1 post tagged “l’art et de la publicité”

November 21, René François-Ghislain Magritte is born in Lessines, Hainaut (Belgium)

By Phyllis Tuchman

The discomboblulated world of Rene Magritte

In the 40 years since his death, Surrealist Rene Magritte’s reputation has had its ups and downs. The Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a Magritte retrospective in 1965, two years before the artist died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 68. Back then, such a tribute was tantamount to being canonized. But the 1960s was the so-called great decade of American abstraction. The Belgian painter instead became an ad man’s darling. Commercial artists embraced one of their own, someone who had once earned his living designing posters and wallpaper patterns. Rock musicians such as Jeff Beck, Jackson Browne, and Paul Simon decorated their album covers with his works or made reference to him in titles or lyrics. Paul McCartney was thinking of Magritte, whose works he collects, when he named the Beatles’ media company Apple, one of the painter’s frequent images.

Currently, Magritte is back in the limelight. Not surprisingly, so is representational art. He recently had a large one-person show at the Palace Museum in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Last winter, “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images,” a show surveying the Surrealist’s influence on younger generations of artists, was a runaway hit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (guards wore bowler hats and the carpets in the galleries featured cloud-filled skies). At the end of next year, the Rene Magritte Museum, a four-story wing of the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, will finally open in Brussels, with 150 works. This homage in the encyclopedic museum honors him along with masters such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch and Jacques-Louis David.

Born in the French-speaking region of Belgium on Nov. 21, 1898, Rene Magritte was the oldest of three brothers. His father was a tailor; his mother committed suicide when he was 13. Besides his interest in art — he began taking painting lessons in 1910 —the young boy enjoyed silent movies featuring Fantomas, Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin and stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bret Harte, and French-language writers. He also must have been enthralled by Max Linder’s comedic films in which objects, say, engagement rings and shoes, are as critical as the characters.

Magritte later recalled, “When I began to paint myself, toward 1915, [I] … oriented my efforts in a direction having little to do with common sense.” At the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, he studied with an artist who also taught Surrealists Paul Delvaux and Andre Masson. But at that moment, Dada was in the air. Magritte, who initially executed Cubist pictures and then Futurist canvases, was befriended by Dada poets. Shortly after he married Georgette Berger in 1922, one of them showed the newlywed a reproduction of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico. About the Italian’s “Song of Love” (1914), Magritte later said, “for the first time, my eyes saw thought.”

Still, it took Magritte a while to develop his recurrent motifs: forests, skies, facades, masks, word plays, sleigh bells, oversized objects. To earn a living, he became a commercial designer. After executing almost 60 paintings in 1926, he exhibited many of these enigmatic works the following April. One of them, “The Threatened Assassin,” is gory, inexplicable, understated. It features a murderer listening to a gramophone near the nude body of his victim while two men wearing bowler hats and overcoats wait to capture him with a club and a net and three other men, standing outdoors, observe the scene through an open window.

After the solo show, the Magrittes moved from Brussels to a suburb of Paris. The artist was painting pictures “to provoke,” in his words, “an emotional shock.” In “Pleasure” (1927), a girl in a lace-trimmed dress stands in front of a tree where four birds perch while she gnaws at a fifth whose blood coats her fingers and white collar. However, as Surrealism coalesced into a movement replete with exhibitions and a magazine, Magritte’s art became less violent. By 1928, for example, he was painting variations of lovers with cloth-shrouded heads who pose, kiss, and embrace. “Attempting the Impossible,” another 1928 work, is a self-portrait of the artist standing beside a nude whose left arm he is painting.

Magritte was not a typical bourgeois. A lifelong liberal, he joined the Communist party three times. During his Paris period, he hung out with painters Salvador Dali and Joan Miro as well as director Luis Bunuel and poet Paul Eluard. Around the time of Dali and Bunuel made the film, Un Chien Andalou, Magritte executed his most famous painting, “The Treachery of Images” (1928-29). Beneath a pipe, the artist inscribed on his canvas the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (this is not a pipe). He explained, “Can it be stuffed with tobacco, my pipe? No, it’s only a depiction, isn’t it? If I had written ‘This is a pipe’ under my picture, I would have been lying!”

After three years in France, the Magrittes returned home, renting a town house in Jette, a suburb of Brussels. A corner of the dining room became the artist’s studio. When he painted nudes, his wife was his only model (she outlived him by 19 years). Despite exhibiting regularly — Magritte had a solo show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1933 — he once more made his living from commercial projects. A worldwide Depression and World War II compounded his difficulties selling art. Eventually, as Surrealism entered the history books, commissions were tendered and the Belgian acquired important New York dealers.

For the moment, Magritte’s shortlisted. His uncanny visual juxtapositions have inspired American artists to sculpt children the size of adults and adults the size of children and to replace logs in fireplaces with human legs. In “Perspicacity” (1936), he depicted himself painting a bird in flight although he was looking at an egg resting on a table. Magritte’s world is discombobulated and filled with doubts. An avid reader of detective novels and philosophy tomes, he crossed Dashiell Hammett with Martin Heidegger. Looking at Rene Magritte’s paintings, we feel we’re cracking a code about the nature of our existence.