TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092192/0921400.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 8.7 KB | 176 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 62

The Poker-Faced Enchanter


A retrospective of Rene Magritte proves that the great Belgian
Surrealist's mind-wrenching visual puns and paradoxes still
slice cleanly

By ROBERT HUGHES


    The images and ideas of Rene Magritte are known to
millions of people who do not know him by name. So argues the
art historian Sarah Whitfield in her catalog to the
retrospective of 168 works by the great Belgian Surrealist that
opens at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art this week,
and she is certainly right. This accounts for the faint feeling
of deja vu that even non-Magritteans sometimes get when looking
at his work. Magritte died in 1967, but for the best part of a
half-century his images -- or variants on them -- have been used
to advertise everything from the French state railroad system
and chocolates to wallpaper, cars and political candidates.

    The advertising industry has had a vast effect on modern
art, but no modern artist has had more effect on advertising
itself than Magritte. Yet there is never the slightest feeling
that his work has been corrupted by its commercial reuse, and
this is because of its clarity and intelligence. Magritte's
paradoxes still slice cleanly. No matter how many times you see
the small locomotive steaming from the living-room fireplace in
his Time Transfixed (1938), with the mantel clock pointing to
12:43 and every grain line in the wooden floor in place, it will
still come from behind its utter familiarity and surprise you.

    The history of modernism is suffused with cults of
artistic ego and rampant "originality" -- especially Surrealism,
the movement Magritte was linked to. But he made a virtue of
anonymity, disappearing behind the work like one of the partly
vanishing, ambiguous figures in his own paintings. Apart from
a short stay in Paris (1927-30), Magritte spent his whole adult
life in Brussels, issuing his mind-wrenching visual conundrums
from a base of the most perfect bourgeois propriety, using a
corner of his living room for a studio and never painting any
naked woman but his wife Georgette, who, in return, never posed
for any other artist. The common man in Magritte's paintings,
with his raincoat and bowler, whether standing with an apple in
front of his face or floating down in multitudes upon the
unperturbed streets of Brussels, really is Magritte -- the
poker-faced enchanter. No artist ever behaved less like one.

    It mattered a lot that Magritte was Belgian, not French.
The French Surrealists made a point of public provocation,
inserting themselves into politics, issuing pretentious
manifestos. Not so their Belgian cousins; "the subversive act,"
said one, the writer Paul Nouge, "must be discreet." Magritte's
style, as it evolved, was studiously neutral. His early work,
in the 1920s, was mainly exercises in late Cubism -- the
"tubist," streamlined, geometrical forms of Fernand Leger and
Amedee Ozenfant, shapes that might have been made from metal.
The artist who clearly had the biggest impact on Magritte,
turning him toward fantasy and irrational images, was Giorgio
de Chirico. And even then Magritte couldn't find a way to use
De Chirico's unique scenography until he learned about collage
from Max Ernst.

    The objectivity of collage -- taking an image from outside
and putting it, whole and entire, in the fictional space of the
painting -- appealed to Magritte, because he liked standardized
images; it was their encounter and rearrangement that created
the magic, more than the things themselves. "Our secret
desire," he remarked, "is for a change in the order of things,
and it is appeased by the vision of a new order . . . The fate
of an object in which we had no interest suddenly begins to
disturb us." Turned balusters, game pieces, the little round
horse bells known as grelots, cut-out paper doilies, wood
paneling, views through a window, fire, a birdcage, a rifle, a
tuba, a pipe, loaves of bread, a naked woman: there wasn't much
in Magritte's repertoire of images that couldn't have been seen
by an ordinary Belgian clerk in the course of an ordinary day.

    But assembled they are another thing -- just as Ernst's
drawings made of rubbings from the floorboards of his seaside
hotel became another thing. Here is the silent ugly cannon in
the room of screens, each bearing a familiar image; in a second
it will fire of its own accord, blowing the screens to shreds;
we stand, as the title says, On the Threshold of Liberty. Some
of Magritte's images have taken on, with time, a truly prophetic
aura. One of these is Eternity (1935). Three pedestals in a
museum, with a red rope stretched in front of them. On the left
one, a medieval head of Christ. On the right, a head of Dante.
In the center, a block of butter. A jab at the contented Belgian
stomach, 60 years ago; but today you can't help thinking of the
lumps of fat by Joseph Beuys that are enshrined in the world's
museums, as though Magritte had been conducting satire in
advance.

    He painted in a perfectly deadpan style, neutral rather
than "primitive" -- serviceable, in a word. It came partly from
posters and partly from kitsch art. "This detached way of
representing things," he remarked, "seems to me to suggest a
universal style, in which the quirks and little preferences of
an individual play no role." It is meat-and-potatoes figuration,
with no pretensions; if there were any pretensions in this
world, where flotillas of loaves sail by in the evening sky like
flying saucers and an innocent eye opens in the middle of a
slice of ham on your plate, they would greatly reduce its
credibility.

    But the epigrammatic force can be irresistible, especially
where Magritte reflects on sexual violence, alienation or
loneliness: the couple trying to kiss through layers of cloth
in The Lovers (1928), or The Titanic Days (1928), his image of
attempted rape, in which the bodies of the terrified woman and
the attacking man are fused together as in a grim photographic
overlap. Often his color is extremely beautiful, though the
viewer, intent on the visual conundrums, may not at first notice
how powerful and tender it can be. But as his friend Louis
Scutenaire wrote, "Magritte is a great painter. Magritte is not
a painter." He had no interest in what the French called la
belle matiere, and when he did essay it -- as in a series of
pseudo-pastoral kitsch-classical paintings in the manner of
Renoir, done during World War II -- he subverted it; these hot,
sluglike nudes are of a brutal vulgarity exceeded only by late
Picabia, who may in fact have influenced them.

    In some ways his most extreme work comes from this
aberrant moment of peinture vache (stupid painting), as he
called it -- it's as though, in parodying other Belgian artists
(Ensor, and a particularly gross comic illustrator named
Deladoes), he touched a demotic rock bottom from which he could
only recoil in the end. But Georgette hated the new style, and
by 1950 Rene was back to the old one, often repainting versions
of images he had first made in the '30s. This recycling fitted
his own idea of himself as a craftsman rather than an artist.
You could make more than one chair to the same pattern.

    Magritte was not a "literary" artist, and his work was
more about situation than narrative. Nevertheless, his titles
were important to him, and they are never neutral. They were,
so to speak, pasted on the image like another collage element,
inflecting its meaning without explaining it. They reflected his
browsing in high and popular culture. The Glass Key comes from
Dashiell Hammett, and references to the Fantomas thrillers (on
which Magritte, along with the rest of the Surrealists and
everyone else in France and Belgium, doted) are everywhere. On
the other hand, The Man from the Sea is Balzac's title, and The
Elective Affinities Goethe's.

    Then there was Edgar Allan Poe. Magritte used him
repeatedly. The Domain of Arnheim, Magritte's image of a vast,
cold Alpine wall seen through the broken window of a bourgeois
living room, with shards of glass on the floor that still carry
bits of the sublime view on them, is the title of Poe's 1846
tale about a superrich American landscape connoisseur who
creates a Xanadu for himself. "Let us imagine," says Poe's hero,
"a landscape whose combined vastness and definitiveness -- whose
united beauty, magnificence and strangeness shall convey the
idea of care, or culture . . . on the part of beings superior,
yet akin to humanity . . ." Yes, one can well imagine Magritte
liking that. His work too sets up a parallel world, extremely
strange and yet familiar, ruled by an absolutist imagination.