René Magritte: Great Art Explained

Our first kiss is an intimate moment.

A moment when we connect on an emotional level.

A moment of sexual desire and passion - and a sign of love.

We expose our desires and open ourselves up to another person.

Make ourselves vulnerable.

A kiss is a way of abandoning oneself.

A joining of two people But in this painting by Rene Magritte,

he takes the Cinematic cliché,

but disrupts our voyeuristic pleasure by covering the faces in cloth.

A moment of connection becomes one of isolation - of sexual frustration.

An intimate moment becomes something dark and effortlessly disturbing... something hidden and anonymous.

So many artists create myths around themselves,

elaborate stories to make themselves seem more interesting.

But Rene Magritte did the opposite.

He created a Persona that concealed his personality.

He made himself invisible.

For most of his adult life Magritte hid behind the exterior of a respectable

member of the Bourgeoisie.

Even the bowler hat he wore

that has now become

so intrinsically linked to him,

was adopted precisely because it was the uniform of Belgian civil servants.

Apart from 3 years in Paris he lived anonymously in the suburbs of Brussels

his whole life,

was married to the the same woman for 45 years -

and walked his Pomeranian dog at the same time every day.

He had a lifelong obsession with Detective novels

and Mysteries and we can compare his outward conventionality to

that of a secret agent,

a subversive saboteur, who avoids detection by dressing and behaving like everybody else,

and then challenges Conformity from within.

He was born at the end of the 19th century in in the nondescript

town of Lessines in Western Belgium.

His father was a gambler

and a drunk who owned a Tailor's shop

and his mother was a Milliner.

Tailored suits and hats are reoccurring motifs in his paintings.

As a child Magritte and his friend played in an abandoned cemetery.

And it was here that he saw a local artist painting at his easel.

It was a critical moment,

and he later said

that he thought it was

as if the artist had been given magic powers from above.

He would later include Granite tombs and wooden coffins repeatedly in his art.

When Magritte was growing up,

his mother had attempted suicide by trying to drown herself in the water tank

in the family attic.

She was then locked up in her bedroom for her own safety,

but one night she managed to escape

and threw herself into the nearby River where she drowned.

When her body was eventually found,

her night dress had been dragged up over her naked body

and was covering her face.

Magritte refused to discuss his childhood, and according to his widow Georgette,

he never spoke of death.

In particular he never mentioned the death of his mother.

Given the circumstances of his mother's death: The river, the naked body,

and the shrouded face,

it is hard to disassociate his childhood Trauma from his paintings.

But that's exactly what Magritte wanted us to do.

Unlike the rest of the Surrealists,

psychology didn't interest Margret who avoided any in-depth interpretation of his work,

and yet it is ironic

that he is the one artist who offers

so much opportunity for "armchair analysis".

Is this deliberate Detachment from his past memories another mask?

In this rarely seen work, two pieces of text are connected.

On the left it translates

as "A character losing memory"

and on the right it says "A woman's body".

And this painting for example is based directly on the death mask of an

unknown girl who drowned in the river Seine.

There is no escaping

that despite the humor of his work it can also be deeply morbid

and have an air of mourning.

A happier childhood memory was

when he was visiting a Fairground at the age of 15.

It was here that he met a beautiful young girl called Georgette,

who in 1922 would become his lifelong wife.

Magritte left home at 17,

and moved to Brussels - and after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts there,

he worked as a poster and advertising designer,

whose clients included Alfa Romeo Magritte's Commercial Art was almost certainly an influence on

his paintings,

and in the same way advertising condenses commercial Concepts into one single image,

Magritte does the same with his portrayal of The Human Condition.

The advertising industry's use of reoccurring images

and motifs can also be seen to have had an influence.

And as with his commercial design Magritte would employ a neat flat finish in

his art.

Decades later Andy Warhol, a fan of Magritte would follow a similar career path,

and his prints and paintings would be infused with evidence of his days

as a commercial draftsman. in 1926 Magritte signed a contract with a gallery in

Brussels,

which made it possible for him to paint full time.

Around this time he produced the first painting that he himself labeled as "Surrealism".

Belgian critics hated his new work

and he decided to move somewhere where he would be appreciated.

Surrealism began officially in 1924 with the surrealist Manifesto drawn up by Andre Breton.

With the stated aim to "liberate the Mind by subverting rational thought

and giving free reign to the unconscious".

In 1927 Magritte moved to Paris, be closer to the French Surrealist group.

His three years there would be the most prolific of his life

and "The Lovers II" would be created a year after he arrived in the

city.

Magritte became a leading member of the surrealist group,

but differed from the others in that he rejected Freudian ideology and, as noted,

he would always actively discourage any psychoanalytical reading of his work.

He was never totally at home with the Bohemian artists of Paris,

preferring to keep away from their excessive lifestyle and heavy drinking.

Determined to hang on to his "outsider status",

he took an apartment far out in the Paris suburbs,

where he could work all day and he and Georgette could have early nights.

The Dadaists were the forerunners of the surrealists,

and their art was as much about writing, as painting.

Poetry too was a major part of Dadaism.

This continued into surrealism and Magritte started experimenting with his own word paintings,

which are some of his best known works.

The idea was to question the reality,

but also the limitation of words and their visual representations.

And look at the well-worn connections between the two.

Maybe the simplest way to explain Magritte's word paintings is by using one of

his most famous works.

"The Treachery of images".

Inscribed next to it is "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" 0r "This is not

a Pipe" This is of course true,

because it is NOT a pipe, it is a painting of a pipe.

You can't pick it up or smoke it.

Words are arbitrary and unreliable and he questions our trust in them.

He is also questioning the very nature of art.

It's an illusion.

It's not a functional object.

It's a signifier of an object.

As with many of Magritte's works,

on the surface they can pass as "gags" or "Whimsy",

but they are also a profound meditation on the instability of meaning.

Before we look at "The Lovers II",

we can look at the methods Magritte used to make us see contradictions

and irrational Concepts.

One method was to combine two familiar objects and make a new one.

Another method was to paint a solid object

as if it were a seethrough portal.

In some paintings, he would defy gravity and show heavy objects floating.

He would give an unfamiliar name to a familiar object.

He would change scale by making small objects huge, and large objects impossibly tiny.

Another method was to obscure or to hide a face or an object,

setting up a conflict between the visible

that is hidden and the visible

that is present.

Magritte did four versions of "The Lovers" in 1928,

and in much the same way we saw how he subverts the expectations of

language,

in these paintings he subverts the expectations of image.

As with so many works by him it is the removal of what we

are expecting as a viewer,

in this case intimacy, that creates a tension and anxiety in the work.

On a simpler level,

he is just playing with our natural human desire to always want to see

what is hidden.

One of the first things

that sticks out to me with this painting is the ominous silence.

In this unsettling image, which was the second in a series of four variations,

Magritte does what he does best, he takes our familiar World,

breaks it into pieces, and then reassembles it.

Even though these figures are caught in such an intimate moment,

we as a viewer don't get to witness it,

because they're not actually touching flesh, there's a barrier between them of suffocating fabric.

On one level it can be read

as a representation of "Blind love"

and another (denied by Magritte),

it could be seen to reference his Dead Mother's shrouded face

when her body was found.

We should also look at how the device of a covering

or mask used to conceal a figure's identity,

corresponds to a larger surrealist interest in disguises

and what lies Beyond

or beneath visible surfaces.

As a viewer it is frustrating

because the Lover's kiss is

so familiar to us

and like Magritte's bowler hatted man the couple are nobody

and every body at the same time.

The biggest contradiction with Magritte was between WHAT he painted

and HOW he painted it.

Along with Dali, Magritte's work belongs to the "Naturalistic Surrealists",

in the sense that his scenes or objects are clearly recognizable representations,

as opposed to, say, the more expressionistic surrealism.

His style of painting is fairly dull and conventional.

It IS naturalistic but completely banal,

and his textures are equally flat

and uninteresting. as we can see in this closeup.

Every element in the painting is recognisable and realistically painted,

but there is no specific Style, no visible brush strokes, and that's the point.

The artist is not there.

This was a deliberate choice on Magritte's part,

as a way to have extreme contrast between the drabness of his style,

and the extraordinary subject matter.

The relationship ship between the elements,

is what is important

and if the style doesn't attract attention the irrationality of the image becomes even

more shocking.

Magritte had A peculiar method of working.

When he was painting he wore the same clothes he wore every day.

That is a Bourgeois gentleman's business suit.

He never had a studio,

but worked in a corner of the living room of his home,

which had wall-to-wall carpeting, which, it was noticed, was totally stain-free.

And he worked quietly and alone.

The truth is Magritte didn't even like the painting process,

which he referred to more than once as "boring".

It was the ideas that really interested him, that made him passionate,

and transferring them onto canvas was just a chore.

Interestingly he also loathed going to art galleries and museums,

and would rather look at reproductions of famous works Magritte's early paintings were heavily

influenced by cubism and

when he first showed them,

the critics were not impressed.

The single most important event of his career happened in 1922.

When he was shown a reproduction of Georgio De Chirico's 1914 painting "The Song

of Love",

with its strange juxtoposition of a classical bust and a red rubber glove.

It changed Magritte's life.

Later, his own images would often reference De Chirico's manipulation of space and perspective,

and he would sometimes use the same motifs in his own canvases.

Like many of the surrealists, literature was an important influence on Magritte.

In 1868 the poet Comte de Lautréamont,

wrote a book called "The songs of Maladore".

and Magritte did these extraordinary illustrations for the 1948 Edition.

The book was a major influence on the surrealist movement

because it contained the phrase:

"As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine

and an umbrella on an operating table",

a metaphor that captures one of the most important principles of the surrealist aesthetic.

That is, the combination of two different

or unrelated objects to challenge our preconditioned perception of reality.

Edgar Allen Poe was one of Magritte's idols,

and during his only trip to the US,

he insisted on a visit to Poe's grave.

Georgette Magritte recalls that he read

and re-read Poe's "Tales of Mystery

and Imagination".

And was inspired by The Writer's literary experiments,

and his interest in the boundaries between rationality and irrationality.

Magritte created several tributes to Poe's story "The Domain of Arnheim",

which is the tale of a man who inherits $450 million,

and decides to use it to create a perfect landscape.

Magritte's work too is concerned with the ideal landscape, and in this version,

the natural is represented by the mountain and the eggs,

and the artificial by the wall.

In another reference to the writer,

Magritte places a tattered copy of Poe's only novel "he Narrative of Arthur Gordon

Pim of Nantucket" on the mantlepiece of this painting,

which like the book is concerned with duplicity,

Magritte was also deeply engaged with the books of Louis Carroll

and like many of his contemporaries saw Alice in Wonderland

as a precursor of surrealism.

Carroll played with the perceptions of reality

and made us re-evaluate our visual expectations.

He played with contradictions of scale and he used humour and Whimsy,

to reveal deeper philosophical ideas.

Alice: "I can't explain myself I'm afraid, because I'm not myself you see" Caterpillar:

"No I don't see".

In the same way Alice leaps onto the fireplace

and then passes through the mirror into Carroll's looking Looking Glass World.

Magritte's miniature locomotive emerges from another realm into our world.

And finally one of the most enduring of his Inspirations was "Fantômas"

As children Renee and his brother Paul,

loved the cinema, and were obsessed with the famous Fantômas film serials of 1913,

based on a series of popular crime fiction books.

Fantômas, was a sinister anti-hero, who often switched identity,

and was a masked criminal, constantly at threat from being revealed.

The character had a hidden Dark side, perhaps more fascinating than their outward appearance.

These would be concerns that Magritte addressed as an artist,

and Fantômas would be the basis for several of his paintings.

After 3 years in Paris, Magritte and Georgette returned to Brussels,

where he remained for the rest of his life.

His paintings were not selling well,

and so he started an advertising agency for extra funds.

Given the ubiquity of René Magritte's images in our culture,

it is a shock to learn

that he never really made a sustainable living out of his art,

and he had no major retrospectives in his lifetime - until it was almost

too late.

Towards the end of his life, Magritte's fame began to spread,

and in 1965 he was given a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern

Art in New York.

Although his health was beginning to deteriorate,

he attended the exhibition in person making his one

and only trip to the United States.

He died died only two years later with his wife Georgette, at his bedside.

Magritte had the ability to confound us with the most simplistic image.

He subverts our expectations, not by taking us OUT of our world,

but rather by exposing how absurd our everyday world IS.

A pipe is not a pipe, anymore than a rock can float,

or night and day can exist at the same time.

These are the limitations of painting and language.

And THIS is what interested Rene Magritte.