strictly limited to the study of the decomposition of human forms.

Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur is distinguishable itself from earlier futurist works in that it represents Magritte’s first attempt at submitting an object to a specific procedure (in this case substitution). The necessity of describing the substitution procedure in the title of the work, where formerly Magritte had either altogether omitted to propose a title or had only given a general one word title such as Femmes to his futurist paintings, points to the importance and the novelty of this new procedure.

If the link between the heart (inside the chest) and the rose (outside of the chest) can be more or less described in terms of substitution, the nature of links between objects in subsequent paintings will not only multiply but will also become more complex. As a result, any attempt to give a one- or two-word definition to the procedure involved in subsequent works will become problematic. Given these difficulties, René Passeron and Suzi Gablik have nevertheless both attempted to reduce Magritte’s rhetoric to a calculable number 10 of procedures. René Passeron has been able to denote a total of five procedures, while Suzi Gablik, for her part, has found eight.10

If we continue our comparison of the two paintings, we notice that the impact created by the substitution of one object for another (i.e., a rose for a heart) noted in Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur is, in Le Jockey perdu, extended to new limits. In order to examine this point more closely, let us look at what Bürger has called "the traditional unity of the work" or "the unity of the universal and the particular. "

In Ligne de Vie I Magritte described the motivation for substituting a rose for a heart. This procedure, said Magritte, was prompted by a desire to create a "shattering" (bouleversant) effect on the overall perception of the painting11. In a further note on this work, he commented on the disappointing effects produced by the final image: "La rose que je mis dans la poitrine d’une jeune fille nue ne produisit pas l’effet bouleversant que j’attendais."12

10 René Passeron notes that five basic procedures have been used by Magritte over the years. The first procedure is one of physical contradiction, as between the extremes of heavy and light, animal and vegetal, day and night. The second procedure is one of logical displacement or metonymy. Such is the case with the substitution of the egg for the bird. The third procedure noted is that of an aberrant superposition. Such would be the case with the apple substituted for a human face. The fourth is qualified as a process of reification. Here the author has in mind the examples of the flesh turning to wood or to rock. Finally, the fifth procedure is defined as one of the "absolute enigmatic". Here an enigma is proposed which cannot yield sense.

Suzi Gablik proposes eight categories as follows : (1) isolation, (2) modification, (3) hybridization, (4) a change in scale, position or substance, (5) the provocation of accidental encounters, (6) the double image as visual pun, (7) paradox, (8) conceptual bipolarity.

11 Magritte, p. 107.

12 Magritte, p. 107. 11

Indeed, it can be observed that the substitution procedure initiated in Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur does not shatter the stability and coherence of the composition. This is due in part to the ambiguous nature of the substitution (visible character of the rose vs. invisible character of the heart) noted earlier, and in part to the small fraction of the work being affected by this procedure. It must also be noted that the substitute object is of a more or less equivalent size to the object it replaces, thus reducing the visual impact of the transfer. Furthermore, let us add that the application of a limited colour scheme to the entire surface plane, and the overall schematization of the image mentioned in the initial description of the work, are two criteria which bind the image into a structured whole.

Looking at Le Jockey perdu we notice that the substitution procedure initiated in Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur has been modified. The relative equivalence in size between heart and rose witnessed in the 1924 painting has been abandoned in favour of a more contrasted choice of objects. The greater discrepancy in the size of the two objects involved in the substitution procedure (i. e., the bilboquet and the tree trunk) has not, however, severed all of the ties linking them together. Indeed, some form of association in colour, shape, and material still remains.

Let us now briefly comment on the overall visual consequences of this substitution. For one, I would suggest that the unexpected and illogical appearance of the bilboquets has served to isolate them from the rest of the image. Although their presence is not altogether without purpose (they still serve as trunks from which the branches may sprout) their acute disproportion 12 prevents them from being coherently included in the scenery depicted. It is as if, in perceiving the overall image, one is simultaneously offered two distinct and overlapping scales. Their reconciliation into a unified image is still possible, though not without a certain degree of effort.

The organic and nonorganic work of art

It is Bürger’s contention that the historical period to which the avant-garde belongs created a crisis in the specific historical form of the "work," or the "artwork" as a category. This period called the unity of works into question. It did not destroy it (though such were the dadaïsts’ intentions), but it mediated it, for the concept of unity was extended and stretched to new limits. What the avant-gardiste work really called into question, says Bürger, was the traditional "organic" conception of the work, with its relationship between parts and whole.

In the organic (symbolic) work of art, the unity of the universal and the particular is posited without mediation; in the nonorganic (allegorical) work to which the works of the avant-garde belong, the unity is a mediated one. Here, the element of unity is withdrawn to an infinite distance, as it were. In the extreme case, it is the recipient who creates it... .The avant-gardiste work does not negate unity as such ... but a specific kind of unity, the relationship between part and whole that characterizes the organic work of art.13

13 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984,), p. 56. 13 Bürger denotes as classicist the artist who produces organic works. This artist, states Bürger, will take on a different attitude towards his material than does the avant-gardiste. The classicist will view his material as a living substance, as a carrier of meaning. For the avant-gardiste, material is nothing other than an empty sign into which only he can introduce significance. He tears the material "out of its functional context that gives it meaning... .The Classicist treats the material as a whole, whereas the avant-gardiste tears it out of the life totality, isolates it, and turns it into fragments."14

The diverging attitudes expressed by both category of artists towards their material, notes Bürger, is reflected in their attitude towards the constitution of the work. The classicist conceives of the work as a living image of the totality and this even though the work may only show a segmented representation of reality. In keeping with his approach to the material, the avant-gardiste intends to control the meaning.

The works created by Magritte between 1925-1927 can best be described as a series of attempts to negate spatial and semantic unity. By spatial unity, I refer to the system of representation established during the Renaissance which

implies that the painting surface is understood as a "window" through which we look out into a section of space. If taken seriously, this means no more nor less than that pictorial space is subject to the rules that govern empirical space, that there must be no obvious

14 Bürger, p. 70. 14 contradiction between what we do see in a picture and what we might see in reality. 15

By semantic unity, I refer to Bürger’s description of the construction principle of the organic work of art where: "individual parts and the whole form a dialectical unity. An adequate reading is described by the hermeneutic circle: the parts can be understood only through the whole, the whole only through the parts."16

Bürger notes that it is possible to negate spatial unity without negating semantic unity. Here Picasso’s papiers collés are used as an example. Although the notion of perspective as described above has been destroyed, Bürger maintains that because the creation of an aesthetic whole is posited, a sense of unity remains. Describing the papiers collés, Bürger says: "the reality fragments remain largely subordinate to the aesthetic composition, which seeks to create a balance of individual elements (volumes, colors, etc.)...the intent to create an aesthetic object is clear, though that object eludes judgment by traditional rules."17

The negation of semantic unity is thus understood as the emancipation of the parts from the superordinate whole: "they are no longer its essential elements. This means that the parts lack necessity. In an automatic text that strings images

15 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Vol.l, Its origins and Character, (New York, Harper & Row, 1971,), pp. 140-141.

16 Bürger, p. 79.

17 Bürger, p. 74. 15 together, some could be missing, yet the text would not be significantly affected."18 A work produced on this principle, says Bürger, "neither creates a total impression that would permit an interpretation of its meaning nor can whatever impression may be created be accounted for by recourse to the individual parts, for they are no longer subordinated to a pervasive intent."19 What occurs under these circumstances is characterized as a "refusal to provide meaning" or as a "withdrawal of meaning."

Although Magritte had intended as early as 1924 to emancipate parts of the painting from the superordinate determination of the whole, this process was not actually begun until 1925 and Le Jockey perdu. As Magritte himself noted, the efforts made in 1924 to distance the rose from its insertion within the painted image were unable to shatter the unified perception of the work. It is not until the creation of Le Jockey perdu that the lack of necessity, or the arbitrariness given to the parts with respect to the whole, began to be realized. Indeed, the double scale reading, mentioned earlier with regards to the presence of the disproportionate bilboquets amidst a spatially unified scenery appeared as the initial step in drawing the objects away from a global and comprehensive reading of the whole.

It is my belief that the objects represented in the works dating from the 1925- 1927 period were gradually drawn away from the subordinate role of con­ structing unitary meaning. During the months leading up to 1927 (the year of

18 Bürger, p. 80.

19 Bürger, p. 80 16 his move to Paris, the capital of French surrealism), he increasingly began to tear his objects away from an organic structure in order to let them discover freer forms of association. These new associations liberated the objects from the harness of predestined function, and allowed them to seek meaning in a setting which surpassed market rationality. The need to expand the bounds of organic construction compelled Magritte to subject his objects to a number of procedures. His intention was here similar to that of Breton’s : to liberate words from their strict grammatical use in order to let them expose unexpected aspects of their nature.

Breton denounced and rejected notions of order and precdictability at all levels of their manifestation, and especially as they appeared in creative expression. He’s use automatic writing was accuse and denounce the restriction of language to strict uses of communication and exchange. His writing served to "emancipate words and restore to them their full power" (Surrealist Manifesto). Automatic writing was believed to liberate thought from the bounds of reason and from aesthetic and moral preoccupations an attitude which was in direct opposition to the instrumentalist and rationalist ideology of the Third Republic.

Aragon described the first experimentation with automatic writing as follows:

Tout se passait comme si l’esprit, parvenu à cette charnière de l’inconscient, avait perdu le pouvoir de reconnaître où il versait. En lui subsistaient des images qui prenaient corps, elles devenaient matière de réalité. Elles s’exprimaient suivant ce rapport, dans une force sensible. Elles revêtaient ainsi les caractères d’hallucinations visuelles, auditives, tactiles. Nous éprouvions toute la force des images. Nous avions perdu le pouvoir de les manier. Nous étions devenus leur domaine, leur monture. Dans un lit, au moment de dormir, dans la rue les yeux 17 grands ouverts, avec tout l’appareil de la terreur, nous donnions la main aux fantômes.20

Magritte’s first attempts at negating the structural basis of painting, though remaining within a painting did not avoid generating conflict. Indeed, it would appear as if Magritte was caught in a dilemma with respect to the representation of receding space. The conflict arose between the need to use effects of the third dimension to intensify the impact produced by the manipulation of objects and the identification of receding space with the structural basis of the organic work of art.

Much as Magritte intended to negate traditional organic unity, the very fact of having to express this negation in pictorial terms implied the urgency of some form of synthesis. I believe that during these early years, Magritte attempted to redeem his "deviations" into spatial perspective by directly opposing the illusionary (figurative) effects of this representation to the two-dimensional nature of the canvas. In other words, he sought and found a way to bracket and objectify receding space, thereby distancing and reducing it to the unequivocal condition of a simple pictorial means to be used for the attainment of a specific effect.

The emergence of reminders of the two-dimensionality of the canvas can be witnessed in the case of Le Jockey perdu in the addition of the dark curtain on the right side of the painting. This example will be discussed in greater detail.

20 Louis Aragon, "Une vague de rêves", Commerce, Fall 1924, p. 14. 18 The 1927 show

Contracts signed with Paul-Gustave Van Hecke and the Centaure Gallery in Brussels in 1926 gave Magritte the opportunity to concentrate his energy on his artistic production. As a result, 1926 figures as a particularly prolific year for the young painter, with over 60 works created. Magritte held his first solo exhibition the next year at the Centaure Gallery. The exhibition ran from April 23rd to May 3rd, 1927. Forty-nine oil paintings and twelve collages were shown. The catalogue included texts by Van Hecke and Nougé. Among the paintings shown were Le Jockey perdu, La Traversée difficile (fig. 5), Le Supplice de la vestale (fig. 6), and L’Assasin menacé. Le Jockey perdu was the earliest among them.

Critical reception to this exhibition was largely negative. Bürger’s description of the nonorganic work as being characterized by a "refusal to provide meaning" or by a "withdrawal of meaning" was perceived by some authors, though certainly in an uncritical manner. Indeed, one author wrote:

On pourrait peut-être écrire le vide. Magritte nous prouve qu’on peut le peindre... Je n’y vois qu’une seule chose: c’est le produit d’un cerveau de citadin exsangue, trop faible pour être sensuel, d’un être, énervé jusqu’au grand calme; nous sommes dans le grand froid, dans le grand silence, dans la mort. Plus rien ne relie cet art à la réalité: c’est, au fond, un produit très naturel du spiritualisme poussé jusqu’à l’extrême.21

21 Willem Verougstraete, Au large, Brussels, no 2, June 1927, pp. 27-28. 19

Another added:

L’exposition Magritte sue toutes les sueurs d’un modernisme qui n’en peut plus. Que dire devant ces toiles prétentieuses, sans aucun lien vivant, veules, sinistres de pauvreté, affichant, sans pudeur, la décomposition d’un milieu qui crève d’individualisme et sent la charogne à quinze pas?22

It must be kept in mind when reading these lines that the viewer’s pictorial anticipation at the time of the exhibition had been largely forged by the stability and order of the Ecole de Paris. Indeed, artists such as André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso had, by this time, all returned from their experimen­ tations and wanderings of the 1910s to reorient themselves in an aseptic academism.

At the same time as Magritte was working on his first attempts at defining a new pictorial vocabulary, a series of regular meetings were being held on the rue Blomet, in Paris, between Masson, Miro, Leiris, Limbour, Artaud, and Desnos. Together, these men were beginning to imagine the possibility of creating an automatist imagery. The results of these visual experiments, where the unconscious was allowed to dictate the drawing or painting while the logical forces were held back, were first exhibited in 1925 at Pierre Loëb’s Gallery. These first experiments led to the creation of distinct automatist techniques, and eventually to the development by some artists of a particular mode of functioning. Such was the case with Dominguez’ décalcomanies sans objet

22 Anonymous author, Drapeau rouge, Brussels, 27 April 1927, p. 23. 20

préconçu, Man Ray’s solarisations and other manipulation of photographic techniques, and Max Ernst’s frottages and raclages.

A neutral style

Three years prior to painting Le Jockey perdu Magritte had written:

Une grande erreur est la cause de recherches désespérées de la plupart des peintres modernes: ils veulent fixer "a priori" le style-aspect d’un tableau; or ce style est le résultat fatal d’un objet bien fait: l’unité de l’idée créatrice et de sa matérialisation.23

It is my observation that the combination of "materialization" and creative idea mentioned by Magritte was most accurately reflected in the realization of a neutral style. By neutral style I am referring to the use of a pictorial means to function as a mediator between an idea and its representation — a tool to materialize a thought.

il faut donc que le peintre connaisse à fond les ressources matérielles dont il dispose et les emploie rigoureusement selon les lois de leur substance. Il doit être un savant technicien MAITRE de son métier et non ESCLAVE. La virtuosité est le cas de l’idiot (considéré médicalement). Le vrai métier, c’est la disposition, le choix des lignes, formes et couleurs qui déclencheront automatiquement la sensation esthétique.24

23 Magritte, p. 18.

24 Magritte, p. 19. 21 Later in 1938, Magritte again commented on his style:

Cette manière détachée de représenter des objets me paraît relever d’un style universel, où les manies et les petites préférences d’un individu ne jouent plus. J’employais, par exemple, du bleu clair là ou il fallait représenter le ciel, contrairement aux artistes bourgeois qui représentent le ciel pour avoir l’occasion de montrer tel bleu à côté de tel gris de leurs préférences. Je trouve quant à moi, que ces pauvres petites préférences ne nous regardent pas et que ces artistes s’offrent dans le plus grand sérieux en spectacle très ridicule.25

According to Bürger, the avant-garde movements were the first to liberate "artistic means" and allow them to become physical means. He emphasizes that for the first time in history, a truly styleless movement was developed. "What did happen is that these movements liquidated the possibility of a period style when they raised to a principle the availability of the artistic means of the past periods."26 In Burger’s opinion, it was at a time when one began to see "defamiliarization" or shock as the general principle at work in avant-garde art that one was able to recognize that the object "artistic means" had reached its full historical development.

The use of space

Raising pictorial means to the level of physical means, and thus liberating them from their association with specific aesthetic canons not only involved the

25 Magritte, p. 108.

26 Bürger, p. 18. 22 creation of a neutral style but also required the explicit denunciation of the use of traditional linear perspective as an illusionary practice. This Magritte achieved by simultaneously opposing two- and three-dimensional effects within a single image. If in Le Jockey perdu the use of receding space was deemed necessary to heighten the effect of the substitution process, it is, however, forbidden from defining the whole image. Indeed, Magritte sets up fragmentary reminders of the actual two-dimensional nature of the canvas.

The presence of the dark curtain on the right side of the canvas is one instance where such resistance occurs. I perceive this curtain as fulfilling a double function. For one, it plays on the theatrical aspect of the image. It heightens the impression that the surrounding space only acts as a neutral site into which the objects are the only real protagonists. For another, it reinforces the perception of the picture plane as a fiat surface resembling a window.

The image of the horse and jockey presents a second instance of disruption in the homogeneous perception of receding space. The only reproductions I have seen of this painting have been printed in black and white. Furthermore, the quality of the print has never been very good. However, given these inconveniences, it still remains possible to observe the two-dimensional effect given to the figure (horse and jockey). In contrast to the detailed surrounding landscape, the horse and jockey appear as dark silhouetted forms. Aside from the presence of a few highlighted areas (cap, hand, right side of the face), the whole figure appears to be defined entirely by contour. The contrast achieved by superimposing the dark silhouetted figure upon a lighter background produces a collage effect. Magritte cleverly integrates the impression of collage 23 into his image by strategically positioning the head of the jockey on the central vanishing point27, as well as by avoiding a complete profile image of the horse and jockey by presenting them in a semi frontal position.

Let us compare this ambiguous, double standing status given to the horse and jockey figure to one mentioned earlier with regards to the same painting. I have already discussed the problematic status of the bilboquets. It has been upheld that their presence within the image creates both a disturbing and a normalizing effect. Though their insertion within the landscape is illogical, they are integrated into the composition by preserving a utilitarian function and by maintaining a number of characteristics (shape and material) which relates them to their substitute, the tree trunks. If this instance serves as an example of the kind of disturbance which can disrupt the semantic unity of the work, a similar example can be noted with regards to the spatial unity.

As is seen in the above description of the painting, the horse and jockey are subjected to two different spatial readings. They are defined.by their flatness, and yet their strategic position and orientation within the landscape also allow them to be comprehensively inserted within the whole image. A certain amount of tension arises from this ambiguous situation. Receding space is at once affirmed and rejected. The double identity (fiat yet inserted within a composition defined by the laws of perspective) given to the figure is a good

27 "...in the perspective picture all parallel lines, regardless of location and direction, converge in one of an infinite number of Vanishing points’; all parallels intersecting the picture plane at right angles (’orthogonal’, often loosely referred to as Vanishing lines’ pure and simple) converge in a central vanishing point (often loosely called the Vanishing sight’)". Panofsky, p. 5. 24 example of the way in which Magritte disrupted organic spatial unity by using receding space as a simple pictorial tool.

I shall use the term "objectification" of space to define the specific kind of contradictory use of space made by Magritte in those early years. This term, then, refers to what I perceive as an intention on Magritte’s part to qualify the space hosting the combined objects as a purely functional area (as a setting), by exposing the actual flatness upon which this representation is built. In other words, the intention is to deny the illusionary representation of space its traditional status as a fundamental element of painting (as was the case in organic works of art) by elevating this practice to the level of a pictorial means.

While still in his futurist style, Magritte had already made allusions to the possible necessity of drawing upon receding space as a tool for creating specific effects. He wrote:

Lorsque l’idée créatrice nécessite des plans en profondeur pour son expression adéquate le peintre doit sacrifier l’aspect plane de la toile, car c’est la toile qui sert et non le peintre et il ne peint pas pour couvrir une toile de couleurs, comme le poète n’écrit pas pour couvrir une page de mots.28

A similar effort at objectifying the illusionary aspect of a technique by designating it as a consciously used tool occurs at times in film. Such is the case in Godard’s 1967 movie entitled La Chinoise, when one of the actors

28 Magritte, p. 19. 25 unexpectedly turns to the camera and addresses the audience directly. This sequence is immediately followed by a short scene in which the in-action cameraman, to whom the actor is addressing himself, is in turn shown on the screen in the act of recording the event taking place before him. This kind of diversion momentarily repels the spectator from complete absorption.

It is my conclusion that Magritte continued to negate the use of receding space until about 1927. At this time he gradually moved away from a contradictory and ambiguous representation of space towards isolating his objects against a uniform and monochrome background. This allowed him to channel his efforts exclusively to the development of procedures for relating objects to one another. It was not until 1933, after the discovery of his work process known as objet- réponse, that Magritte finally re integrated receding space within his image. This incorporation of the third dimension differed from the practice witnessed in the earlier years, in that it operated on a positive and constructive basis. As will be discussed in the third chapter with regards to La Condition humaine, the integration of receding space was then made on the same basis as that of any other object involved in the construction of an objet-réponse, and no longer served to disturb the cohesion of the work.

Collages

It is during the 1925-1927 period that Magritte did most of his experiments with collage. Given his interest in creating a confiictive representation of space, it is possible to see in this technique an opportunity for him to develop stronger 26 and freer forms of confrontation than the painting medium allows. Collages are similar in principle to the idea of frottage. They allow for a freer, more spontaneous assemblage of forms, figures, and shapes taken directly from one’s immediate surroundings. Magritte often combined collage with some drawing and painting techniques.

Because some of the works created with the collage technique reproduce themes presented in earlier paintings, it is possible to make some observations on the changes which this new medium brought to the image. A look at the 1926 collage entitled Le Jockey perdu (fig. 7) can give us such an indication.

For one, we notice that the drawing of the jockey and horse team is much more detailed. If in the painted version the illusionary representation of receding space was confronted by a dark silhouetted jockey and horse, we observe that in the collage version the reverse is true. The flat background is here contrasted to a detailed and illusionary representation of jockey and horse.

We also observe that a third procedure has been added to the combination of bilboquets and tree branches. In addition to the procedures of substitution and of scale inversion already noted in the painted version, we observe that a change in texture has occurred. This modification is obtained as a result of a "découpage" technique. A sheet of music has been cut in the shape of bilbo­ quets and glued onto the pictorial surface. Tree branches were then painted on the extremities of these shapes. 27 Magritte pursues his conflictive representation of space by contrasting the two- dimensional effect of the découpage technique with the effects of depth and volume. This is accomplished by drawing some shaded areas along the right side of the bilboquets, thus attempting to give volume to a form defined by flatness.

Although doing away with the strong receding lines observed in the painted version of Le Jockey perdu, Magritte does not altogether abandon the feeling of receding space; rather, new devices are being sought to produce a similar effect. The presence of curtains on both sides of the image accentuates the impression of scenic space noted earlier in the painted version. The wash of blue ink painted in gradation from dark to light as it descends towards the centre of the work also creates an effect of receding space. So too does the network of arbitrarily drawn diagonals which delimits the area of the scene. To do Magritte justice however, I must stress that not all of his collages maintain such a high contrast between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional effects. The works shown in figs. 8 and 9 serve to illustrate this last point. Indeed, we notice in both of those works that the images are no longer held within a coherently organized "scene" (one being defined according to the laws of perspective), but are scattered in such a way as to resist a congruence between the meaning of the individual parts and the meaning of the whole. 28 The notion of space: Magritte and Brecht

The playwright Bertold Brecht had, at about the same time period, a similar contradictory notion of space, of its representation and of its use as the one noted in Magritte’s early works. Though using the theatre stage as a privileged location from which to present his plays, Brecht explicitly denounced this setting as fictional. In fact, he developed a number of processes to prevent the spectator from identifying with the scenes acted on stage.

Brecht considered that the process of identification which normally occurred in bourgeois theatre only served to let the spectator dwell on emotions as a kind of therapy for a short and determinate time. The play would in this sense be experienced as a kind of purge. Once the play ended, the bourgeois could go back to a life of repression and alienation, without having pondered upon the nature of the split existing between leisure and work. Brecht wanted his theatre to induce the spectator to thinking. He wanted to sever the automatic link of identification, so that instead of letting himself be guided along to predetermined emotional and ideological responses, the spectator could of himself stand back and reflect upon the action presented to him.

The techniques used by Brecht to achieve this breach between play and audience were motivated by a sort of objective representation. For example, the actor was not to allow himself to identify with his character, seeing how this identification process would automatically induce a similar reaction in the audience. Instead, the actor was to be able to maintain his identity as comedian and from such a standpoint only, relate to the audience a delayed or distant 29 version of the character he was interpreting. The notion of distanciation was thus also applied to the kind of play-acting to be performed by the comedian.

There were to be no hidden or special effects produced on stage. Lighting was to be as neutral as possible. The variations in light were to be suggested by signs or symbols (i.e., a moon for the night), and not by a make-believe reproduction of the actual light intensity. Actors who were waiting for their parts were permitted to stay on stage. Similarly, the musicians were also to be in full view, so as to render visible the source of the musical contribution.

Brecht was also presenting the artistic process of creation as a process of rational choice between various available means. The conflictive relationship between the illusionary representation of space and its denunciation as illusionary noted earlier with regards to Magritte’s work, was also present in Brecht’s work. On the one hand, the use of a theatrical stage and setting was deemed mandatory for the presentation of the action, yet on the other, this space was explicitly prevented from fulfilling its illusionary role. Through a series of processes, it was manipulated in such a way as to induce the spectator to view it as a tool or as a neutral area which simply hosted the action without defining it. Brecht, then, also attempted to negate the basis of theatre, though remaining within a theatrical mode of expression.

Magritte and Brecht similarly prevented the viewer from wallowing in the action. In both cases, this distanciation was achieved as a result of the contradictory status of the product (i.e., paintings and plays which were identified on the basis- of a negative rapport with their medium). The conflict 30 occurred between the affirmation of space through its illusionary representation (Magritte) or actual physical use (Brecht) on the one hand, and its negation or destruction through disruptive processes on the other. Magritte says of his painting:

I don’t paint ideas. I describe, insofar as I can by means of painted images, objects and the coming together of objects in such a light as to prevent any of our ideas or feelings from adhering to them.29

Peter Bürger comments on the type of reception which accompanies these works. He maintains that what distinguishes the historical avant-garde from other movements

consists in this new type of reception that the avant-gardiste work of art provokes. The recipient’s attention no longer turns to a meaning of the work that might be grasped by a reading of its constituent elements, but to the principle of construction.30

Through an "irrational" construction of space, meaning is denounced. Bürger explains that if the recipient is unwilling to accept a partial or arbitrary meaning expressed only through parts of the work, he must necessarily orient his attention to another level, that of the principle of construction. By refusing to adhere to the usual hermeneutic circle which provides meaning for the whole through a cohesion of its parts, the avant-gardiste work produces a shock effect. "Shock is aimed for as a stimulus to change one’s conduct of life; it is the

29 Suzi Gablik, Magritte, (London, Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 13.

30 Bürger, p. 81 means to break through aesthetic immanence and to usher in (initiate) a change in the recipient’s life praxis"31

Le retour à Vordre and Magritte’s destruction of spatial and semantic unity

In a brief essay entitled Lesfameuses Années Vingt, Theodor Adomo comments on the false illusions of freedom and political liberation which prevailed about the 1920s.

Ce que la conscience du public d’aujourd’hui - du moins la mode de la réactualisation - met au compte des Années Vingt était déjà en déclin à l’époque, dès 1924...32

Fostering an ideal vision of the 1920s in Europe, remarks Adomo, gives fascism the false appearance of having been externally applied, rather than being the consequence of an inward-found phenomenon.

Les phénomènes de régression, de neutralisation, cette paix des cimetières que l’on n’attribue généralement qu’à la pression de la terreur nazie, apparaissaient déjà sous le Régime de Weimar, et en général dans les sociétés libérales européennes. Les dictatures ne fondirent pas sur ces sociétés, de l’extérieur, tel Cortez envahissant le Mexique, mais elles furent engendrées par la dynamique sociale après la Première Guerre mondiale, et projetèrent leur ombre sur l’avenir.33

Bürger, p. 80.

32 Theodor W. Adomo, Modèles Critiques, (Paris, Payot, 1984), p. 47.

33 Adomo, p. 47. 32

Le retour à l’ordre which occurred during the early twenties had already set the ground for an idealization of order which Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were to bring to its apotheosis.

In France, the search for stability and order headed by Raymond Poincaré and Aristide Briand, both of the Bloc National, was typical of the tactics used by all conservative governments. It included, among others measures, a refusal to partake in any form of innovative measures (economic or social), and the reduction of taxes to their lowest possible levels, thus precariously relying on short-term bonds as a source of financing. This option was all the more delicate, since France was balancing its budget by taking into account unreceived payments to be made by Germany in reparation for war damages.

Peace, normality, and safety were the prevailing mots d’ordres. In 1921 relations with the Vatican were renewed in order to provide "religious appeasement. " Patriotism was being encouraged by the wide-spread propagation of anti-German sentiment. In other words, all sorts of issues were being sought to defer the government from taking action and from having to deal with real issues. For Nathanael Greene, the 1920s resembled more "the decade preceding the First World War than the decade that was to follow."34

This nostalgic look back to the stability of the prewar period also occurred in the visual arts. The academism of The School of Paris which had triumphed before 1914 was brandished as a remedy against the youthful wanderings of

34 Nathanael greene, From Versailles to Vichy - The Third French republic, 1919-1940, (New York, Thomas Y. crowell Company, 1970) p. 32. 33 cubism and fauvism. The tenants of an artistic retour à I ’ordre were praising the same values of stability, order, and hierarchy which the leaders of the centre and right were advocating and trying to install at the cost of raising fascism.

At a time when the shaping of the pictorial space as a continuum was being upheld as the only valid form of representation, Magritte was pursuing his destruction of organic unity. Though the works done in 1926-1927 were still generally organized according to the laws of perspective with lines converging towards a vanishing point, this vanishing point was no longer visible as in Le Jockey perdu. Rather, the scenes were almost always limited to interiors, or at least to a mixture of interior and exterior. Whereas in Le Jockey perdu, Magritte had sporadically begun superimposing two- and three-dimensional effects, the process later became internalized, in the sense that the opposition between the two spatial dimensions occurred within the bounds of the structural design of the image. As can be observed in La Traversée difficile (fig. 5) and Le Groupe silencieux (fig. 10), whole surface areas of the depicted interior are ambiguously represented in part as fiat surfaces (a wall) and in part as scenic views. In other words, whereas in prior works (especially in the collages) the conflictive relationship between the two- and three-dimensioanl effects produced as a result of juxtaposition occurred anywhere on the surface of the canvas, in the works dating from 1926 and 1927 this opposition of effect is almost entirely restricted to the surface areas delimited by the construction of the interior space (i.e., to the walls and panels inside the room).

Both of the paintings mentioned above are constructed around the representation of an interior space with a scenic view painted on the back wall. The direct 34 confrontation between effects of flatness and illusionary receding space witnessed in Le Jockey perdu is here condensed and transposed into the ambiguous nature of the back plane. Is this plane a painted surface depicting an outdoor scene, or is it an actual view onto such a scene? Magritte plays on the impossibility of determining whether this plane is in the second or in the third dimension. This simultaneous presence of both dimensions is repeated on the side walls of the rooms where perforated panels of wood are positioned. The square panels, which have been interpreted by some writers as representating paintings,35 have been pierced with square openings. The panels have been strategically inclined and positioned so as to allow the "windows" to give onto flat surfaces, and also to reveal some sense of depth.

It is possible to say that in both of these images the only vestige left from the receding perspective of Le Jockey perdu is the alignment of wall, ceiling and floor. The objects located within this space no longer find the kind of coherence which defined the hybrid trees in Le Jockey perdu. As incongruous as the mixture of bilboquet and tree branches may have seemed, the resulting object nevertheless fulfilled a coherent function within the whole image. This is not the case in La Traversée difficile and Le Groupe silencieux. The objects represented no longer work towards constructing a semantic unity of meaning. The three­ eyed cube, the cut-out wooden figure, the empty frame set in front of a perforated canvas partially draped by a red curtain and the distant castle positioned on the edge of a cliff, which are all represented in Le Groupe silencieux no longer amount to the kind of semantically cohesive structure still

35 José Pierre, Magritte, (Paris, Aimery Somogy, 1984) p. 23. 35 partially present in Le Jockey perdu. The parts no longer inform the whole. Each element is isolated and turned into a fragment whose meaning is no longer dependent on a functional context.

Later in 1927, Magritte added to this negation process by violently deforming the objects or figures represented in his paintings. Rather than simply displaying objects next to one another, he also began assembling and constructing them into units. The figures joined together no longer attempted to form a hybrid whole (as in the case of the bilboquet and tree branches - where both com­ ponents function as other, yet also as a comprehensive part of the whole), but remained independent fragments whose accumulation failed to produce a unitary meaning. Le Supplice de la vestale (fig. 6), Entracte (fig. 11), and Le Double Secret (fig. 12) are examples of this. The assemblage of arms and legs in Entracte, and the combination of torso and what appears to be four metal rods in Le Supplice de la vestale, do not produce the kind of constructed meaning which held the hybrid trees together in Le Jockey perdu.

As Magritte gradually moved towards an emphasis on an arbitrary assemblage of objects, he progressively backed away from a conflictive representation of space. The spatial composition of the 1927 paintings are sharply divided into two distinct zones: an immediate foreground and a distant background. The objects appear in the immediate foreground of the painting. The background is, in most cases, composed of a horizon line joining uniformly a fiat sky and seascape (or sky and landscape). Presented in front of such a vast background, and detached from the kind of setting which the interior space of 1926 upheld for them, the objects become all the more isolated. This isolation is amplified 36 by the fragmentation to which the objects and bodies are subjected. In comparison to the 1926 painting, where the objects were shown in their entirety, the figures depicted in the 1927 paintings are only partially represented. This is the case with the torso and fragments of walls in Le Supplice de la vestale, the body parts in Entracte, and the head and shoulders in Le Double secret (fig. 12). The references to linear perspective are reduced to anecdotal remnants. They occur sporadically in the form of partial walls and floor space (see Entracte and Le Supplice de la vestale).

Although Magritte has begun to reduce and simplify his representation of receding space in favour of an increased interest in the manipulation and fragmentation of objects, the confrontation between the effects of the second and third dimension still lingers on. Le Double secret is one example of this. A man is shown from the shoulders up and portrayed in a semi frontal position against an ocean scene background. The face has been subjected to a strange manipula­ tion. The central portion, meaning most of the facial features and part of the neck and shoulders, have been cut away from the bust and transposed directly to the left of the figure, on an equal pictorial plane with the latter. This fiat segment is simply juxtaposed upon the background scene. Although the cutting pattern is arbitrary, it remains well within the bounds of the face. The cavity created as a result of the removal of the central piece reveals an undulated surface of metallic spherical bells. This surface is slightly set back within the figure, as if it were inside the body.

If on the left side the flatness of the facial segment is defined by its opposition to the vast horizon and by the jagged edges arbitrarily delimiting its contour, 37 the segment on the right is characterised by an inverted opposition. The insertion of the undulated sheet metal within the bust gives the figure a sense of depth and volume. This is heightened by the treatment given to the jagged line delimiting the right side of the cavity. Looking closely at this line, one notices that it possesses a certain thickness, giving the impression that the bust is in fact a hollow sculpture.

The simultaneous perception of flatness and depth observed in Magritte’s earlier paintings is in this case being presented side by side. On the left we observe that the illusionary representation of volume (shadows and highlights employed in drawing the facial features) is being denounced for its falseness. On the right we observe that the same illusionary representation of volume is being confirmed in its trueness. On the left, the figure is perceived as a flat segment, on the right as a hollow structure.

Generally speaking, I perceive the works produced during the 1925-1927 period as the result of a pictorial form of automatism. It is my belief that these works correspond more closely to the type of arbitrary association of forms "dictated by the mind in absence of all control exercised by reason" advocated by Breton in the First Surrealist Manifesto than what was to follow in later years. As was seen in the case of Le Jockey perdu, attempts had been made by Magritte to join objects together using some constructive principle. For the most part, however, at least for the years 1926-1927, it must be emphasized that this association of objects restricted itself mainly to an arbitrary display of unrelated objects. Having been tom away from their usual context, the objects were usually presented side by side without being necessarily submitted to a reconstruction 38 process. On this aspect, Giorgio De Chirico’s works dating from the années géniales can certainly be seen as a possible source of influence.

It is my intention to suggest that by gradually evolving towards the negation of both spatial and semantic unity, Magritte’s works of 1925-1927 achieved a strong criticism of commodity relations, of reification. By inscribing themselves in opposition to the autonomous and aesthetic character of modernist works, they reacted against the commodity relations which had given rise to them. I believe that the creation of "shattering" images used by Magritte was a means of critically perverting and distorting reified bourgeois consciousness.

A reaction to modernism

In Theory of the avant-garde, Peter Bürger stipulates that the techniques used by the historical avant-garde movements can best be understood as an attack on modernism. In Burger’s opinion, the radical shift in art did not occur in the middle of the nineteenth century but at the beginning of our century, or more precisely between the last stage of modernism and the first appearance of the historical avant-garde movements. The autonomous status of art, which throughout the nineteenth century had intensified along with the development of capitalist modes of production, emerged towards the end of the century as a separate sphere of human activity.

Bürger remarks: 39 As regards the difficult question concerning the historical crystal­ lization of art as an institution, it suffices if we observe in this context that this process came to a conclusion at about the same time as the struggle of the bourgeoisie for its emancipation. The insights formulated in Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetic writings presuppose the completed evolution of art as a sphere that is detached from the praxis of life. We can therefore take it as our point of departure that at the end of the eighteenth century at the latest, art as an institution is already fully developed in the sense specified above. Yet this does not mean that the self-criticism of art has also set in....The self-criticism of the social subsystem that is art can become possible only when the contents also lose their political character, and art wants to be nothing other than art. This stage is reached at the end of the nineteenth century, in Aestheticism36

This development, notes Bürger, was marked by an increasing interest in form over content ("meaning becomes available as the category 'content’ withers" p.20).

For Peter Bürger, the most advanced stage of modernism occurred in a movement he calls aestheticism. Aestheticism is, in his view, the culminating stage in which the individual content of works lost their political character and began to loose themselves in a Tart pour l’art" attitude. It is as a reaction to such social ineffectiveness that Bürger understands the emergence of the historical avant-garde movements. "As institution and content coincide, social ineffectuality stands revealed as the essence of art in bourgeois society, and thus provokes the self-criticism of art. It is to the credit of the historical avant-garde movements that they supplied this self-criticism.1,37

36 Bürger, p. 26.

37 Bürger, p. 27. 40 In an article entitled "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism", Terry Eagleton demonstrated that modernism, as it occurred at the turn of the century, can only be thoroughly understood if considered within its historical context, namely that of the emergence of commodity culture. Eagleton proposes a dialectical analysis of modernism. He argues that modernist works were at once determined by commodity relations and yet simultaneously rebelled against this determination. For him, the preponderance of form over content noted by Bürger can only be explained by referring to the battle being waged by modernist artists against the permeating effects of commodification.

By closing in upon itself says Eagleton, modernist art was taking refuge from the prevailing threat of being turned into a simple commodity. It was thus putting up a resistance against the social and economic forces which would have readily degraded it to the level of pure consumable imagery. Such an attempt at surpassing the inevitable determination as commodity implied a retreat from communicable meaning.

Modernism is among other things a strategy whereby the work of art resists commodification, holds out by the skin of its teeth against those social forces which would degrade it to an exchangeable object....To fend off such reduction to commodity status, the modernist work brackets off the referent or real historical world, thickens its textures and degrades its forms to forestall instant consumability, and draws its own language protectively around it to become a mysteriously autotelic object, free of all contaminating truck with the real. Brooding self-reflexively on its own being, it distances itself through irony from the shame of being no more than a brute, self-identical thing.38

38 Terry Eagleton, The New Left Review, no. 152, July-August 1981, p. 67 41 To safeguard itself from being confused with the kitsch and the banal, art had developed a solipsist character. By transcending into the realm of metaphysics, says Eagleton, modernist art had hoped to delay the consumption of art as a object of mass production. But the flight from market anonymity translated itself as an entry into market fetichism. The attempt made to elude the consequences of reification had turned into its consecration. For Terry Eagleton:

the most devastating irony of all is that...the modernist work escapes from one form of commodification only to fall prey to another. If it avoids the humiliation of becoming an abstract, serialized, instantly exchangeable thing, it does so only by virtue of reproducing that other side of the commodity which is its fetichism. The autonomous, self- regarding, impenetrable modernist artefact, in all its isolated splendour, is the commodity as fetish resisting the commodity as exchange, its solution to reification part of that very problem.39

If modernism attempted to protect itself from consumability by retreating within its own special sphere, what followed modernism attempted a similar pursuit, but by negating the basis of modernism. According to the surrealists, art was no longer to try and hide in a cocoon, but was to be proposed as the basis for redefining social praxis, to "transform the world and change life" (Surrealist Manifesto). Instead of trying to hide from the disastrous effects of commodity relations, the historical avant-garde movements, though remaining within pictorial expression, denounced their isolation and social ineffectiveness. The practices were in a sense inverted. The concept of art was no longer to be defined as a closed system navigating on the periphery of life. It was to act as the nucleus of a newly defined existence.

39 Eagleton, p. 67. 42 Breton’s recipe-like answer to poetry, as it was expressed in the First Surrealist Manifesto, can only gain its full significance if understood as a virulent criticism of literature’s remoteness from everyday experience.

Faites-vous apporter de quoi écrire, après vous être établi en un lieu aussi favorable que possible à la concentration de votre esprit sur lui- même. Placez-vous dans l’état le plus passif, ou réceptif que vous pourrez. Faites abstraction de votre génie, de vos talents et de ceux de tous les autres. Dites-vous bien que la littérature est le plus triste chemin qui mène à tout. Ecrivez vite sans sujet préconçu, assez vite pour ne pas retenir et ne pas être tenté de vous relire. La première phrase viendra toute seule....Il est assez difficile de se prononcer sur le cas de la phrase suivante. Peu doit vous importer d’ailleurs.40

This passage, and to a certain extent the whole of the manifesto, was meant as an attack against the novel as the privileged form of literature.

Magritte’s works of 1925-1927 constitute a criticism of reification insofar as by shattering the semantic and spatial unity achieved in organic works of art (of which aestheticism represents the most advanced stage, i.e., where the solipsist character and the socially irrelevant content of art coincide with its autonomous status) they rebelled against the conditions which led to the establishment of art as a separate sphere of human activity.

If the period 1925-27 can be generally characterized by a destruction of the spatial and semantic unity present in organic works of art, it has also been noted

40 André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, (Paris, Gallimard, 1977) pp. 42-43. 43 that the works dating from 1927 begin to reflect a shift in interest away from a conflictive representation of space towards an arbitrary assemblage of objects.

Starting in 1928, Magritte instigated a whole range of possibilities with which to bring objects into relation with one another, and in 1933 resolutely based his works on a specific model of construction. From the moment he reassigned the liberated pictorial means to the subordination of what started to look like a surrealist style, Magritte began to compromise himself to the reinstatement of art as a privileged means of expression and away from a pure practice of automatism. From the moment automatic writing began to take on the characteristics of literature, and automatic painting began to take on the characteristics of art by relapsing into what appears to be serial production, the creative and liberating function of automatism inevitably found itself reduced to the dimension of a simple technique. 44

n

THE YEARS 1928 TO 1933

L’ordre bourgeois n’est qu’un désordre. Un désordre au paroxysme, privé de tout contact avec le monde de la nécessité. Les profiteurs du désordre capitaliste le défendent au moyen d’un faisceau de sophismes et de mensonge dont ils tentent de maintenir le crédit dans tous les domaines de l’activité humaine. C’est ainsi qu’ils n’hésitent pas à affirmer que l’ordre social bourgeois a permis un développement extraordinaire de la culture et que l’art, entre autres, a conquis des régions inexplorées qui paraissaient jusque- là inaccessibles à l’esprit. Le doute n’est plus possible. Nous devons dénoncer cette imposture.

René Magritte, "L’Art Bourgeois", London Bulletin, no. 12, March 15,1939.

A move to Paris

Magritte moved to Paris during the summer of 1927. The contract signed in 1926 with Le Centaure Gallery had given him the financial security needed to ensure this move. Goemans also left for Paris that year, only shortly preceding Magritte. His move was motivated by the opening of his own gallery in the French capital. After a short stay with Goemans, the Magrittes moved to 45 Perreux-sur-Mame, just outside of Paris. It is in Paris that Magritte met for the first time J. Arp, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and Joan Miro. The encounter with Miro gave rise to a long and devoted friendship between the two men. Magritte’s involvement with the French surrealists was, however, temperate. He participated in a number of their important reunions held during the period of his stay in Paris (1927-1930), but did not form particularly close ties with any of them. It may be noted that Breton waited until 1941 before making any significant remarks on Magritte in "Génèse et perspective artistique du surréalisme." As for Eluard, his first dedication to Magritte was made in 1935 in "Cahiers d’art."

The period 1928-1933, which covers the Paris years and the three years immediately following his return to Brussels, was characterized by an intensification of the developments noted in 1927. The representation of space, which had been submitted to a sharp division between foreground and distant background, was now reduced to a shallow foreground area. The distant and bare landscape was replaced by a uniform and monochrome background (often in the form of a wall). The arbitrary connection of objects noted in Le Supplice de la vestale and in Entracte began to give way to a whole array of attempts at joining objects together. Furthermore, the choice of objects gradually began to narrow, thus taking on the form of a vocabulary.

In an article devoted to Magritte’s Paris years, José Vovelle remarks that the works of 1926-1927: à perspectives multipliées offrant une profusion d’éléments insolites, voient leur importance décroître rapidement et, ...n’ont plus qu’une valeur de rappel. La démonstration devient moins confuse, l’espace se 46 reserre pour laisser à quelques formes élues le soin de soutenir, suivant le terme de Marcel Jean, une seule "idée".... Contestation du réel et subversion du spectateur apparaissent à un degré supérieur dans la mise en situation qui se manifeste à travers les procédés.41

Vovelle divides the works produced during the period 1927-1930 into four types of images: (l)those involving the representation of arbitrary forms, (2)those sectioning the canvas into separate areas, (3)those mixing words and images, and finally (4)those bringing violent modifications to parts of the body.

Vovelle even delimits these four basic processes to specific time periods. The abstract forms often represented as dark, smooth, and rounded shapes occurred most frequently in 1928-1929. The division of the painting (represented or real) into independent partitions occurred exclusively in the 1927-1930 period. The integration of words only appeared after 1928 and for all intents and purposes ended in 1930. Vovelle notes that Magritte returned to this process only on rare occasions after this date. As for the gross distortion caused to the human body (usually to the head), its beginning was actually noted in 1926. Magritte continued to explore this option in 1927-1928 by formulating new variations, but ceased completely in 1930. Vovelle remarks that Magritte did not subsequently abandon his reference to the human body but rather modified his approach to it. After his departure from Paris, the exaggerated disproportions and the shocking malformations eventually gave way to an individual treatment of specific facial features.

41 José Vovelle, "Un conflit de surréalistes : Magritte à Paris" in Revue de l’art, no 12, 1971, p. 58. 47 A shift in tension from space to objects

Having narrowed the ambient area surrounding the objects to a limited foreground, backed by a neutral and uniform wall, Magritte shifted the tension and the viewer’s attention away from a conflictive representation of space onto the multiple combinations of objects being presented.

The use of the term "objectification of space" used in reference to the 1925- 1927 period should, in the case of the 1928-1933 period, be substituted with the term "neutralization of space". Whereas in the preceding chapter objectification of space referred to the conflictive representation of space (where receding space was objectified by the simultaneous perception of effects of the second dimension), the term neutralization of space used in this chapter is cautioned by a different process. In light of the changes noted above (shortening of ambient space, appearance of a blank wall as a background), this term now alludes to the omnipresent status which has been given to the representation of space. The spatial construction is gradually being returned to a subordinate role as unifier of the image.

I consider the years 1928-1933 as transitional precisely because by slowly slipping into a constructive mode of representation, Magritte began to weaken his earlier attack on the organic work of art and to gradually orient his criticism in another direction. As we will see in chapter three, this new direction was leading towards a quest for meaning or value which attempted to reach beyond any sense of contradiction. The arbitrariness, assigned by Breton, to the 48 medium used in the practice of automatism,42 was gradually being challenged. The primacy of the medium began to impose its specificity.

Les Mots et les images

Having completely isolated his objects from their background, Magritte began to search for ways by which they could, in themselves, shatter preconceived modes of perception. Magritte declared that:

Etant donné ma volonté de faire si possible hurler les objets les plus familiers, l’ordre dans lequel l’on place généralement les objets devait être évidemment bouleversé;.... Quant au mystère, à l’énigme que mes tableaux étaient, je dirai que c’était la meilleure preuve de ma rupture avec l’ensemble des absurdes habitudes mentales qui tiennent généralement lieu d’un authentique sentiment de l’existence.43

Magritte described the series of works produced prior to his discovery of the objet-réponse (1933) as follows:

"[ils] furent également le résultat de la recherche systématique d’un effet poétique bouleversant, qui, obtenu par la mise en scène d’objets empruntés à la réalité, donnerait au monde réel d’où ces objets étaient empruntés, un sens poétique bouleversant, par échange tout naturel.44

42 André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, (Paris, Gallimard, 1977), p. 138.

43 Magritte, p. 109.

44 Magritte, p. 110. 49 This systematic search began in 1927 in the form of an illustrated list. It was entitled Les Mots et les images (fig. 13). Although published in 1929 in the single issue of La Révolution surréaliste alongside surrealism’s second manifesto, a letter dated 1927 addressed to Paul Nougé suggests that this project had initially started two years prior to its publication. The text was composed of a combination of eighteen statements with eighteen illustrations. Each statement was expressed in a written form and was complemented with an illustration of its content.

The text took on the form of a lesson. It gathered into one work a list of possibilities for liberating words and images from their restrictive everyday use. By proposing the interchangeability of words for others, of one image for another, and of one form of expression for another, Magritte reacted against the imposition of a fixed and given reality.

I consider Les Mots et les images as representative of the whole period, because it concretizes into one work a process which actually extended over the subsequent five years. Indeed, it is possible to trace back to this text most of the procedures used in the construction of images dating from 1928 onwards.

Vague figures have a meaning as necessary and as perfect as precise ones

La Sortie de l’école (fig. 14) was painted in 1927. It figures as a transitional work, in that it combines characteristics from the Paris years and from the few years just preceding the move to the French capital. Indeed, it signals the 50 appearance of the abstract shapes which, as Vovelle noted, were painted mainly in 1928-1929, and yet it retains the ambiguous nature of the back wall noted in La Traversée difficile and in Le Groupe silencieux. La Sortie de l’école depicts a room of which only three sides are visible: a frontal "wall" (parallel to the picture plane), a right wall, and a floor. The right wall contains an open doorway of which only a partial view is given. A huge white fan is found standing upright in the bottom right corner of the painting. The right wall is painted grey and the floor is made of wooden planks. The plane facing the viewer is painted in the manner of a sky. Soft white areas are blended into the blue background suggesting transparent clouds. Directly in front of this plane, and attached by one of its extremities to the right wall, is a huge, thin, black form held in midair. The form is roughly in the shape of a semi- circle although its rounded contour gives it somewhat of an organic effect. This arbitrarily formed shape is pierced by four irregular wholes. Given the highlights which appear around its edges, the material seems to consist of a smooth shiny substance.

The simultaneous perception of flatness and depth given to the constructed surface areas in La Traversée difficile is maintained in La Sortie de l’école. Indeed, our reading of the back plane oscillates between the perception of a painted wall and that of an open sky. The contrast between the two readings has, however, been reduced. Although it is possible to interpret the back plane as receding space (in that it reminds one of a cloudy sky), the view presented no longer opens onto the highly contrasted and unexpected sceneries of La Traversée difficile and Le Groupe silencieux. I maintain that the contrast between the two readings has lost some of its intensity because it seems that the 51 blended blue and white washes on the back plane come closer to signifying space than they do to actually representing it.

A word can take the place of an object in reality

Le Sens Propre (fig. 15) is dated 1928-1929. This painting shows an irregularly- rounded framed surface. No image is represented upon this surface; instead the words "femme triste" are neatly written in its centre. This round slab is set on a roughly textured ground and leaning against a stone wall. Attached to the wall and situated above the leaning form is a wide wooden ramp which runs horizontally across the painting, touching both the right and left edges. Our interpretation of the nature of the round shape oscillates between a framed painting and a flat, arbitrarily-shaped surface. In 1928 Magritte had created a whole series of works involving the junction of words and unidentified shapes. In works like Le Corps bleu (fig. 16), Le Miroir vivant (fig. 17), and L’usage de la parole (fig. 18) the specific nature of the inscription was obviously meant to be contrasted against the vague design of the form to which they were related. With Le Sens propre this contrast is less marked. The presence of the frame and of the inscription "femme triste" in substitution for an image which could very well describe a traditional portrait encourages an identification of the form with that of a painting. Yet the irregular contour, thickness, and texture, in addition to its incongruous setting, persist in drawing it away from such an association. 52 What begins to appear in Magritte’s images is a concentration of tension into one instance, or as Marcel Jean has mentioned "into one idea". The ambiguous reading of space typical of Magritte’s early years gradually withers. The blended blue and white plane noted in La Sortie de l’école appears as one of the last stages before the transformation of the distant view into a solid background. The representation of space is, from this moment on, often reduced to a narrow neutralized setting just big enough to allow for the manipulation of objects. The arbitrary assemblage of elements, noted earlier with regard to the works of 1926-1927 and extending into 1928, begins to be subjected to a constructive principle. This can already be detected in works like La Sortie de l ’école and Le Corps bleu. Although in both of these cases a unitary meaning is far from being produced by a dialectical reading of parts and whole, attempts are being made to converge the expression of tension and conflict into a condensed form.

The irrational combination of objects as a criticism of reification

In a letter dated 1927 and addressed to Magritte, Nougé remarked: Ce qui fausse d’emblée le jugement du vulgaire sur les fous et sur nous-mêmes, c’est cette façon très générale de supposer que notre principal souci est de présenter quelque spectacle que nous croyons exister en dehors de nous ou quelque pensée, quelque sentiment dont nous croyons constater en nous l’existence...nous savons bien, mon cher ami, qu’il en va tout autrement de nos démarches et qu’il s’agit pour nous d’inventer un univers et non de le décrire. Que de prudence, de calcul pour donner à l’objet inventé la plus grande puissance sur Tunivers-de-toutes-les-habitudes" dont il nous faut se défendre et qu’il doit supplanter.45

45 Paul Nougé, Histoire de ne pas rire, (Lausanne, Age d’Homme, 1980) p. 220. 53 Nougé’s last sentence gives a good description of the intentions motivating the coming together of objects beginning to appear in Magritte’s work at this time. By tearing banal objects and simple words away from their pre-assigned function and by provoking their arbitrary encounter, a breach was to be formed in the seemingly immutable and orderly reality confronting the subject. In an essay entitled "Pour s’approcher de René Magritte" (1933), Nougé added:

Tirons de ce qui pourrait être nôtre le meilleur parti. Que l’homme aille où il n’a jamais été, éprouve ce qu’il n’a jamais éprouvé, pense ce qu’il n’a jamais pensé, soit ce qu’il n’a jamais été. Il faut l’y aider, il nous faut provoquer ce transport et cette crise, créons des objets bouleversants.46

a) Lukâcs’ theory of reification

In History and class consciousness Georg Lukâcs develops a theory of reification. Among other things, he comments on the subjective effects generated by the intense rationalization and fragmentation process which governs the capitalist mode of production. For him, not only does this mode of production destroy the unity present in a more organic and irrational work process, but additionally and most importantly it operates a turn-about in the subject’s understanding of his relationship to the work process. Lukâcs draws on the example of the worker to elaborate this last point. He argues that the breakdown of the work process into calculable steps and manoeuvres gives the production process, of which the finished good is but a step, an objective and autonomous character which alienates it from the worker’s immediate

46 Nougé, p. 239. 54 experience. The impact of the confrontation with what appears to be a self- sufficient and self-regulating work process is such, says Lukâcs, that it robs the worker of his sense of active involvement.

Instead of perceiving himself at the heart of the production process with the objects emanating from his effort and will, the worker is in fact objectively reduced to purely quantitative measures. In the Poverty of Philosophy Marx had already noted that: "Through the subordination of man to the machine the situation arises in which men are effaced by their labour;.... Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the incarnation of time. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything."47

The most disastrous consequence of the worker’s subordination to this imposing process is the resulting apathy. Having been dislodged from his active and central role within the work process, the worker is reduced to a contemplative observer.

As labour is progressively rationalised and mechanised his [the worker’s] lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative... .The contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system, must likewise transform the basic category of man’s immediate attitude to the world.48

47 Lukâcs, pp. 89-90.

48 Lukâcs, p 89. 55 The quantifying and rationalising norms observed in the production process, as well as their disastrous effects on the worker are, for Lukâcs, but a concentrated version of the structure of the capitalist system. "The fate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole"49. For him, bourgeois society is divided into a series of partial spheres (e.g., justice, the state, etc.) which are internally regulated by their own set of formal laws.

It is, in my view, directly against this segmentation of all human activities (to which, as Bürger noted, art had also been subjected) that surrealism reacted. I also perceive that it is to the same kind of reification phenomenon that Nougé reacted when he warned "Que de prudence, de calcul pour donner à l’objet inventé la plus grande puissance sur T univers-de-toutes-les-habitudes ’ dont il nous faut se défendre et qu’il doit supplanter."

Magritte referred to the necessity of using the pictorial image to shatter the appearance of reality as a given and indestructible entity which is enacted independently of man’s consciousness and experiences:

Ce monde en désordre, plein de contradictions, qui est le nôtre, tient en somme plus ou moins d’aplomb à la faveur d’explications tour à tour très complexes et très ingénieuses qui semblent le justifier et excuser ceux qui en profitent misérablement. Ces explications tiennent compte d’une certaine expérience. Mais il est à remarquer qu’il s’agit d’une expérience "toute faite" et qui si elle donne lieu à de brillantes analyses, cette expérience n’est pas instituée elle-même à la suite d’une analyse de ses conditions réelles....[L’] expérience picturale qui met le monde réel en cause, me donne la croyance en l’infini des possibilités ignorées de la vie. Je sais

49 Lukâcs, p. 91. 56 n’être pas seul à dire que leur conquête est l’unique but et l’unique raison valables de l’expérience de l’homme.50

and again: "J’estime valable l’essai de language, consistant à dire que mes tableaux ont été conçus pour être des signes matériels de la liberté ou de la pensée."51 The arbitrary construction of objects into shattering images presents itself as an active criticism of reification in that it seeks to denounce the false consciousness and immutability upon which bourgeois society is founded.

Magritte repeatedly defended his paintings from being conceived as dream images, or as pure transcriptions of a separate fantastic world, unrelated to our concrete reality. Such an attitude reduces artistic activity to the passive illustra­ tion of a vision, thereby automatically eliminating the possibility of its involvement in any kind of critical process. In a letter to Louis Scutenaire written in 1949, Magritte remarked:

on abuse du mot ’rêve’ au sujet de ma peinture. Nous voulons bien que le domaine du rêve soit respectable. Mais nos travaux ne sont pas oniriques, au contraire. S’il s’agit de ’rêve’, c’est de ’rêve’ très différent de ceux que l’on fait en dormant. Il s’agirait de ’rêves’ au contraire très ’volontaires’, et qui n’ont rien de vague comme les sentiments que l’on aurait en s’évadant dans le rêve. Et cette volonté qui me fait rechercher des images qui passent pour des images de rêve auprès de certains est celle que nous sommes quelque-uns à avoir et qui consiste à faire le plus de lumière possible. (Goemans dit a propos

50 Magritte, pp. 145-146.

51 Magritte, pp. 416-417. 57 de cela: des rêves qui ne sont pas faits pour nous endormir mais pour nous réveiller (ou éveiller)52.

Magritte’s images were not intended to elevate towards, refer to, or represent a higher, purer world. In fact, they fought against just that. They denounced the way life had been, at once, drawn away from day-to-day experience to be turned into pure spectacle, and the way it had been reduced to an accumulation of separate spheres of experience which, though deadened through sub division, were expected to cumulate into a fulfilling life experience.

The construction of an image through negation

La Trahison des Images (fig. 19) depicts a standard brown and black pipe. The inscription "Ceci n’est pas une pipe" appears directly underneath the pipe. The background is of a uniform beige color. The pipe is painted in a meticulous manner with highlights and shaded areas creating the illusion of volume. The proportions of the pipe are larger than life. The painting itself measures 59 X 80 cm, with the pipe occupying most of the surface. Because no shadow is casted by the pipe upon the background, a certain impression of collage is created. Unlike the situation in Le Double secret and in La Sortie de l’école, the ambiguity displayed in this work does not involve a subtle visual play oscillating between effects of flatness and effects of receding space. Here the effect is that of outright confrontation. While in Le Sens propre the words "femme triste"

52 Louis Scutenaire, Avec Magritte, (Brussels, Le Fil rouge, 1977) p. 106. 58 were being used as a substitute for an image, in La Trahison des images, the words "Ceci n’est pas une pipe" are used to negate the image.

The series of attempts at constructing an image by provoking the discordant and arbitrary encounter of unrelated objects comes to a crescendo in La Trahison des images. Although in prior years (1927-1928) the objects (and words) had been hurled away from their assigned functional position and assembled in an ‘irrational’ manner, the effect produced remained closer to what Bürger has called a "refusal to provide meaning" or a "withdrawal of meaning." With La Trahison des images, the withdrawal of meaning is replaced by the negation of meaning. Or, in other words, the construction process observed in an earlier work (e.g., Le Sens propre) is here defined through negation. An image is being proposed, but this image is the result of the negation of two terms. The shock of irrational combination is here at its strongrst. The negating effect is all the more pronounced in that the restricted spatial perspective noted in the works of 1928 disappears to give way to a blank background. The efforts noted earlier in 1925-1927, at dismantling the organic construction of the work by opposing effects of flatness and depth have been translated in semantic terms. A form is proposed and denounced simultaneously.

As Magritte began to look for a constructive approach (even if defined by negation) to his criticism of reification, the surrealist movement also began to stabilize. In Histoire du surréalisme, Maurice Nadeau summarizes this period as follows: 59 Le surréalisme a finalement conquis droit de cité. Il est admis comme mouvement d’avant-garde, il a réalisé des oeuvres qui se voient et se lisent, son audience est assez large, son influence, surtout chez les jeunes, non négligeable. H n’a pas peu contribué à changer le climat de la peinture et de la poésie.53

In reaction to the threat of seeing surrealism identified as a simple form of revival occurring within the artistic and literary circles, Aragon wrote his Le Traité du style (1928), and Breton published his Second Manifeste (1929).

In the second part of his book, Aragon warned against the prevailing reductive attitude which equated surrealism with a technique. He says: "La légende règne qu’il suffit d’apprendre le truc, et qu’aussitôt des textes d’un grand intérêt poétique s’échappent de la plume de n’importe qui comme une diarrhée inépuisable."54 And a little further on:

Et puis je ne veux pas, tu m’entends multitude, que le texte surréaliste non plus que le rêve, passe dans le compartiment des formes fixes, comme un perfectionnement de liberté payant patente, avec l’assentiment enregistreur des morveux qui trouvent déjà le vers libre bassinant. Un pas en avant du vers libre! Voici ce que les gens aimerait entendre dire du surréalisme!55

Breton condemns the lack of ethical rigor on the part of several members of the surrealist movement. He accuses some of them of having deemed the

53 Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme, (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1964) p. 107.

54 Louis Aragon, Le Traité du style, (Paris, Gallimard, 1980) pp. 187-188.

55 Aragon, p. 193. 60 exploration of the dreamlike world and of the subconscious as a valid enough proof of their revolutionary fervour, and of having localized upon purely formal parameters the essence of their rupture with tradition. He set out to define the position of surrealism once again:

Notre désir est de continuer à tenir à la portée de ceux-ci un ensemble d’idées que nous-mêmes avons jugées bouleversantes, tout en évitant que la communication de ces idées, de moyen qu’elle doit être, devienne but, alors que le but doit être la ruine totale des prétentions d’une caste à laquelle nous appartenons malgré nous et que nous ne pourrons contribuer à abolir extérieurement à nous que lorsque nous serons parvenus à les abolir en nous.56

I believe that it is with the transitional years of 1928 to 1933 that the first glimmer of similitude bappeared between the developments noted in Magritte’s works and the course taken by the surrealist movement. Indeed, as Magritte increasingly progressed into a pictorially constructive criticism of reification, one gradually anchoring itself within the domain of artistic expression (though in so doing it also radically mediated the concept of unity by extending it to new limits), the conflicts arising between the surrealists and the communists also began to direct the movement into a more strictly artistic scope of experience.

56 Breton, Les Manifestes, pp. 104-105. THE DISCOVERY OF THE OBJET-REPONSE - 1933

La valeur d’une oeuvre d’art se mesure aussi dans le monde bourgeois à sa rareté, à sa valeur-or, sa valeur intrinsèque n’intéressant que quelques naïfs retardataires que la vue d’une fleur des champs satisfait autant que la possession d’un diamant vrai ou faux. Un révolutionnaire conscient comme Lénine juge l’or à sa valeur. Il écrit: "Lorsque nous aurons remporté la victoire à l’échelle mondiale, nous édifierons je pense, dans les rues de quelques-unes des plus grandes ville du monde, des pissotières en or. "

René Magritte, "La Révolte en question", Le Soleil Noir, Paris, 1952.

Les Affinités électives

Magritte first embarked on the development of the objet-réponse when he painted Les Affinités électives (fig. 20) in 1933. In a text dating from 1940 he writes: 62 Une nuit de 1933, je m’éveillai dans une chambre où l’on avait placé une cage et son oiseau endormi. Une magnifique erreur me fit voir dans la cage l’oiseau disparu et remplacé par un oeuf. Je tenais là un nouveau secret poétique étonnant car le choc que je ressentis était provoqué précisément par l’affinité de deux objets: la cage et l’oeuf, alors que précédemment je provoquais ce choc en faisant se rencontrer des objets sans parenté aucune. Je cherchais, à partir de cette révélation, si d’autres objets que la cage ne pourraient également manifester, grâce à la mise en lumière d’un élément qui leur serait propre et qui leur serait rigoureusement prédestiné, la même poésie évidente que l’oeuf et la cage avaient su produire par leur union.57

Les Affinités électives depicts a bird cage framed by a wooden support inside which is an oversized egg. The egg completely fills the interior of the cage. This simple composition is placed against a uniform background. The painting is done in a monochrome tone. Only the egg differs slightly in tonality. Although tending towards a white color, the egg is not completely white. Its color is tinted with the same brown hue used for the rest of the picture. This is particularly noticeable on the bottom half of the egg where a dark shadow is painted. The delicate effort at homogeneity through uniformity of color softens the otherwise imposing presence of the egg.

If the first painting which lead Magritte away from an arbitrary combination of objects into a poetically defined association occurred as a result of a vision, the ones which were to follow became the result of an intense work process. Les Vacances de Hegel is one of the paintings which resulted from the work process known as objet-réponse.

57 Christian Bussy, Anthologie du surréalisme en Belgique, (Paris, Gallimard, 1927) p. 397. 63 Les Vacances de Hesel

Magritte painted two versions of Les Vacances de Hegel, one in 1958 (fig. 21), the other in 1959 (fig. 22). They are very similar. The image depicted in both works is starkly simple. Each painting shows a black umbrella and a glass of water set on a pink background. The umbrella is open and represented in its entirety. The glass is transparent, filled with water, and placed upon the umbrella, at the very spot where the point of the umbrella would normally be. Whereas, in the 1958 version, Magritte painted a cylindrical glass, in the 1959 version, he painted a stemmed goblet. His signature appears at the bottom left comer of each work.

Magritte described the conception of Les Vacances de Hegel in a letter dated 1958 in the following terms : "My latest painting began with the question: how to show a glass of water in a painting in such a way that it would not be indifferent? Or whimsical, or arbitrary, or weak - but, allow us to use the word, with genius?"58 Having formulated this question, he began looking for solutions. He drew about 150 sketches which eventually led to the production of the 1958 painting. For Magritte, this combination of objects was "the exact solution to the initial question : how to paint a glass of water with genius."59

Magritte described the general construction underlying this work as follows: an object is first chosen as a starting point. This object is presented as a "question"

58 Gablik, p. 122.

59 Gablik, p. 122 64 to which a second object must be found as an "answer". The second object must be "secretly attached to the first by links complex enough to act as a verification to the answer. If the answer is obvious enough, then the combination of the two objects will be startling."60 Furthermore, he specifies that the links uniting the two objects are not reversible. For example, if the dagger is designated as the answer to the rose, the rose does not necessarily in return constitute an answer to the dagger.

The use of the term "problem" in addressing everyday objects is to be noted. For him, everyday objects are problems to the extent that they illustrate the banality into which everyday existence has slumbered. Everyday objects are used as reminders of the oppressive routine which has drained life out of day-to-day existence. The problem, therefore addresses itself not only to the banality into which these objects have fallen, but also to the equally banal life which is surrounded by them. Moreover, the integrated and unquestioned use of these banal objects within a day-to-day routine has inhibited our perception of some of their implicit functions. With regards to the problem of shoes (see fig. 23) Magritte says:

Le problème des souliers démontre combien les choses les plus effrayantes passent par la force de r inattention pour être tout à fait inoffensives. On ressent grâce au "Modèle rouge" que l’union d’un pied humain et d’un soulier relève en réalité d’une coutume monstrueuse.61

80 My translation. Actual quote in French is : Il s’agissait de trouver comme réponse un autre objet, attaché secrètement au premier par des liens assez complexes pour servir de vérification de la réponse, si la réponse s’imposait, évidente, la réunion des deux objets était saisissante. " Pierre, p. 56

61 Magritte, pp. 111-112. 65

In the 1958 version of Les Vacances de Hegel, the problem started with the glass of water. The solution to that problem was found to be an umbrella supporting a glass. Yet, by looking at Magritte’s sketches62 (fig. 24), we notice that the solution to the initial problem was not only of a conceptual nature. The glass of water was drawn over and over again. A variety of modifications were performed on the glass until Magritte eventually drew a line inside the glass of water. From there, the line began to widen into a "V" shape and the idea emerged to transform the line into a folded umbrella. Eventually, the umbrella was opened, moved outside the glass, and increased in size so that it no longer could be contained inside the glass, but was now supporting it.

The condensed series of sketches provided by Magritte as an example of his working process is useful in understanding the formation of the objet-réponse. From it, we can observe that the solution to a given problem is discovered through a lengthy pictorial search. The second object evolved out of a series of combinations of forms. The manner in which the second object is combined with the first is essential for providing an effective answer to the problem. The complexity of the links formed between the two objects is a result of their specific physical combination to each other.

62 Gablik, p. 121. 66 The two versions

In both versions of Les Vacances de Hegel, the glass and the umbrella are kept in scale. In substituting the glass of water for a small structural part of the umbrella, Magritte binds the two objects together. The glass is somewhat integrated into the umbrella. Its substitution for the umbrella’s point is such that the composition has stability.

The changes made in the shape of the glass in the later version intensify this structural link. The slight differences in the 1959 work are quite significant for the quality of the link unifying the combined image. The 1958 version depicts a cylindrical glass in such a way that the point of the umbrella is neither visible nor truly even suggested. In the 1959 version, however, a goblet is mounted on a stem. The significance of the change in the shape of the glass resides in the double function of its stem through its position, size, color, and shape. It acts at once as part of the glass and part of the umbrella. The stem is the area were both objects complete themselves. The umbrella finds an approximation of its missing part and the glass is thereby still more securely attached to its support.

The two versions of the painting differ on another point. In the 1958 painting, the stem of the umbrella itself is made of wood. In the 1959 work, this stem is metallic. This slight transformation further strengthens the connection between glass and umbrella. The change in color allows the strong vertical line of the composition, which runs along the handle of the umbrella, to continue as if it had pierced the dome of the umbrella to emerge on the other side in the form of a glass stem. In other words, it modifies the umbrella enough to allow for 67 a structural link with the stem of the glass. Because of a similarity in the way in which both color and texture reflect light, the stem can more easily fit in. It completes the image of the umbrella without deforming the goblet in any way. The umbrella and glass complement each other so that it becomes doubtful whether the use of the term substitution could be used in identifying the presence of the glass in the position where the end point should normally be.

If we compare the nature of the link binding the bird cage to the egg in Les Affinités électives to the one binding glass and umbrella, we notice that in the former case this link is less complex both conceptually and physically. It is perhaps as a consequence of this that the processes of substitution and of scale inversion are called upon to play a more important role in the realization of the image. The relative position of the two objects (egg and cage) has not been altered. The egg remains in the cage. Only its size has been altered. Furthermore, the substitution of egg for bird is actually closer to a displacement than to a substitution per se. The nature of the cohesion between bird-cage and egg is thus defined less by internal links than by a construction principle which includes processes of uniformity through color, scale inversion, and displacement.

In contrast to the deformation that one sees in such pictures as Le Double Secret, Le Manage de minuit (fig. 25) and others done during the 1925-1927 period, the strength of the link between the two objects in the 1959 version of Les Vacances de Hegel resides in the contradictory though non-obstructive nature of their combination. Although forming one object, both components 68 retain their inherent function and shape. The glass holds water, while the umbrella simultaneously repels it.

The specific quality of the link between glass and umbrella, which Magritte calls its "complexity," establishes the potential of the two objects to combine to form a third. The constructed image produced in Les Vacances de Hegel (1959) is therefore not only the accumulation of two objects, for it is also their surpassing into a third. Glass and umbrella do not negate each other, neither do they infiltrate or merge into one another. Rather, retaining their own identities, they form a third object. This as of yet unnamed third object acquires an identity of its own.

The relationship between title and work

The internal links which Magritte developed between the two objects in Les Vacances de Hegel were also extended to both work and title. The nature of the link unifying title and work is in many ways similar to that of the link binding glass and umbrella. In 1962 Magritte declared that:

Le titre entretient avec les figures peintes le même rapport que ces figures entre elles. Les figures sont réunies dans un ordre qui évoque le mystère. Le titre est réuni à l’image peinte selon le même ordre.63

In 1946-1947, Magritte had already described a similar attitude. He said:

63 Pierre, p. 110. 69 Les titres des tableaux ne sont pas des explications et les tableaux ne sont pas des illustrations des titres. La relation entre le titre et le tableau est poétique, c’est-à-dire que cette relation ne retient des objets que certaines de leurs caractéristiques habituellement ignorées par la conscience, mais parfois pressenties à l’occasion d’événements extraordinaires que la raison n’est point encore parvenue à élucider.64

Hence, the relationship between the two is not based on a means-end rationality, where one becomes the direct and automatic answer to the other; instaed, it becomes the fruit of a personal search for poetic expression. As with the connection between the glass and the umbrella, a union of title and work redefines both with an identity of the whole which surpasses an accumulation of the parts. Magritte described how his search for a title only began once the work was completed. At this point, the work acted much as the initial object had done in the process of his objet-réponse. Starting from this first element (the work), Magritte searched for the title which, when combined with the work, would reveal strong and complex affinities.

With respect to Les Vacances de Hegel, Magritte recalls the process which followed the completion of the painted image as follows:

J’ai ensuite pensé que Hegel (un autre génie) aurait été très sensible à cet objet qui a deux fonctions opposées: à la fois pas vouloir d’eau (la repousser) et en vouloir (en contenir). Il aurait été charmé, je pense, ou amusé (comme en vacances) et j’appelle ce tableau: "Les Vacances de Hegel".65

84 Pierre, p. 110.

85 Gablik, p. 121. 70 The title can no longer be dissected as an isolated entity joined to the work through some "useful" link, but comes to act with it and to enrich it through its own internal links. Words and images interact.

Magritte had first experimented with the connection between words and images in the period from 1927 to 1930. During those years spent in Paris he had painted most of his works containing words. The words, however, were used as images. In fact, their involvement was double, they were integrated in the painting as words, and yet also as part of the composition of the image. In Les Vacances de Hegel the link tying work to title is not as infiltrating. It is not as direct. Whereas the link between glass and umbrella is formed with a minimum of deformation to either component, so is the link between word and image accomplished less boisterously than in the Paris years. It is as if the experiments done with words and images in the late twenties had lead to the evolution of a second stage of interaction between the two mediums. It now appeared as if in order to transcend the gap between word and image, it was no longer necessary to appropriate the characteristics of either one. The connection could be sustained through subtle, yet stronger links.

It is, in my opinion, in the formation of such constructive links between objects (and words and images) that Magritte initiated a new phase of his criticism of reification. If in the 1925-1927 period the criticism of reification took on the form of an attack on the organic work of art, the criticism which began to appear in 1933 took on a different approach. Indeed, the constructive principle of the objet-réponse, which brought objects together and elevated them beyond their simple determination as commodities, presented itself as a criticism of 71 reification in that it intended to surpass the conditions which defined commodity relations. It intended to go beyond the recognition of objects only for their use value.

Use value, exchange value, poetic value

As a direct consequence of the division of labour and in response to an ever-expanding capitalist economy as it occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth century, commodity relations emerged as the dominant form of interaction between people. What had hitherto been produced by a community for its needs gradually turned into a system of mass production. Towards the turn of the century, goods were being produced exclusively for their exchange value, that is to say, for profit.

Capitalism values the commodity above all else: it is the driving force of its economy. Commodification tears the formal, material aspect of an object away from its social and contextual aspect in order to submit the remains to a so-called free market economy for an assessment of its objective worth. In this evaluation process, objects are isolated and considered independent of their specific context. Above all, their ties and links with the community are made abstract. Value is therefore no longer to be obtained from an assessment of the position, status, and function held within a specific social context, but is imposed externally, according to the rules of a market economy. In an article entitled "L’Art Bourgeois", Magritte remarks that: 72 La ruse consiste essentiellement à fausser les rapports normaux de l’homme avec le monde de manière qu’il n’est plus possible d’user de l’objet pour lui-même mais toujours pour des motifs qui lui sont parfaitement étrangers. On désire un diamant non pour ses propriétés intrinsèques...mais parce que, coûtant fort cher, il confère à celui qui le possède une manière de supériorité sur ses semblables.66

Whereas use value is determined from within a specific use context, according to the social function (of whatever nature) being fulfilled within a community, exchange value is imposed externally according to the variations of the market economy. In contrast, in Les Vacances de Hegel, Magritte tears his objects away from an external application of value to construct an internally defined meaning. The meaning (or the absence of meaning) of his third object is yielded by a delicate combination. The complex links binding the two objects together are the result of a specific process and its value cannot be separated from this process.

It appears as if Magritte had established a third category of value, which I shall call "poetic." This newly formed category distances itself from exchange value. It is defined by the quality of the poetic intensity created by the combination of objects into a single image. In his early paintings (1925-1927), Magritte attacked pre-established categories through a disruption of organic spatial unity by "bringing together objects in no way related to one another." Then in 1933, with the development of his concept of the objet-réponse, he moved from the disruption of traditional pictorial unity to the construction of new possibilities of poetic expression.

66 Magritte, p. 132. 73

Magritte’s objet-réponse initiated a search for a means to refute the degradation of life into commodity relations and to reinvest the object with poetic value, both in the work of art and in day-to-day existence. In a letter written to the Belgian Communist Party in 1947 Magritte said:

La seule façon qu’ont les poètes et les peintres de lutter contre l’économie bourgeoise est précisément de donner à leurs oeuvres un contenu qui nie les valeurs idéologiques bourgeoises qui renforcent l’économie bourgeoise.67

Interestingly enough, Les Vacances de Hegel did not attempt to re-establish meaning or value by re-integrating itself within the existing social context of capitalism, nor did it reinstate the status of use value as it was known in pre-capitalist economies. His proposal was not nostalgic. Rather, having recognized the permeation of the commodity structure at all levels of society, Magritte could only propose a surpassing of its condition into poetic value. It is this passage into a new, internally defined expression that made possible the creation of what I call "poetic value." It would appear as if, in an ultimate effort at refuting externally determined value, the objects themselves had had to re-appropriate their expressive power. Recalling the transitional period which led him from a cubist style to a more detailed transcription of reality (1925- 1926), Magritte says:

Il me fallait animer ce monde qui, même en mouvement, n’avait aucune profondeur et avait perdu toute consistance. Je songeai alors

67 Magritte, p. 241. 74 que les objets eux-mêmes devaient révéler éloquemment leur existence et je recherchai quels en étaient les moyens.68

The objects

The objects used by Magritte in his attempts to redefine value from an internal context are almost always standardized and mass-produced. They are objects reduced to their simplest, most common form. In no way do they distinguish themselves. They are the result of serial production, where essence is reduced to form and where all similar forms are considered equal, they are symbols of uniformity.

Furthermore, they are familiar objects belonging to our intimate environment which day-to-day routine has rendered nearly invisible. And yet these are the objects that Magritte re-animates through delicate and complex unification. Commenting on the choice of his objects, he says: "Il convenait que le choix des objets à dépayser fût porté sur des objets très familiers afin de donner au dépaysement son maximum d’efficacité."69

Thus the link formed between the objects was not to be sustained by exoticism. Magritte avoided objects that were eccentric or rare, since a combination of these would have inevitably reoriented attention back towards the market evaluation of the individual objects and away from their poetic value. The objet-

68 Magritte, p. 106.

69 Magritte, p. 110. 75

réponse would then have fallen into a mere accumulation of worth, and its value would have been determined by no more than the summation of its two com­ ponents.

Magritte did not want to surpass exchange value by overflowing into a kind of "surplus" value, into a saturation. His intention was to surpass it by refusing to comply with its imposition and to substitute a different basis of evaluation which would be neither quantitative nor rational.

Isolation as a means of intensifying effect

In a 1933 essay entitled Pour s’approcher de René Magritte, Paul Nougé pointed out that the intensity of the impact produced by Magritte’s pictures was largely a function of the isolation in which he presented his objects. He wrote: "

mais comment conférer à l’objet pareille vertu de fascination, pareille charme? Ici, l’opération fondamentale nous a paru être l’isolement et l’on pourrait se laisser aller à exprimer une sorte de loi: isolé, le charme d’un objet est en raison directe de sa banalité ...la puissance subversive d’un objet isolé est en raison directe de l’intimité des rapports qu’il entretenait jusque-là avec notre corps, avec notre esprit, avec nous-mêmes.70

Indeed the neutral background against which Magritte painted both versions of Les Vacances de Hegel does heighten the effect produced by the combination.

70 Bussy, p. 383. 76 It cuts all ties with the external world. We observe, on the basis of Nougé’s comments that if the objects created by the process of the objet-réponse are isolated within the image, Magritte’s criticism of reification can also be seen as restricting itself to the artistic sphere. The isolation is thus carried through to a second degree. Exchange value may be criticized within the painted image, but by restricting the criticism to his isolated pictorial mode of expression, Magritte in fact complies with the very compartmentalized system to which he was reacting. A comparison between the criticism offered by the objet-réponse and that developed by the Situationist International can serve to illustrate this last point.

Détournement

Détournement, or in English, diversion or deviation (in the sense of rerouting) is a term which was used by the Situationist International (1957-1972) to refer to a type of action by which various forms of embellishment and dupery, such as advertising, promotional material of all types (visual, written) — actually, all forms of expression produced by the dominant class — were modified and deviated from their original purpose. Thomas Levin comments on the difficulty of translating détournement into English:

The translation of détournement, one of the key terms of Situationist aesthetic practice, poses a number of problems. Its rendition as "diversion" in the american edition of "Society of Spectacle"...is unacceptable because it is burdened with the connotation of "distraction". In French, détournement - deflection, turning in a different direction - is also employed to signal detours and to refer to 77 embezzlement, swindle, abduction, and highjacking. The criminal and violent quality of the latter four connotations are closer to the SI practice of elicitely appropriating the products of culture and abducting or highjacking them to other destinations. Nevertheless, these terms are also too marked to be employed.71

The Situationist refused to consider art as a privileged means of expression. Instead, through détournement they proposed to use society, taken in its totality, as their medium of expression. Their efforts were aimed at re-appropriating urban space and criticizing it.

Whereas embellishment is systematically used in an ongoing effort to mask the injustices upon which bourgeois society is founded, the Situationist International acted upon these agents of illusion, of spectacle, in such a way as to transform them into blatant denunciations of the system from which they had emerged.

Sharing the revolutionary vision of Surrealism, the Situationist International expanded its field of action beyond the artistic sphere. Guy Debord understands the differences separating the Situationists from the historical avant-garde movements in the following manner:

Le dadaïsme et le surréalisme sont les deux courants qui marquèrent la fin de l’art moderne. Ils sont, quoique seulement d’une manière relativement consciente, contemporains du dernier grand assaut du mouvement révolutionnaire prolétarien; et l’échec de ce mouvement, qui les laissait enfermés dans le champ artistique même dont ils avaient

71 Thomas Levin, "Dismantling the Spectacle: the Cinema of Guy Debord", On the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time : the Situationist International, 1957-1972, (Cambridge, MIT Press and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1989-1990), p. 110. Given the difficulty in translating détournement into a single English word, I will continue to use the French term throughout the text. 78 proclamé la caducité, est la raison fondamentale de leur immobilisation. Le dadaïsme et le surréalisme sont à la fois historiquement liés et en opposition. Dans cette opposition, qui constitue aussi pour chacun la part la plus conséquente et radicale de son apport, apparaît rinsuffisance interne de leur critique, développée par l’un comme par l’autre d’un seul côté. Le dadaïsme a voulu supprimer l’art sans le réaliser; et le surréalisme a voulu réaliser l’art sans le supprimer. La position critique élaborée depuis par les situa- tionistes a montré que la suppression et la réalisation de l’art sont les aspects inséparables d’un même dépassement de l’art.72

The Surrealists had hoped to abolish the separation of human activity into isolated fields of expression, yet their activity remained limited to the cultural sphere. They had ambitiously hoped to effect a radical change in social praxis, yet their insistence upon separate yet complementary artistic and political revolutions led inevitably to the establishment of two distinct spheres of activity. Though starting from a criticism of the division of labour, Surrealism ended by being subjected to its laws. This fundamental contradiction roused Surrealism and eventually tore it apart.

The Situationists realized the hopelessness of trying to criticize a system while adapting to its structure. If they were to criticize reified bourgeois society, they could not do so by limiting their criticism to a single artificially constructed sphere of activity.

In a 1956 article entitled "Mode d’Emploi du Détournement", Guy Debord and Gil Wolman give examples of possible détournement to be performed on novels, films, architecture, works of art, titles, urban planning, etc. With respect to

72 Debord, pp. 149-150. 79 film, it is proposed that instead of forbidding the screening of fascist films, and thus losing the uniqueness of that cinematographic expression, projections should be accompanied by verbal comments denouncing their fascist ideology. It is therefore proposed, for example, that Griffith’s racist movie "Birth of a Nation" be projected in its original state, but that the image be accompanied by a sound track on which the horrors of the imperialist war and the activities of the K.K.K. would be analyzed.

Debord and Wolman also allude to the somewhat more demanding task of diverting a novel. They note that such a project would benefit from "non­ explicit" association of images and words. For architecture they suggest that, in addition to the détournement of known architectural forms, a whole range of objects could be diverted: cranes and scafoldings could be positioned in such a way as to offer new directions to a dead sculptural tradition.

The objet-réponse as a form of détournement

It is possible to observe in Magritte’s conception of the objet-réponse a pre- Situationist form of détournement. It is possible to speak of détournement to the extent that the construction of the objet-réponse is based on the denunciation of exchange value as a phenomenon derived from rationalized modes of production. Through a series of specific processes, Magritte joined everyday objects to produce images which challenged their determination as commodities. Détournement was present in the rerouting of mass-produced objects to an end diametrically opposed to the one they had been assigned as commodities. 80 In the introduction to their article, Debord and Wolman give a general description of the nature of the links to be established between components:

Tous les éléments, pris n’importe où, peuvent faire l’objet de rapprochements nouveaux. Les découvertes de la poésie moderne sur la structure analogique de l’image démontrent qu’entre deux éléments, d’origines aussi étrangères qu’il est possible, un rapport s’établit toujours. S’en tenir au cadre d’un arrangement personnel des mots ne relève que de la convention. L’interférence de deux mondes sentimentaux, la mise en présence de deux expressions indépendantes, dépassent leurs éléments primitifs pour donner une organisation synthétique d’une éfficacité supérieure. Tout peut servir.73

This description could very well have been written of Magritte’s objet-réponse. The desire to combine elements from unrelated origins in order to make apparent something which out-defines its own primitive terms is common to both the objet-réponse and to détournement as exercised by the Situationists.

Later, describing one of the four laws guiding the use of détournement, they added:

Plus le caractère rationnel de la réplique est apparent, plus elle se confond avec le banal esprit de répartie, pour lequel il s’agit également de faire servir les paroles de l’adversaire contre lui. Ceci n’est naturellement pas limité au language parlé.74

73 Guy Debord, Gil Wolman, “Mode d’emploi du détournement", Les Lèvres nues, no. 8 May 1956, pp. 302-303.

74 Debord, Wolman, p. 304. 81 Again, the intent to liberate "meaning" from rational determination defines both the Sis’ and Magritte’s endeavors. The two subjects differ, however, in the specific ways by which they arrive at these ends. The Situationists defied rational determination by turning a message in upon itself ("faire servir les paroles de l’adversaire contre lui"), while Magritte simply escaped from it by passing into another value system.

Magritte acted within the painted image. His objet-réponse was a dialectically constructed image which defied re-appropriation by rational modes of evaluation. The Situationists, on the other hand, always sought to act directly on actual objects or products. If, for Magritte, we can speak of the creation of a poetic link binding two pictorial objects together, with the Situationist International, the link between the components is the result of a real confrontation in the world.

Magritte created the whole image. His objects were not imposed from an immediate surrounding, but were chosen. His intervention on the initial object was treated in the same manner, and with the use of the same medium as was his intervention on the second object. In fact, since it is difficult to tell which of the two objects in Les Vacances de Hegel served as the original problem, it is quite possible to imagine that the umbrella could have played this role. Although the problem of the umbrella could not, according to Magritte, have yielded the same image as that which had begun with a glass of water, it must be emphasized that the ruling purpose behind the construction of an objet- réponse is to unite the two objects with secret and complex links. Emphasis is thus placed upon the resulting image and on its potential for revealing 82 unexpected and unfamiliar characteristics in both objects. To this extent, possessing knowledge as to which of the two objects actually posed the original problem is less important than perceiving the constructed image itself. Indeed, if the image is to successfully fulfil the aims set forth in the concept of the objet-réponse, attention should be focused on the specific poetic combination of the two objects, and not on their division into problem and solution.

In the case of the Situationist International however, the distinction between target and intervention is quite explicit. One clearly responds to the other. Moreover, the medium used in the intervention is usually different from that of its target, in such a way that subject and response remain more clearly contrasted. The intention is not so much to transcend commodification but directly to attack and unmask false consciousness. The subject to which the intervention responds could be encountered anywhere on the street. It is present all around, in different shapes and media. It does not need to be an isolated image to be attacked and challenged.

In contrast, Magritte’s diversions appear to take place within an isolated realm. Not only, as Nougé pointed out, were the objects isolated within the painting, but the very result, the objet-réponse itself, as a painting restricted to the artistic sphere, is also isolated from direct interaction with daily life.

Therefore, if it can be said that the dialectical principle upon which the objet- réponse is based carries a criticism of exchange value, it must also be observed that this criticism is narrowly limited to expression within the artistic sphere. 83 The inclusion of space in the formation of the obiet-réponse

This restriction to the artistic domain became all the more noticeable in 1933 when Magritte began to integrate receding space as an active element in the construction of his objet-réponse. Indeed, a look at works like La Réponse imprévue (fig. 26) 1933, La Condition humaine (fig. 27) 1933, Le Chant de l’orage (fig. 28) 1937, or L’Empire des lumières (fig. 29) 1954, will reveal the extent of this integration. In all four of these works it will be noted that the representation of illusionary space is no longer given as a setting to heighten the impact produced by the combination of objects, but is now called to play an integral part in the formation of the objet-réponse. Its presence is now combined with the object acting as question in creating the solution to the problem. Magritte describes the creation of La Réponse imprévue in the following terms:

Occupons-nous maintenant du battant de la porte: celui-ci peut s’ouvrir sur un paysage vu à l’envers ou bien le paysage peut être peint sur le battant. Mais essayons quelque chose de moins gratuit : à côté du battant de la porte, faisons un trou dans le mur, trou qui est aussi une issue, une porte. Perfectionnons encore cette rencontre en réduisant les deux objets à un seul : le trou se place tout naturellement dans le battant de la porte. Et par ce trou nous verrons l’obscurité...75

The one element which had stood as the basis of Magritte’s criticism in the early years (1925-27) and which had been pacified in the transitional years, reappears in the mid 1930s as a fully integrated element. For the first time the

75 Magritte, p. 99. 84 illusionary effect of space attains the same constructive status as that of the object.

La Condition humaine

The painting opens onto a window scene viewed from the interior of a room. The window looking out onto a landscape is framed on either side by long brown curtains. Only a fraction of the wall and floor are shown, enough to firmly ground the viewer within an interior space, so as to counterbalance the vividly rendered landscape. This grounding effect is sustained by the dark brown and beige colors given to all the interior materials (curtains, wall, floor, window frame, and sill, etc.). The angle of vision given on this scene is not perfectly perpendicular to the window plane. In other words, the picture plane (the surface of the canvas) is not parallel to the interior wall containing the window. The viewer is situated just to the right of a head-on view. This point of observation is partially responsible for making the painted canvas on an easel directly in front of the window more noticeable. The subject of the painting is so perfectly rendered and blended in with the outside scenery that, were it not for its noticeable, unpainted edge (which becomes visible due to our slightly off- center position) and the parts of the easel not hidden by the canvas, it would go unnoticed.

La Condition humaine reveals a very meticulously balanced play between interior and exterior. The lively colored landscape situated at the center of the canvas, framed and contrasted as it is by a dark colored border of curtain and 85 wall, automatically attracts one’s attention. The scenery depicted is balanced, with equal proportions given to land and sky. The sky is painted in a bright blue color, and is contrasted by large white clouds. The portion identifying the land is composed of a foreground (a field with a small earth path running across it) and a background (a small mountain range running the length of the window’s width) both painted in a soft green. Acting as a mediator between foreground and background is a single tree placed approximately midway. The position of this solitary tree, although painted on the right-hand side of the canvas standing on the easel, is actually located at the center of the actual canvas. Being so strategically positioned, it becomes the immediate focus of attention and thus acts as a delaying factor in deciphering the incongruities noticed around the painting’s edges. Indeed all four sides of the easel painting show subtle signs of disturbance, preventing the perception of the content of the painting from being confused with the actual landscape itself. On the right-hand side the above mentioned untreated strip of canvas is stretched across the edge (or thickness) of the wooden frame and kept in place by a series of small nails.

At the top edge of the painting appears the small wooden upper support of the easel upon which the canvas is resting. Its presence is heightened by its strong color and formal contrast to the sky area into which it protrudes. The incongruity displayed on the left-hand side of the painting is the most subtly treated. It, in fact, only becomes visible at the upper left hand comer of the painting. Again, because of our slightly off-center position (towards our right side), the left-hand side of the canvas only very slightly overlaps the left curtain, but ever so slightly that the phenomenon becomes noticeable only where the upper horizontal edge of the canvas perpendicularly meets the curtain 86 line. At the lower edge of the canvas, the incongruity is marked by the appearance of three easel legs. But here again this discordance is very subtly rendered by a combination of formal and color contrast.

Only a very small strip of actual landscape is showing between the lower edge of the painting and the window sill. It is the prolongation of the easel legs into this small area of the actual landscape that informs of the presence of an object obstructing the view; painted in a dark brown color, they are perfectly integrated with the interior space. It is only to the extent that they overstep this domain, and ever so slightly invade the small strip of actual landscape between easel painting and window sill, that they indicate the presence of the canvas. The necessity of positioning the viewer slightly off-center is therefore justified by the delicate double play effect sought by Magritte.

In perfecting his concept of objet-réponse by extending it to include subtler possibilities of construction, Magritte also paradoxically gave his image a greater degree of coherence. If in Les Vacances de Hegel we can speak of the construction of a third object which is isolated against a uniform background, in La Condition humaine this distinction is no longer possible. Indeed, we observe that in this painting the interior and exterior spaces are united by the the easel, thus binding all the elements into one image. There is, of course, a moment of indecision in perceiving the double play created by the superimposition of a canvas representing the exact scenery it is masking, but the successful creation of this ambiguous situation relies entirely on the cohesive structure of the image. 87 Though the representation of illusionary space is disputed within the image (by appearing at once as a flat surface and a receding space), its role remains that of unifier. Whereas in early years Magritte used the simultaneous representation of both flatness and depth as a means of disrupting the organic unity of the work (ie. La Traversée difficile), in 1933 the simultaneous perception of both the second and third dimensions is reversely used as a cohesive element.

So in shifting his criticism of reification away from a direct negation of the organic into a form of détournement, surpassing determination as exchange value, Magritte begins to strengthen the unity of his image. The concept of the organic work which had served as the source of his criticism in 1925, had by 1933, reappeared as the basis for building the ultimate stage of his criticism: the objet-réponse.

If in the early days, the negation of the organic work rested on formal and semantic contradictions, the works dating from 1933 onwards carried the contradictions to another level. In orienting his criticism of reification towards surpassing of exchange value by relying on the construction of images, Magritte threatened to turn his work into the kind of affirmative criticism mentioned by Herbert Marcuse. In his essay entitled "On the Affirmative Character of Culture", Marcuse contends that art is both a form of protest against the negative aspects of society and a compensation for its shortcomings. On the one hand, art allows the expression of humane and noble values (thus protesting against the impossibility of their realization in social reality) and on the other, because these expression take refuge in the medium of aesthetic semblance, they are unable to have a direct impact on the realization of social change. Art is 88 thus affirmative in the sense that being set apart from daily life, inside a separate, autonomous sphere belonging to a higher and purer world, it does not constitute a threat to bourgeois society. Thus, art reinforces the given social conditions against which it protests. It affirms values that it cannot realize.76

In the years 1925-1927, Magritte had challenged the permeation of commodity relations by deconstructing spatial unity. During the years spent in Paris (1927- 1930) and those shortly following, Magritte progressively moved away from this practice and began looking for ways to relate objects to one another. The result was a series of attempts in which many connections between objects, and between objects and words were formulated. Having decided, in the late 1920s, to focus his attention on the detailed transcription of objects, it was not until the development of his objet-réponse in 1933 that Magritte managed to propose a sublation of exchange value and thus fully develop his criticism.

It is significant to note, however, that the criticism applied to Magritte earlier for his confinement to the pictorial domain is reflected historically, for 1933 also marks the beginning of the decline of the surrealist movement into a purely artistic activity.

76 Herbert Marcuse, Negations, Essays in Critical Theory, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1968) p. 114. 89

CONCLUSION

As a conclusion, I would like to attempt a short comparative analysis between Magritte’s stylistic evolution (from a destructive to a constructive pictorial approach) and the development followed by the surrealist movement. As we have already seen, Magritte’s works underwent two different stages of resistance to commodity relations. We will recall that the thesis proposed in this text identified the works dating from 1925 to 1927 as being based on the negation of the spatial and semantic unity of the organic work of art. Conversely, it was argued that the works dating from 1933 were characterized by a constructive principle.

It is my intention to propose a very similar view of the historical evolution of the surrealist movement. In other words, I would like to propose a vision of Magritte’s stylistic development as a pictorial account of the evolution of the surrealist movement itself. Indeed, it is my observation that in its initial years surrealism was centered around the idea of a global revolution, one aimed at destroying the narrow functionalist logic of its time. These early years were marked by a desire to develop a plurality of forms by which to express disgust with bourgeois society. No one particular means was designated a priori for the pursuit of this revolutionary project. 90

As the years went by, and as a result of a number of very specific historic events, this strong coalition began to give way to a number of approaches which tended to turn surrealism away from its destructive stronghold towards a constructive mechanism, one aiming back towards the creation of works of art.

In his book Surréalisme, art et politique Louis Janover discusses the dilemma facing the surrealist movement. Janover points out that from the beginning, surrealism exhibited a double tendency. As much as the movement was able to bring forth a radical criticism of the artist’s function in society, a criticism which even today has not lost any of its subversive potential, it was also able to develop a new conception of art which preserved a very specific artistic flair, thus strengthening the elitist position of art via a new set of moral justifications. Janover notes that at the heart of surrealism lay a destructive tension between, the necessary implications of an ethical position on individual production on the one hand, and a collective activity motivated by artistic success on the other.

If in the early years the surrealists (strongly guided by Breton) were able to maintain the focus of their revolutionary fervour on a global project, with time this global vision began to wither and eventually disintegrated into a specifically artistic project.

For Janover, the contact with marxism as represented by the communist party, accelerated the surrealist evolution into a literary and artistic school. The brief but highly consequential contact with the communist party marked the beginning of a permanent scission between the two elements initially considered as whole. Both spheres became complementary yet independent, one focusing on political 91 emancipation, the other on human emancipation. By allowing for a scission to occur between the literary and the revolutionary elements, each group withdrawing within its specific sphere of activity, the surrealists were going against their original will of creating a unified impact.

Let us attempt to follow the evolution of the surrealist movement from its prevailingly destructive phase to its artistic consecration, as it occurred through a series of specific historical events and as it was reflected in some of its most important texts.

The First Surrealist Manifesto written in 1924 introduced surrealism as a "révolution de Vesprit," as a global revolution which inscribed itself in direct opposition to the rationalism of the bourgeois world.

Nous vivons encore sous le règne de la logique, voilà, bien entendu, à quoi je voulais en venir. Mais les procédés logiques, de nos jours, ne s’appliquent plus qu’à la résolution de problèmes d’intérêt secondaire. Le rationalisme absolu qui reste de mode ne permet de considérer que des faits relevant étroitement de notre expérience. Les fins logiques, par contre, nous échappent. Inutile d’ajouter que l’expérience même s’est vu assigner des limites. Elle tourne dans une cage d’où il est de plus en plus difficile de la faire sortir. Elle s’appuie, elle aussi, sur l’utilité immédiate, et elle est gardée par le bon sens. Sous couleur de civilisation, sous prétexte de progrès, on est parvenu à bannir de l’esprit tout ce qui se peut taxer à tort ou à raison de superstition, de chimère; à proscrire tout mode de recherche de la vérité qui n’est pas conforme à l’usage. C’est par le plus grand hasard, en apparence, qu’a été récemment rendue à la lumière une partie du monde intellectuel, et à mon sens de beaucoup la plus importante, dont on affectait de ne plus se soucier. Il faut en rendre grâce aux découvertes de Freud. Sur la foi de ces découvertes, un courant 92 d’opinion se dessine enfin, à la faveur duquel l’explorateur humain pourra pousser plus loin ses investigations, autorisé qu’il sera à ne plus seulement tenir compte des réalités sommaires. L’imagination est peut- être sur le point de reprendre ses droits. Si les profondeurs de notre esprit récèlent d’étranges forces capables d’augmenter celles de la surface, ou de lutter victorieusement contre elles, il y a tout intérêt à les capter, à les capter d’abord, pour les soumettre ensuite, s’il y a lieu, au contrôle de notre raison. Les analystes eux-mêmes n’ont qu’à y gagner. Mais il importe d’observer qu’aucun moyen n’est désigné a priori pour la conduite de cette entreprise, que jusqu’à nouvel ordre elle peut passer pour être aussi bien du ressort des poètes que des savants et que son succès ne dépend pas des voies plus ou moins capricieuses qui seront suivies.77

Hence, the surrealists of 1924 and 1925 were not at all concerned with designating a specific form by which to concretize this revolution. If writing was to be used, the results produced were not to be considered as literature. Rather this form of expression was to be used only to the extent that it helped to liberate the mind from the rigid and quasi-complete submission to the dominating pragmatism.

A declaration dated January 27, 1925, 78 in which the surrealists defined their goals in seven points, clearly stated that "Le surréalisme n’est pas une forme poétique. Il est un cri de l’esprit qui retourne vers lui-même et est bien décidé à broyer désespérément ses entraves."

77 Breton, p. 22.

78 Nadeau, p. 67. 93 Nor were the surrealists of this time concerned about developing any concrete political action. In a 1925 letter addressed to Jean Bernier, the director of a communist publication called Clarté, Aragon declared:

n vous a plu de relever comme une incartade une phrase qui témoigne du peu de goût que j’ai du gouvernement bolchevique, et avec lui de tout le communisme....Si vous me trouvez fermé à l’esprit politique et mieux, violemment hostile à cette déshonorante attitude pragmatique qui me permet d’accuser au moins de modérantisme idéal ceux qui à la fin s’y résignent, c’est, vous n’en pouvez douter, que j’ai toujours placé, que je place l’esprit de révolte bien au-delà de toute politique... .La révolution russe? vous ne m’empêcherez pas de hausser les épaules. A l’échelle des idées, c’est au plus une vague crise ministérielle. Il siérait vraiment que vous traitiez avec un peu moins de désinvolte ceux qui ont sacrifié leur existence aux choses de l’esprit.

"Je tiens à répéter dans Clarté même, que les problèmes posés par l’existence humaine ne relèvent pas de la misérable petite activité révolutionnaire qui s’est produite à notre Orient au cours de ces dernières années. J’ajoute que c’est par un véritable abus de language qu’elle peut être qualifiée de révolutionnaire...79

The intention was thus clearly stated from the start to orient this revolution on a global basis, one based on the necessary destruction of the existing way of thinking.

If a consensus was maintained on the necessity of achieving this radical destruc­ tion, a scission began to appear, however, on the question of how to achieve this goal. What were the means to be used? The surrealists were vehemently opposed to the creation of a surrealist literary school. The contradictory position

79 Louis Aragon, "Communisme et Révolution", La révolution surréaliste, no 1, January 1925, p. 32. 94 of surrealism noted by Janover began to surface as early as 1925. Indeed, in the third and fourth issue of La Révolution surréaliste, Pierre Naville began to warn against the menace of a surrealist art.

Je ne connais du goût que le dégoût. Maîtres, maîtres-chanteurs, barbouillez vos toiles. Plus personne n’ignore qu’il n’y a pas de peinture surréaliste; ni les traits de crayon livré au hasard des gestes, ni l’image retraçant les figures de rêve ni les fantaisies imaginatives, c’est bien entendu, ne peuvent être ainsi qualifiées.80

Meanwhile, Aragon, Breton and Eluard persisted in their quest for revolt:

Ah! banquiers, étudiants, ouvriers, fonctionnaires, domestiques vous êtes les fellateurs de l’utile, les branleurs de la nécessité. Je ne travaillerai jamais, mes mains sont pures. Insensés, cachez-moi vos paumes, et ces callus intellectuels dont vous tirez votre fierté. Je maudis la science, cette soeur jumelle du travail. Connaître! Etes-vous jamais descendus au fond de ce puits noir? Qu’y avez-vous trouvé, quelle galerie vers le ciel? Aussi bien, je ne vous souhaite qu’un grand coup de grisou qui vous restitue enfin à la paresse qui est la seule patrie de la véritable pensée...

Il n’est pas de révolution totale, il n’est que la Révolution perpétuelle, vie véritable, comme l’amour, éblouissante à chaque instant. Il n’est pas d’ordre révolutionnaire, il n’est que désordre et folie. "La guerre de la liberté doit être menées avec colère" et menée sans cesse par tous ceux qui n’acceptent pas...81

80 Pierre Naville, "Beaux-Arts", La Révolution surréaliste, no. 3, April 1925, p. 27

81 Louis Aragon, "Fragments d’une conférence", La révolution surréaliste, no. 4, July 1925, pp. 23-25. 95 These texts were supplemented by a series of manifestations and riots such as those occurring at the Vieux-Colombier and at the Saint-Pol-Roux banquet, in 1925.

Up until the outbreak of the Moroccan war, the surrealists stayed clear of any political involvement. Any such implication would have threatened to reduce the idea of a total revolution to the dimension of a mere political function. The Franco-Moroccan war signalled the first alignment of the surrealists with the communist party. Although they did not adhere to the party, the surrealists were willing to voice their converging position alongside other revolutionary instances. Joining their forces together, the French and the Belgians surrealists signed a tract entitled "La révolution d’abord et toujours". It is with the signing of this tract that the first direct reference to political economy appeared. In a retrospective analysis of that event Breton declared:

La Révolution d’abord et toujours...sans doute idéologiquement assez confuse...n’en marque pas moins un précédent caractéristique qui va décider de toute la conduite ultérieure du mouvement. L’activité surréaliste en présence de ce fait brutal, révoltant, impensable [la guerre du Maroc], va être amenée à s’interroger sur ses resources propres, à en déterminer les limites; elle va nous forcer à adopter une attitude précise, extérieure à elle-même, pour continuer à faire face à ce qui excède ces limites. Cette activité est entrée à ce moment dans sa phase raisonnante. Elle éprouve tout à coup le besoin de franchir le fossé qui sépare l’idéalisme absolu du matérialisme dialectique.82

Paradoxically, it is in an effort to enlarge its actions beyond the bounds of its realisation (automatic texts, narrative transcription of dreams, improvised and

82 André Breton, Qu ’est-ce-que le surréalisme ?, (Paris, Actual, 1986) p. 12. 96 spontaneous acts, poems and drawings) that surrealism began its involvement with the communist party, a road which was eventually to lead it to its artistic consecration.

If by 1926 surrealism began to incorporate the quest for a social and political revolution within its immediate realm of concern, it did not consider abandoning its own global revolution. The surrealists refused to accept a subordination of the second revolutionary instance to the first. The two were considered separate yet complementary.

Je ne crois pas qu’à l’heure actuelle il est lieu d’opposer la cause de l’esprit pur à celle de la Révolution et d’exiger de nous, de certains d’entre nous, une spécialisation encore plus grande. Encore moins comprendrais-je qu’à des fins utilitaires on tienne à obtenir de moi le désaveu de l’activité surréaliste par exemple.83

Breton’s refusal to subordinate surrealism to a political control was materialized when he decided to abort the project which was to merge La Révolution surréaliste and Clarté into one publication. Rather than opt for a combined realisation, both reviews remained independent and decided to pursue their mutual exchange of articles, and this until 1927.

In 1927 Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Peret and Unik joined the communist party. This act was meant as proof of their sympathy for the proletarian revolution. It did not however signify their subordination to the party rule. They understood

83 André Breton, "La Force d’attendre" Clarté, no. 79, December 1925. p. 32 97 their act as a purely formal gesture. In order to render this position quite clear, they published "Au grand jour" (1927).

Si par ailleurs, et seulement en fonction de nos humeurs respectives, nous n’avons pas tous cru devoir adhérer au Parti communiste, du moins, nul d’entre nous n’a pris à sa charge de nier la grande concordance d’inspiration qui existe entre les communistes et lui...

Nous avons adhéré au Parti communiste français estimant avant tout que de ne pas le faire pouvait impliquer de notre part une réserve qui n’y était point, une arrière-pensée profitable à ses seuls ennemis (qui sont les pires d’entre les nôtres)...84

The rapprochement between the two instances led to mutual discontent, and gave rise to a whole series of accusations. The surrealists condemned the C.P. for their reductive vision of the movement. They complained of being used only as a literary faction of the party, when in fact they were beyond and above political concerns.

Surrealism presented a threat to the C.P. to the extent that in its utopian ambition of creating, amidst everyday life, a world of poetic expression in which every individual could heighten his development, it liberated the power of poetic communication from its artificially maintained isolated position within specialized modes of expression. Through poetic expression in the form of automatic writing, surrealism finally freed the individual from a rigid structure which, based on the division of labour, confined artistic activity to an autonomous sphere. Now, through the mediation of automatic writing, theory

84 André Breton, "Au grand jour" 1927, as quoted in Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme, (Paris, Seuil, 1964) p. 100, footnote no. 11 and 12. 98 and revolutionary activity could instantaneously combine to create a true representation of revolutionary praxis.

As a result of the tension and the energy being channelled in the debate with the C.P., only one issue of La Révolution surréaliste appeared in 1927 (October). Following this period of confrontation with the C.P., surrealism began to turn its attention inward and fortify its own position. From this moment onward, the options followed by the diverse members of the surrealist movement began to diverge considerably.

The year 1928 was as a prolific year. Breton published Nadja, Aragon wrote Le Traité du style. An exhibition of surrealist works was organized at the "Sacre du Printemps". Max Ernst exhibited at Berheim. The surrealist influence began to spread. Para-surrealist publications such as Grand jeu began to appear. The year of 1928 also marked the exclusion of Antonin Artaud, Soupault and Vitrac. Desnos was slowly beginning to drift away as the links with Clarté were being cut.

In an attempt to propel the movement into a new wave of communal action, and in order to test each member’s dedication to the revolutionary cause, Breton decided to set up a meeting on March 11th 1929. Every participant to this meeting was to express their opinion in favour of either an individual or a collective revolution. The unsuccessful outcome of this reunion provoked Breton to write the "Second Manifesto". This text was published in the only issue of La Révolution surréaliste of 1929. In it Breton attempted to clarify the position of surrealism, to "purify" it by issuing a new rappel aux principes. 99

Tout porte à croire qu’il existe un certain point de l’esprit d’où la vie et la mort, le réel et l’imaginaire, le passé et le futur, le communicable et l’incommunicable, le haut et le bas, cessent d’être perçus contradictoirement. Or c’est en vain qu’on rechercherait à l’activité surréaliste un autre mobile que l’espoir de détermination de ce point...

Le surréalisme n’est pas intéressé à tenir grand compte de ce que produit à côté de lui sous prétexte d’art, voire d’anti-art, de philosphie ou d’antiphilosophie, en un mot de tout ce qui n’a pas pour fin l’anéantissement de l’être en un brillant intérieur et aveugle, qui ne soit pas plus l’âme de la glace que celle du feu...85

Breton went on to warn against the danger of reducing surrealism to a passive routine. He cautioned that the experimental side of the endeavour could not be subordinated to the artistic side, but had to be further developed.

The problematic involvement with the C.P. resurfaced in 1930. The ambiguous position of surrealism was addressed once again when the validity of its revolutionary endeavors was brought under question. The C.P. demanded the subordination of the movement to a political revolution. Unable to accept this demand, Breton opted for a compromise. He insisted on perceiving surrealism as an autonomous yet complementary action to the political revolution, but was willing to change the name of the publication in order to prove his degree of implication. The title of the publication was changed from La Révolution surréaliste to Le Surréalisme service de la révolution.

For Maurice Nadeau this event marked the beginning of the permanent scission between the artistic and the political agenda of the movement.

85 Breton, Les Manifestes, p. 77. 100

Désormais, le surréalisme poursuit sa course sur deux chemins parallèles: celui de la Révolution politique, celui de l’exploration toujours plus poussée des forces inconnues qui gisent au coeur de l’homme....Le rôle de Breton est de conciliation et d’arbitrage, bien qu’il demeure le seul capable d’opérer la fusion, qu’il voudrait complète, de ces deux démarches; c’est par là qu’il continue de contrôler autoritairement le mouvement.86

Breton continued to pursue this mediating role into the unfolding of VAffaire Aragon. L’Affaire Aragon developed around the publication of Aragon’s anarchic and provoking poem entitled "Front rouge", in which he called for the assassination of political leaders. Having converted to communism upon his return from the Second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers held in Krakov, Aragon had returned from a second trip, this time to Moscow, all the more inclined to pursue the political option. It is at this time that he wrote "Front rouge". Its publication caused quite a disturbance and resulted in the possible imposition of a 5 year jail sentence on its author. Breton responded to this threat by pleading that a poem could not be "interpreted for judiciary purposes". Many surrealists (Nougé, Magritte, Mesens, Souris) and others (Gide, Rolland) reacted to what they perceived as a weakening of will and determination on Breton’s part by asserting that surrealists should at all times take on the full responsibility of their actions and thoughts.

After Aragon’s departure from the surrealist movement to join the C.P., the ties between the two groups became increasingly difficult. Breton, Eluard and Crevel were finally expelled from the C.P. in 1933 for having criticized the actions of the Soviet government. The last issue of Le Surréalisme au service

86 Nadeau, p. 140. 101 de la Révolution appeared on May 15th 1933. This was the last of the surrealist publications per se. Following its disintegration, the surrealists intensified their cooperation with Minotaure, an art review with which they had previously begun to collaborate and which, in its later years, eventually took on a more decisive surrealist overtone.

Although it is possible to maintain, as Janover does, that the destructive tension which eventually condemned surrealism was inherently inscribed in the very nature of the project proposed by the movement, it must also be specified that this tension began its explicit realization the moment surrealism was forced to abandon its own global brand of revolution in order to conform itself to a specialized version of it.

The years surrounding the creation and the disintegration of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (1930-1933) appear as the most representative of this pivotal process, a process which was to mark surrealism’s decisive abandoning of its global destructive project "la destruction radicale de tout un monde", and signal the beginning of its specifically artistic manifestation. 1

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor, W. Modèles Critiques. Translated by Marc Jimenez and Eliane Kaufholz, "Critique de la politique", Payot, Paris, 1984.

Aragon, Louis, Le Traité du style, Gallimard, Paris, 1980.

Arendt, Hannah, La crise de la culture, Huit exercises de pensée politique, translated under the direction of Patrick Lévy, Gallimard, Paris, 1972.

Bakhtine, Mikhail, Le marxisme et la philosophie du langage, translated and presented by Marina Yaguello, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1977.

Bakhtine, Mikhail, L’Oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, translated by Andrée Robei, Gallimard, Paris, 1970.

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1968.

Breton, André, Le surréalisme et la peinture, Gallimard, Paris, 1977.

Breton, André, Manifestes du surréalisme, Gallimard, Paris, 1973.

Breton, André, Qu’est-ce-que le surréalisme?, Actual, Paris, 1986. 11 Burger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Translated by Michael Shaw, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984.

Bussy, Christian, Anthologie du surréalisme en Belgique, Gallimard, Paris, 1972.

Debord, Guy, La Société du Spectacle, Gérard Lebovici, Paris, 1987.

Dupuis, J. F., Histoire désinvolte du surréalisme, Paul Vermont, Nonville, 1977.

Gablik, Suzi, Magritte, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970.

Greene, Nathanael, From Versailles to Vichy - The Third French Republic, 1919-1940, Thomas Y, Crowell Company, New York, 1970.

Hauser, Arnold, Histoire sociale de l’art et de la littérature, vol. 3, "L’Epoque moderne", Le Sycomore, Paris, 1982.

Hegel, G.W.F., La phénoménologie de l’esprit, Vol. I, translated by Jean Hyppolite, Aubier-Montaigne, Paris, 1983.

Janover, Louis, Surréalisme, art et politique, Galilée, Paris, 1980.

Lukacs, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Translated by Rodney Livingstone, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1968. Ill

Magritte, René, Ecrits Complets, edited by André Blavier, Flammarion, Paris, 1979.

Marcuse, Herbert, Negations, Essays in Critical Theory, Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro, Beacon Press, Boston, 1968.

Marx, Karl, Manuscrits de 1844, translated by Emile Bottigelli, Sociales, Paris, 1972.

Marx, Karl, Le Capital, Vol. I, translated by J. Roy, Gamier-Flammarion, 1969.

Nadeau, Maurice, Histoire du surréalisme, Seuil, Paris, 1964.

Noel, Bernard, Magritte, Flammarion, Paris, 1977.

Nougé, Paul, Histoire de ne pas rire, Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1980.

Panofsky, Erwin, Early Netherlandish Painting Vol.l, Its Origins and Character, Icon Editions, Harper & Row, New York, 1971.

Passeron, René, René Magritte, translated by Elizabeth Abbot, Filipacchi, New York, 1980.

Pierre, José, Magritte, Aimery Somogy, Paris, 1984. IV

Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1968.

Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, Déjà Jadis, ou du mouvement Dada à Tespace abstrait, U.G.E. Paris, 1973.

Scutenaire, Louis, Avec Magritte, Le Fil rouge, Lebeer Hossman, Bruxelles, 1977.

Tocqueville, Alexis de, De la démocratie en Amérique, U.G.E., Paris, 1963.

Torczyner, Harry, René Magritte - Signes et Images, published with the help of the "Centre national des lettres", Draeger, Paris, 1977.

Tzara, Tristan, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 2, Flammarion, Paris, 1975. V

ARTICLES

Aragon, Louis, ‘Une vague de rêve’, in Commerce, Fall 1924.

Aragon, Louis, ‘Chronique - Fragments d’une conférence’, in La révolution surréaliste, no. 4, July 1925.

Aragon, Louis, ‘Communisme et révolution’, in La révolution surréaliste, no. 2, January 1925.

Bounoure, Vincent, Le thème de la contradiction chez Magritte’, in L’Oeil, no. 206-207, February - March 1972.

Breton, André, ‘La force d’attendre’, in Clarté, no. 79, December 1925.

Debord, Guy, and Wolman, Gil, ‘Les modes d’emploi du détournement’, in Les Lèvres nues, no. 8, May 1956.

Eagleton, Terry, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, in The New Left Review, no. 152, July-August 1981.

Jameson, Frederic, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, in The New Left Review, no. 146.

Naville, Pierre, ‘Beaux-Arts’, in La révolution surréaliste, no. 3, April 1925. VI

Verougstraete, Willem, in Au large, no. 2, April 1927.

Vovelle, José, ‘Un conflit de surréalistes : Magritte à Paris’, in Revue de l’art, no. 12, 1971.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

Levin Thomas, "Dismantling the Spectacle: the Cinema of Guy Debord", On the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time : the Situationist International, 1957-1972, (Cambridge, MIT Press and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1989-1990). vu

Fig. 1 Jeune fille ayant une rose à la place du coeur. 1924. Oil on canvas 55 x 40 cm. Mrs Magritte collection. Vlll

Fig-2 Le Jockey perdu. 1926. Oil on canvas, 63,5 x 73,5 cm. Mrs. R. Michel collection IX

Fig.3. Femmes. 1922. Oil on canvas, 70,2 x 100,2 cm. Private collection. X

Fig.4 Femmes. 1923. Oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm Private collection. XI

Fig-5. La Traversée difficile. 1926. Oil on canvas, 80 x 65,3 cm, Private collection. Xll

Fig.6. Le Supplice de la vestale. 1926-1927. Oil on canvas, 97,5 x 74,5 cm. Isy Brachot Gallery, Brussels-Paris. Xl

11 Fig.7. Le Jockey perdu. 1926. Paper, wash, ink, 39,5 x 60 cm. Harry Torczyner collection, New York XIV

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Fig.8 Untitled. 1926. Paper, wash, ink, 55 x 40 cm Private collection. 1.9. Untitled. 1926. Paper, wash, ink, 40 x 55,5 cm. private collection. XVI

Fig.10 Le Groupe silencieux. 1926. Oil on canvas, 120 x 80 cm. Isy Brachot Gallery, Brussels-Paris xvii

Fig. 11. Entracte. 1927. Oil on canvas, 114 x 161 cm. Private collection. Fig. 12. U Double secret. 1927. Oil on canvas, 114 x 162,5 cm. Private collection. XVlll An object is not so possessed of its name that one cannot find for it another which suits it better:

There are objects which do without a name:

A word sometimes only serves to designate itself:

An object encounters its image, an object encounters its name. It happens that the image and the name of that object encounter each other:

Sometimes the name of an object takes the place of an image:

A word can take the place of an object in reality :

Fig.13. Les Mots et les images. La révolution surréaliste, Paris, n° 12-15, 1929, p 32-33. XX

An image can take the place of a word in a proposition :

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An object can imply that there are other objects behind it:

Everything tends to make one think that there is little relation be­ tween an object and that which represents it:

The words which serve to designate two different objects do not show what may distinguish those objects from one another:

In a painting the words are of the same substance as the images:

One sees differently the images and the words in a painting : XXI

Any shape whatever may replace the image of an object:

An object never performs the same function as its name or its image:

The visible contours of objects in reality touch each other as if they formed a mosaic:

Vague figures have a meaning as necessary and as perfect as precise ones:

Sometimes, the names written in a painting designate precise things, and the images vague things:

Or the contrary: g. Fig. 14. La Sortie de l’école. 1927. Oil on canvas, 75 x 100 cm. Claude Spaak collection. xxiii

Fig.15. Le Sens propre. 1928-1929. Oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm. Robert Rauschenberg collection, New York. xxiv

Fig.16. Le Corps bleu. 1928-1929. Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. Mr. & Mrs. Orvalet collection, Brussels. XXV

Fig. 17. Le Miroir vivant. 1926. Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm. Mrs Sonabend-Binder collection, Brussels. Fig.18 L’usage de la parole. 1928. Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm. Rudolf Zwirner Gallery, Kôln a < C&ci Ti eMjvoiA urn plfUZ. XXVll

Fig. 19. La Trahison des images. 1929. Oil on canvas, 62,2 x 81 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. XXV111

Fig.20 Us Affinités électives. 1933-34. Oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm Etienne Périer collection, Paris. XXIX

Fig.21. Les Vacances de Hegel. 1958. Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm Isy Brachot Gallery, Brussels-Paris. XXX

Fig.22 Les Vacances de Hegel. 1959. Oil on canvas, 48 x 38 cm. Private collection XXXI

Fig.23 Le Modèle rouge. 1935. Oil on canvas, 55,9 x 45,8 cm Collection Musée National d’Art Moderne; Centre National d’Art et Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris. ^Ax V^-TTyy^ t /c < f S' «$ % -rx>,x- 7

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Fig.24. Letter written by René Magritte to Suzi Gablik, Mat 19, 1958. XXX11I

Fig.25 Le Mariage de minuit. 1926-1927. Oil on canvas, 139,5 x 105,5 cm Musées Royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels. XXXIV

Fig.26. La Réponse imprévue. 1933. Oil on canvas, 82 x 54,5 cm. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. XXXV

Fig-27. La Condition humaine. 1934. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Private collection, Paris. xxxvi

Fig.28. Le Chant de l’orage. 1937. Oil on canvas, 66,2 x 54,9 cm. Scottish National Gallery of art. xxxvii

Fig.29. L’Empire des lumières. 1954. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.