Rene Magritte

Taking its inspiration from a huge exhibition held in Brussels to commemorate the centenary of Magritte's birth, this travelling exhibition shows 90 oil and gouache works, 52 of which have never before been seen in Japan. The whole of Magritte's unsettling oevre is represented, giving art-lovers a great opportunity to acquaint or re-acquaint themselves with this compelling artist. Born in Belgium in 1898, Magritte attended the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts, working through various more or less contemporary styles, and subsequently becoming a wallpaper designer and commercial artist.

Giorgio de Chirico's Song of Love	In fact, Magritte continued to do advertising, publicity and poster work throughout the 1920s and 30s, even after what was possibly his most crucial formative experience as an artist, seeing in 1922 Giorgio de Chirico's "Song of Love" (left) an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements in a dreamlike architectural space, and a huge influence on Magritte's mature style. Other less elevated yet no less mysterious influences included Louis Feuillade's cinematic five-part serial of the dime thriller "Fantomas" novels, also cited by Luis Bunuel and Alain Resnais, and inspiring the present day band of the same name.
A founder member of the primarily literary Belgian Surrealist group, established in 1926, Magritte moved to Paris in 1927 to participate in the activities of the French Surrealists. Unlike the Paris-based Surrealists, though, Magritte was, on the surface at least, stolidly middle-class in his domestic arrangements, returning to Brussels in 1930 where he remained until his death in 1967 living with Georgette Berger, his first and only wife, whom he had first met in 1913. In 1965, Magritte put forward his own notion of Surrealism: "The term surrealism gives rise to confusion, and the term Realism is not suitable for the direct apprehension of reality. Surrealism is the direct knowledge of reality: reality is absolute, and unrelated to the various ways of interpreting it. André Breton says that Surrealism is the point at which the mind ceases to imagine nothingness, not the contrary. That's fine, but if I repeat this definition I'm no more than a parrot. One must come up with an equivalent, such as: Surrealism is the knowledge of absolute thought." Turning to a consideration of his work, Magritte presents certain problems, not least the constant war he waged against interpretation: absolute thought is not verbal. Seeing is what matters. Seeing must suffice. This was Magritte's counsel. Of course, this is an almost impossible demand for the viewer. The titles, in any case, taken from literature, musical scores and film, invite mental peregrinations. Indeed Magritte would at times invite friends to view completed works and make suggestions for titles, notably Paul Nougé who said in 1944: "We question pictures before listening to them, we question them at random. And we are astonished when the reply we had expected is not forthcoming."
	The viewer standing before Magritte's paintings finds no response to the usual demands and expectations of art, at least as they existed contemporarily. And yet Magritte has been described as a narrative painter, in contrast to myth-makers such as Picasso, his images stories first, and formal paintings second, "snapshots of the impossible." Not a naturally fluent painter, certainly not a sensuous one, and desiring "the identity of each image to be perfectly clear, without the distraction of a particular style," Magritte developed a deadpan form of representation to cast his spells of the everyday.
The functionality of the style is, though, integral to the effect of the work. (Only twice, in short periods, both in the 1940s, did Magritte depart from it.) He used it to render mundane subject-matter in startlingly imaginative juxtapositions, dislocating space and time, and not infrequently the viewer's mental balance. Magritte called his paintings, "material symbols of free thought," and his best works achieve their freedom of thought by their sensed profundity and a thorough defeat of facile interpretation. The exhibition runs at Hiroshima Museum of Art until December 8th. Click here for more details. Don Fowler 11/2002