Magritte

Joe and I visited this exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW in November 2024. It’s on until the 9th of February 2025 and I strongly recommend a visit. Marketed as an in-depth retrospective featuring more than 100 works, most of which have never before been seen in Australia it’s a great opportunity. I’ve always liked his paintings which are described as being in a deadpan, realist style depicting ordinary objects and everyday settings, revealing them to be more mysterious and enchanting than we could ever have imagined. Paintings on display were from his first exhibition in Brussels 1927 through to his final works before his death in 1967. Here I am outside the gallery.

There is remarkable unity in the images. Right from his first exhibition we see his interest in the bowler-hatted man. In this first appearance, The meaning of night, 1927, his long overcoat, starched Edwardian collar and black tie would have been recognised by contemporary viewers as the unremarkable uniform of professional men. But facing the viewer with closed eyes, his ordinariness perhaps veils an inner life of dreams and poetic invention. Magritte later observed, The man with the bowler hat is just a middle-class man in his anonymity.. And I wear it. I am not eager to singularise myself.

The gallery notes tell us this ubiquitous everyman appears in more than 50 artworks throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Here he is in The siren’s song, 1952.

There are 172 bowler hatted men in Golconda, 1953. The name comes from a city in south-east India, described by Magritte as a magical city. He explains the title of the painting means something of a marvel. And I think it is a marvel to travel through the sky on earth.

Of his painting Baucis’s landscape, 1966 Magritte would write to a friend, I have discovered how to paint the emptiness between a hat and a man’s suit without suggesting ‘the invisible man’. The title refers to the Greek mythological figure Baucis who observed from a hill-top her hometown after it was destroyed by a flood sent by Zeus.

In Magritte’s last decade the bowler-hatted man increasingly took centre stage. It had been repeated so often it could be signified with the barest of visual clues: a silhouette, or reduced to sensory organs, hat and suit. In New York for the opening of a retrospective of his work in 1965 Magritte wore a bowler-hat for photo shoots. This is Man and the forest, c1965.

That painting is closely related to The happy donor, 1966, which may refer to Magritte himself as he donated it to the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussells in 1966, the year before he died. In both the recognisable figure contains another image within its outlined shape. Here the windows of a distant house glow warmly in a landscape bathed in shades of twilight, a beacon of welcome at the close of the day.

Another iconic image in Magritte’s work is the pipe which was also there from the very start. Here it is is in The treachery of images from 1952. Reminds me of Maigret.

It was only a matter of time until the two were put together. This is Good faith from 1965.

This earlier picture of the pipe in 1936 is an example of Magritte’s subversive humour. I don’t like it much but it certainly makes a pretty clear point – they could use it in anti-smoking ads. It’s also got a great title (I love his titles) The philosophical lamp. Magritte explains: The meditations of the obsessive, absent-minded philosopher can suggest a mental world closed in on itself, as here a smoker is the prisoner of his pipe. The note also tells us the image of the man bears more than a passing resemblance to the artist.

From the very beginning Magritte was interested in telling more than the surface story. In Character meditating on madness, 1928, he has created an atmosphere of intrigue and suspense … A man in profile, dressed in a nondescript suit, holds a cigarette. His expression is focused as he peers intently at something or someone just beyond view. The title adds to the ambiguity.

Magritte’s portraits were always interesting. Portrait of Paul Nougé, 1927 is of his friend who was a Belgian writer and poet, part of that country’s surrealist group. The double figures reflect photographic techniques of doubling and repetition. The background looks like bone marrow when viewed through a microscope perhaps alluding to Nougés occupation as a biochemist.

Georgette, 1937 depicts Magritte’s wife. They have a romantic meet/cute story – met as teenagers in 1913, were separated by WWI, met by chance in Brussels in 1920 while walking in the Royal Botanic Gardens and married two years later! She was his model and inspiration, appearing in may of his paintings, drawings, photographs and films. That’s a collection of surrealist objects surrounding her face framed so that it could be mirror, a precious miniature painting, or a photograph kept in a locket.

Portrait of Irène Hamoir, 1936 is of another friend who was a journalist, poet and novelist.

In his very first exhibition in 1927 there were a number of paintings that signalled the young artist’s allegiance to the burgeoning surrealist movement. He later fell out with the Paris based surrealists over what he called his sunlit surrealism. He called it a battle between those who want to preserve an ancient or a recent tradition and those who want change. He was always in favour of change I think. Here is a later one, The lovers, 1928, that has become one of his iconic works. He painted it in Paris. The draped cloth evokes images of victims wrapped in cloth … while also relating to the surrealist themes of concealment and disguise.

The false mirror, 1929, was, before its purchase by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in the collection of fellow surrealist artist Man Ray who wrote of it: ‘eye of the sky’ is hanging in my apartment, and it sees many things! For once, a picture sees as much as it seen itself.

Buildings with rows of windows is another motif in Magritte’s work that was already evident early on. This is Summer, 1932.

After 1929 Magritte moved onto interrogating various philosophical problems in his work. With a close circle of friends he attempted to discover a hidden poetic layer of reality, whereby every object we perceive had an amazing new poetic secret – a resonance that could be discovered through intellectual and pictorial inquiry. Here we have his solution to the problem of the window. This (badly photographed) is The human condition, 1933. The picture in the room is of the landscape outside the room. Magritte said: For the viewer, the tree was simultaneously in the room in the picture and outside in the real landscape; and seeing two different spaces at once is like the moment existing simultaneously in the past and the present as in déjà vu.

Evening falls, 1964 is a variation on the problem of the window, here the illusion portrayed in the picture above is shattered with the shards of glass still portraying the view of the exterior landscape.

And here we have his solution to the problem of the house. In praise of dialectics, 1937 is in the NGV. Magritte painted lots of pictures of houses in various places before deciding the best position would be as depicted here: a house-front, through an open window the inside of a room is visible and in the room is a house.

Here, as Magritte explains: the tree, as subject of a problem, became a large leaf the stem of which was a trunk directly planted in the ground. The plain air, 1940.

The song of the storm, 1937 inverts the position of rain and clouds; the rain being so clear!

The work Magritte included in his first solo exhibition in Parish is very different from the works we are most familiar with. These paintings became known as his vache period – vache meaning nasty or mean. I wasn’t that keen but they show he could have painted anything. The flame rekindled, 1943 reflects the cover of a novel about a famous French detective of the period, Fantômas.

During WWII Magritte worked with a fellow artist to paint and attempt to sell forgeries of other artists’ work. The note suggests this was not just for money but the subversive nature of the act itself was also a driving force. [The ‘fake’ Titian], 1944 was one such work. It’s not a copy of one work, but a combination of two Titian paintings – Woman with a mirror 1515 and Flora 1517. He did works in the style of people like Paul Klee, Picasso, de Chirico and Ernst.

The farewells, 1943 alludes to Manet’s Luncheon on the grass 1862-63.

The Survivor, 1950, was submitted for inclusion in an exhibition, Art and Peace organised by the French Communist Party in April 1950. In the context of other entries featuring May Day parades and heroic workers this one polarised opinions and prompted two hours of argument between members of the selection committee. We’re not told whether it was exhibiited or not.

The kiss, 1951, may have been more acceptable to the committee given the exhibition was organised under the aegis of Picasso’s dove, a very active bird, at the time, in the skies of the Cold War.

The dominion of light, 1954 is one of 27 versions of the same idea a nocturnal landscape and a sky above in broad daylight. On the day we visited one of these was up for auction at Christie’s where it later sold for $121.16 million! At first glance, the eye tends to make sense of the composition as an image of dusk – the final blast of sun before the night sets in. But on closer inspection, we register the clear brightness of the sky and the deep intensity of the darkness below and recognise we are in fact viewing qualities of light that belong to opposite times of the day.

In the 1950s and ’60s Magritte returned to his fastidiously painted, realistic style … composing mysterious and deeply arresting images … often on a larger scale … carefully considering perspective and framing – often using rooms, doorways and windows – skilfully manipulating light so that his works took on a cinematic quality. The listening room, 1952 is an example of Magritte’s ‘hypertrophy’ works, in which he juxtaposed commonplace objects and spaces at disjunctive scales. The note says:Despite the painting’s modest size its composition imparts and overwhelming, almost suffocating sense of scale.

The invisible world, 1954 reflects Magritte’s view that the art of painting, as I see it, makes possible creation of visible poetic images. They reveal the riches and details that our eyes can readily recognise: trees, skies, stones, objects, people, etc. They are meaningful when the intelligence is freed from the obsessive will to give things a meaning in order to use or master them.

The title Pascal’s coat, 1954, on this painting refers to Blaise Pascal, 17th century French mathematician, physicist and philosopher who experienced a religious vision that he recorded on a piece of parchment and sewed into his coat.

According to the accompanying note Magritte had an aversion to symbolism which I think seems unlikely given his work, but even so Variation on sadness, 1957 seems to combine metaphor with morbid humour. Of the two eggs one is embodying potential for life, the other representing its absence. The title of this work is very accessible – poor hen! When asked why he painted eggs Magritte said perhaps because I see the world in it.

Many of these later works are held in American institutions as Magritte was embraced in that country in the 1950s and 60s. Lots are in the Houston Art Gallery like Force of circumstance, 1958. I’ve no idea what the title means.

The memoirs of a saint, 1960, is another work that mixes up interior and external images. The reason for the title is not explained but lots of possibilities spring to mind – the isolation of the saint working on a bare stage?

The childhood of Icarus, 1960 harks back to Magritte’s earliest surrealist pinting which he said was a response to a mysterious feeling, and ‘unreasoning’ anxiety. The jockey seems to be fleeing into the forest beyond while the picture frames enclose familiar Magrittean motifs: rows of windows, fluffy white clouds.

The telescope, 1963 is another painting in which our sense of reality is again tested. It takes a while to work out we are seeing a window reflecting the outside and opening onto the inside. Magritte describes it: The window half opening onto absence of light.

The exhibition also included these painted bottles that Magritte produced during the German occupation of Brussels in WWII. Canvas and paint were in short supply so he eked out his studio supplies by painting onto empty bottles of Bordeaux, port and sherry.

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