Magritte [antikvár]

Magritte Few people would deny that, of the many artists who participated in that fuU-scale readjustment of our sensibilities which called itself Surreahsm, René Magritte remains today one of tlie most accessible. His paintings speak to us very direcdy. The great nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Courbet once said that he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one, and there is a sense in wliich tliis claim might also have been made by Magritte. (He actually admitted once that 'A woman's body floating above a city was an advantageous substitute for the angels that never presented themselves to my sight'.) Whilst other SurreaHsts painted angels, or more often devils, of their own invention, Magritte stuck closely to what he could see - the real world which we think we know but which, according to him, we do not know at all. In many ways Surrealism was heir to the great nineteenth-century movements of Romanticism and Symbolism; it took the nineteenth-century protest against rarionaHsm a:id materialism on to a different level but it was essentially the same protest. The SurreaHsts' search for tlie marvellous and their attempts to free the creative imagination from personal inhibition anl social constraint were not new but they were given a new, twentieth-century em^jhasis and sense of urgency. And yet to explain Magritte's achievement simply in these terms is to misrepresent it. His position within the Surreahst movement as a whole was an ambiguous one. His relations with other members of the group, particularly André Breton, its high priest, were not always good. As an artist, he chose to ignore those esoteric phenomena which so excited his colleagues in Paris: neoUthic and primitive art, the art of children and of the insane, medieval and symbolist painting, spiritualism, alchemical Uterature, psychoanalysis - none of these imaginative stimuh made much visible impact upon his painting. To look at a picture of the mid-i920s by Ernst or Miró is to be made aware of private fantasies at work, of rich and complex layers of meaning. Not so with Magritte. Any attempt to read his images as symbols of unconscious obsessions or repressed desires he firnJy resisted. Although his early Surrealist paintings remind us strongly of the irrationalities of the dream world, a large proportion of his art appeals to our conscious mind. Magritte's statements about the world are often in the form of unanswerable questions or riddles, whose purpose may be to upset us but whose apparent logic we find it diíEcult to deny. Magritte was not interested in accidental effects, automatism or other typically Surrealist techniques but, in his own words, in 'an objective representation of objects' - so objective, in fact, that his maimer of representing them was dehberately prosaic. The Surrealists professed a common hatred of aestheticism and belle peinture, but it is in Magritte's cool, straightforward style, derived in part from his admiration for the paintings of the ItaHan Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) but also perhaps from his own work in advertising and pubhcity, that we fmd best exemplified this concern that the image should speak for itself, with as htde interference from the artist as possible. Because they saw themselves as dealing with elemental experience - a kind of Jungian 'collective unconscious' - the Surrealists believed that their art would speak direcdy to a large audience, overriding cultural and aesthetic prejudice. By remaining aloof from the Surreahst preoccupation with the stream of consciousness, Magritte went further than his feUow artists towards reahzing the ideal of a universal pictorial language - an ideal which in the fmal analysis is probably unattainable. If in his art Magritte self-consciously set about to eliminate all traces of his personality, he certainly did not compensate for this in his hfe. Outwardly uneventful, it exhibited none of the noise and controversy which surrounded the activities of some of his Surrealist friends. Magritte preferred to live a hfe of bourgeois seclusion and anonymity. The romantic notion of the artist as outsider meant nothing to him: he was a man who painted pictures because he had to earn a living. He enjoyed listening to classical music (condemned by Breton for its formalism and inabihty to disrupt habitual modes of perception), hked reading, particularly detective novels and mystery stories (an enthusiasm he shared with