On Magritte

Throughout this summer, the Art Institute of Chicago has hosted an exhibition of my favorite painter, Rene Magritte. There has never yet been a show on the major museum circuit dedicated to the years of Magritte’s evolution from surrealistic tinkerer to symbolist master, and the show, titled “The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” highlights in force how he sought to make “everyday objects shriek aloud.” A few examples:

If you’ve read a few of my posts here, the station Magritte holds for me should be no surprise. I’ve always been drawn to the enigmatic nature of his scenes, which often juxtapose or even merge household items together to evoke some deep revelation, as though scraping at the mystery with a fingernail. Or even a crowbar. To me, he is not the most technically accomplished of the masters: at times his people and scenes seem flat or oddly shaped. But the potency of his work lies in his ideas, which smack your cerebellum like the head of a hammer. Going through the exhibition, it was interesting to see his maturation; he started his career with almost Dali-esque panoramas filled of many different characters and images, leaving the audience straining to piece together a ramshackle story. But by the mid-30’s, he was concentrating on one idea per canvas, like the pieces I’ll go over below, and it’s this focus where he harnessed the full potential of his form.

But in seeing the exhibition and reading about the man, I’ve had a shift in my thinking about him in that his work plunges deeper into the mystery than I realized. I was, of course, drawn to him for semiotic reasons: he’s a field day for someone who enjoys the challenge of making meaning out of the meaningless.
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But reading his giant words quoted on a wall of the Art Institute is when I realized that much of the time he is not concerned with meaning. He doesn’t necessarily want his audience to connect the dots. Often, there are no dots--there's just the mystery. It really is just a train sticking out of a fireplace. In his book Magritte, Jacques Meuris asserts that, in many ways Magritte wasn’t a surrealist, he was a realist in that he took the surrealistic images that his mind created and tried to reproduce them on canvas as accurately as possible. He disdained Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland because it presented fantastic scenes in a dreamscape. Magritte's point is that the dreamscape is a very real part of our reality, albeit one that exists in our minds, though this reinforces the thesis that what happens in the mind, as mysterious and unexplainable as it is, is in many ways just as real as the tangible world around us--a powerful idea that not only challenges the way we think about our minds, but how we look at the perspective lenses with which we view the objective world around us.

For many of his works, there was no point other than the experience of the mystery itself. So let’s tour some mysteries…

Time Transfixed, 1938. Coming soon to a living room near you...Modernism! (Whether you want it or not.) Seeing all these live is obviously a completely different experience, and I have to eat my words about his technical skill here. The unique woodgrains on each individual floorboard are as meticulous as nature. First saw this piece in the excellent high-art-auction board game Masterpiece at age 10 or 11, and the real one is housed in Chicago. Here he's clearly trying to grab your relaxed conceptual mind and twist it like taffy.

The Lovers II, 1928. Emotionally universal; intimately anonymous. It must be difficult to breathe in there, and hot, and they don't care. The color of the wall is soft and warm, a wonderful balance to the dress and contrast the the ominously dark background. The stormy blues and blacks behind, as well as the shadow in the back of his head, contrasts with the glow of the soft white cloth to make their passion that much tighter, honest, and urgent.

Clairvoyance, 1936. A self-portrait, an artist's statement, a revelation. Everything simultaneously contains all its history and all its potential. Also a commentary on our ability to choose what to see: the past, the present, the future, the imagined, the inevitable, and maybe even the hoped for, not to mention the work and time and energy needed to see those hopes realized.

The Treachery of Images, 1928-1929. Brief, boring, and profound. Alfred Korzybski's aphorism that "the map is not the territory" appeared not much later. There's been way too much written about this, most of which I haven't read, so this is no real revelation, but I like to think of that quote and this painting as tools used to unhinge some of the restriction that linguistic constructs and images can have on the way we see reality. The pictures, words, and concepts our brains create to interpret our reality are not the things themselves, and since those concepts have a significant effect on the way we see reality, we should look at them an analyze them. This, to me, is semiotics in a nutshell. Because if we can take a step back and see the distance between the symbols of things and the things themselves, we can increase our general skills of discernment, insight, and appreciation.

The Banquet, 1958. This might be my favorite. The burning sunset sky and searing orange dot contrast well with the somber mute of the trees and silence of the stones in the fence. The detail on the fence is both cartoonish and familiar. You can feel the stone on your hands, hear the crickets, see the lightning bug dancing among the trees. Then you get snapped out of it by that dot, right in the middle, screaming, "This is a painting!" Is it the sun, or a sick joke? Does it make you appreciate what surrounds it any less? Magritte was also frustratingly enigmatic with the titles of his paintings. A banquet of what?

And through web of nonsensically subconscious associations, Magritte was still not primarily concerned with meaning. On page 29 of Mueris book, he's quoted as saying, "...what I paint implies no superiority of the invisible over the visible; the latter is sufficiently rich to form the poetic language which evokes the mystery of the invisible and the visible." As the map is not the territory, the painting is not the thing--but the painting is the painting, and it is the interaction that the viewer has with the painting (though those are also two separate things), all us viewers with all our different histories and personalities and mechanisms for conceptualization. And if that's what Magritte endeavored to create each time he set to the canvas, to create the unique mystery for each of us, then maybe his entire oeuvre is a critique of the idea and necessity of conceptualization itself, and by extension, pointing to all the universalities and uniquenesses our conceptual mechanisms share.