Friday, September 27, 2013

Magritte Is Not a Surrealist


The new Magritte exhibition, opening at the Museum of Modern Art, offers a welcome opportunity to reassess the artist's place in the history of 20th century art.  Magritte was affiliated with the surrealists, and is often regarded as a paradigm exemplar of that movement--perhaps even it most recognizable exemplar.  That, I think, is a mistake.  Magritte comes into contact with surrealism and borrows aspects of the surrealist idiom, but he does not fit the surrealist mold.  Surrealists were concerned with alternate realities and dreams, with turning the ordinary into something bizarre, unstable, and irrational.  Surrealism was an assault on logic, and as escape from rationalism, fueled by an impression that reason had brought the world to war.  In his surrealist manifesto, Andre Breson defines surrealism as "Psychic automatism in its pure state."  He says it concerns "the omnipotence of dream," and he cites Freud as a central inspiration.  Magritte finds inspiration in Freud too, as we will see, but his agenda is very different.


As Michel Foucault observes in his short book on Magritte, Magritte is concerned with the nature of representation.  Foucault is impressed by the Belgian painter's canonical "ceci n'est pas une pipe," which reminds the viewer that pictures are not real.  When looking at a paining, we tend to speak of objects: there's a horse, that's Napoleon, look at the stormy sky.  When we talk that way, we implicitly endorse a mimetic or illusionistic theory of art, according to which art recreates or duplicates reality.  This idea about art's function was called into question by abstraction in the early decades of the twentieth century, but Magritte does something even more radical.  He suggests that even so-called representational art is not a mere copy of the world.  To make this case, he often asks about the relationship between art and language.  Language is widely recognized to be a set of arbitrary signs (the word "pipe" could represent anything).  Magritte draws attention to the possibility that mimetic images are also symbols.  The painting at the top is called The Palace of Curtains III.  Here image and language are directly compared.  We naively think that just one--the word--needs mastery of learned conventions to decode.  We think pictures give us the world more directly.  Magritte invites us to see both as curtains.  


 Curtains also appear in the next painting, called The Empty Mask (above).  Here we have a frame, which houses pictures rather than words.  The lower right contains a curtain (rideau), then we have the sky again above it, and a facade in the lower right.  Most intriguing is the upper right which contains the words "human body" in French, but then, parenthetically, "or forest."  Words can represent anything, recall, but so can pictures.




This point is made more directly and charmingly in Clairvoyance (above).  The title suggests that artist can see the future of the egg.  But the image of an artist faithfully copying an object and producing an image that bears no resemblance reminds us that the meaning of an image may depends on the artists intentions.  Consequently, we cannot read meaning off of a painting.  Meaning is not there to be seen. Pictures are as opaque as words.


Clairvoyance is not Magritte's only painting about the artistic process.  In another Attempting the Impossible, he depicts himself painting a nude woman (his wife, Georgette Berger).  This is clearly a Pygmalion allusion, but with a twist.  As the title indicates, the artist cannot in fact create anything real. The exhibition also includes a photograph taken while Magritte was making this work.  It serves as a reminder that the painter in the painting is no more real than his unfinished model.  They are equally impossible objects.

These paintings show Magritte's abiding concern with the nature of representation and the nature of art--hardly a central concern for most surrealists.   Other examples abound in the show.  One display case contains a palette with sky painting on it, as if the artist's raw material were the world itself, there are also two paintings of eyes, suggesting that artists paint ways of seeing, and a partially colored replica of the Venus de Milo, which may be a further commentary on the process of attempting to render things into reality.

Clouds are a pervasive theme in Magritte's work.  One work disrupts the illusion of painting by breaking a cloudy sky into four framed panels.  Another shows a cloudy sky next to suspended pink bells.  Magritte's interest in bells and music can also be found throughout the show.  Here bells stand in for sky, suggesting the music of the spheres, but also reminding us that sound is invisible.  These bells will never be heard.  This raises the question about whether all pictures contain invisible elements as well.


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Also on display is The Human Condition, which depicts a painting canvas in front of a landscape; picture becomes indistinguishable from depicted.  Though clearly a comment on mimetic painting, the title also indicates that human beings are trapped in a semiotic web, which we habitually mistake for reality. This reading finds support in a BBC interview (in full here), which Magritte conducted in 1967:


MAGRITTE: The actual tree in the landscape—you can’t see the tree itself. You can see the tree in the painting—right there. But you know the real tree is there behind the painting, because your mind projects it out there in the real landscape. The logic of the painting demands this. You picture it in your mind. And that is also how you see the real world in everyday life: you see the world as being outside yourself, but what you actually experience is a mental representation—(he taps his head)—a mental event, inside, in here.

BBC: I get it now. The painting is a metaphor about how we see. A visual pun...

MAGRITTE: Indeed. Because it’s also a metaphor about how we don’t see. What’s out there— really?

Another intriguing painting is called The Alphabet of Revelations (below).  This one also contains two panels, or rather two halves separated, as Magritte likes to do, by a trompe l'oeil frame.  The use of frames, and especially merely painting frames, reminds us not to mistake painting for reality.  On the right the painting contains four ordinary objects from Magritte's lexicon in stat silhouette, as if to suggest these are important symbols.  The lower portion of that panel contains a trompe l'oeil rip.  The "real world" behind the rip is as black at the painted objects.  The panel on the right contains a tangled wire-like form.  This may be a comment on abstract art, placed here along side recognizable forms as if to say both are fundamentally the same.



Many of Magritte's painting contain cryptic collections of symbols.  Below, I've reproduced the Key of Dreams (left) and the Reckless Sleeper (right).  The form offers another quartet of ordinary objects, each inexplicably mislabeled.  Or are these labels accurate?  Perhaps the words have unconventional meanings in this context, or the pictures are being used as arbitrary signs.  The Reckless Sleeper contains a constellation of symbols embedded in an amorphous stone stella under the night sky.  These include Magritte staples like a bowler hat, an apple, a bird, and a mirror.  The sleeper, is nestled in a wooden box above.  Both these concern the interpretation of dreams (the former suggests this theme by its title, and the later more obviously).  This brings us back to Freud.  But unlike other surrealists, who who saw dreams as phantasmal alternate realities that defy reason and reveal secret desires, Magritte uses dreams as another opportunity to contemplate the nature of representation.  Dream interpretation becomes a special case of an overarching theme: the idea that meaning is never transparently given.  As with dreams, pictures aren't windows with transparent glass that we can simply peer through.


This, I submit, is the crux of Magritte's project.  He wants to raise questions about the nature of representation in art by reminding us that pictures are symbols and thwarting interpretation at every turn.  Where surrealists want to open up the door to other worlds, Magritte tries to close off all worlds, and leave us with symbols and surfaces to contemplate.


It must be added that representation is not the only theme in Magritte's work.  The MoMA exhibition also includes other works that show off Magritte's range and his intelligence as a painter.  For the most part, these other works reinforce my thesis that he is not primarily a surrealist.  Consider, for example, his wonderful Man With a Newspaper (above, left).  One panel shows a man reading at a table, and then three successive panels show his absence.  The first panel is taken from a turn of the century German health manual, according to the Tate website (above, right).  The subsequent panels suggest a narrative.  The man has disappeared, never to return.  Had one of these panels been painted in isolation, we would see it as a mere interior, but here they are conceptualized as pictures of absence, and the repetition suggests the passage of time.  They represent non-existence and duration -- two features that are normally thought to defy depiction.



Another canvas, The Menaced Assassin which MoMA owns, is more overly narrative in content.  It shows a murder scene.  The nude body of the victim is viewed by three identical men peering through the window.  Another man cavalierly plays a phonograph (might he be the killer?).  Two other men (the first appearance of bowler hats in Magritte's oeuvre) lurk behind an entrance way, waiting to to pounce with a cudgel and a net.  These figures are said to be inspired by Louis Feuillade's Fantomas films (see the still from episode 3), and the other elements may derive from true crime magazines or crime fiction.  Indeed, the image might easily be mistaken for an instance of those genres, but the three men outside the window suggest otherwise.  On one reading, this is a picture about viewing art.  Many pictures depict sex or violence, yet we watch casually. The bowler-wearing men (who are also identical) may stand in for Magritte himself, reduplicated and setting a snare.



Magritte's interest in the pornography of viewing can also be found in other works, like the two classics above.  In The Gigantic Days (above, left), we see a clothed man projected onto a nude woman's body who tries to push him away with the futility that some people experience when trying to rid themselves of traumatic memories.  The Rape (above, right) is even less subtle.  Here a woman's face become a nude torso, making viewers complicit in an act of sexualizing objectification.  Like other paintings I've mentioned, these are about viewing, but they are more overtly political.  They push even further and more chillingly on the idea that there is no innocent eye.


I will end with one last image, that is a bit of an outlier in the MoMA show.  Young Girl Eating a Bird is a grizzly image of a female figure biting into a bird, with blood covering her fingers and dripping down her lacy collar.  Behind her stands a tree with other exotic-looking birds, monochrome and improbably poised, like illustrations from a field guide.  One has the impression that each will be consumed one by one.  The girl has a doleful expression as if her feast were a tiresome obligation or mourning right.  This takes on special irony given the picture's subtitle: The Pleasure.  Here at last one might think we have found the surrealist in Magritte: the painting seems to be an essay in bizarre incongruity, an image taken from a nightmare, inexplicable and otherworldly. 

But there is another interpretation more in line with the themes adduced above.  Perhaps the activity of feeding on brightly colored exotic birds is a metaphor for seeing art.  We are encouraged to take pleasure in that aesthetic repast, but it can also be a mechanical activity, foisted on us by the demands of class identity.  Seeing itself can also be a brutal act.  As Magritte teaches, eyes can distort reality; eyes can even rape.  In this image, the violence of seeing may even be part of a subtle revenge plot.  Think of images like the one of the left, from a turn of the century crime magazine, which Magritte might have seen.  The world of things is a hostile place (Magritte's mother committed suicide).  Through paintings, we can regain a kind of control.  Paintings may cut us off from reality, but in doing so, they can also be empowering.  If this reading has any merit, Magritte has not given us a dreamscape here, but rather a further commentary on the function of images.  Where surrealists seek an alternate reality, Magritte keeps us firmly planted in the gallery, drawing attention to the nature of art itself. 

26 comments:

  1. Magritte as epistemologist! No, a meta-epistemologist! Even better :) I have never before set eyes on Clairvoyance and I am TRANSFIXED (what an odd word). Thank you!

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  2. Thanks! Yes, I was originally going to describe him as a conceptual artist (which he is), but in some ways the term philosopher, or your meta-epistemologist, seems a better fit.

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  3. Magritte was concerned with depicting ideas in paintings, mainly.
    Surrealists wanted to leash the unconscious in paintings in a hope of new meanings/if not better ones.
    But it is an open question if the unconscious has to be leashed or consciously invited to speak for itself. I think it does it anyway. In art.
    There is also a way of seeking contradiction for the sake of it, something that I noticed in Kafka writings.

    The painting "ceci n'est pas une pipe," to me it looks real enough. I find it hard to understand why he wrote "ceci n'est pas une pipe". Because it is. I do not believe it is the real object because the medium has its constraints, but I believe that he depicted what he said it does not look like what he depicted in the painting.
    The painter is concerned with the real meaning of things, and this is something that is misleading in real life, in art, or language.
    But the relationship between language and art could be interesting. We use language when we think, no?
    We have to think when we paint, not only to feel.
    But language does seem to come across faster as making people understand the meaning rather than an image. Sometimes. When things are trickier. We all know how to speak and use the language, but not all of us are able to read a certain idea in a painting.
    I do not believe that words can represent just anything, I would rather believe that their range is too limited and unable to fulfill certain needs that our understanding require.

    In the "Clairvoyance" painting, the painter has to paint what he sees, it is not about his intentions. He thinks that he is precisely paintings what he sees, objectively. And he painted a bird. It is realistic, isn't it? The bird comes from an egg. Like you paint the future.
    But most likely it can get trickier than that.

    "Attempting the Impossible" might be about the woman depicted in the painting, his wife, and not about him. why not? Like she is not real yet, or as she should be, but she will be.
    I also believe that, first of all, what you see in the picture, as being clearly defined and pose no mystery to the eyes must taken as it is. If it is a woman that is not yet finished but about to and a man attempting to do so, then this is a fact that can not be neglected.

    "The Human Condition" is interesting in the sense that Magritte is actually concerned with what we can not see and never will but should rather than what is misleading us but eventually be able to see.
    Do you see any resemblance with Malevich's paintings "White on White"?
    When things get too similar and almost identical, but could not be more different from each other.



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  4. In the "Clairvoyance" painting. The painter had the intention to paint what he saw by looking at the egg, but it is realistic, his intention is not based on fictional facts, absurdity or contradiction. There are intentions based on fictional facts or something false.
    He had to paint what he saw. And what you see is always true as long as you think it is and there are not enough evidence that it is not true.
    Of course the first thing that comes to mind is that what you first see is the egg, but painters usually see more than that and it is as realistic and true. and it is called art.

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  5. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" If the picture is depicting a "pipe" and also some written words stating that it is actually not a "pipe" , don't I encounter a contradiction in myself by reading and seeing a thing and something that negates its existence? I see a "pipe". Why would he tell me that it is not? I understand that it is not the real "pipe", but it is as real as any object in a painting. As real as our reality is. And comparing to other reality which is more real than ours or the real one.
    Maybe he does it to enforce what our eyes see? Something like, get out of here, it is a "pipe".
    which is more powerful? that we see clearly that it is a "pipe" or what is written that says it is not a "pipe". Which is more powerful, the language or the image? Because I still see a "pipe" in the painting so what it is written can hardly convince me that it is not a "pipe" in the painting.
    why doesn't he tell me what it actually is? because it is something rather than nothing in the painting. Not a "pipe" but what? You still see a "pipe" isn't it?
    And so does Magritte.

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  6. "These bells will never be heard. This raises the question about whether all pictures contain invisible elements as well. "

    the sound is invisible. but could it be the same, as depicting ideas and feelings as painting does?
    it is a different medium, but it has to communicate. I do not express those ideas in a painting, but I do it with sounds.
    I do not precisely understand what invisible elements mean. Meaning is invisible by what we mean visible but it is as real as any visible element. And so are ideas or feelings.
    Maybe it is different with sound, because you have to hear it.
    Does sound imply more freedom than paintings do? Is something that painters strive to achieve?
    I do not think it is precisely more spontaneous, but I do not understand it that well.

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  7. "The man with a newspaper" . For me, it does not really represent the passage of time. For this, only one picture with the man being absent from it would suffice.
    But if we look closely at the three successive paintings, we notice that the flowers from the window are identical in all the paintings. Unless the flowers are artificial.
    But since we do not know this for certain, the man could be missing just for a few minutes, about to come back, or he left but not long ago. Also, we should notice a deterioration of the table cloth or furniture if there is too much time involved. Everything is still as being frozen in time, just that the man is missing. It is spooky.
    Like waking up and seeing that everybody has disappeared. What would all the precious objects mean then? Without the people who desired them and fought for them?
    It is like seeing those ghosts mine towns from USA or other places, some look so perfect, frozen in time, just that the people are missing.

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  8. In "The Alphabet of Revelations", the right paintings with the four objects. They are all black.
    Also the black world from behind the rip. It could mean that there is nothing painted on the canvas. That the four objects are cropped from the black world that is visible behind the rip. They are not painted black, they are intentionally made look like objects, but their content is the same content as the content behind the rip. It was not obvious for me in the beginning.

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  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  10. bird, painter, egg,.... bird, artist, egg,... not a chicken type of bird, psychic, egg,... bird like image, figure like artist painter, psychic egg like obligon,… birdness, painterness, eggness,… painting of birdness, painting of painterness, painting of eggness,… painting of paintingness, painting of painterness, painting of eggness, painting of futureness……….. I see the future!……. the alligator egg is the future of the bird that projects the artist to look at a new interpretation of y associative groupings and sequences only conceptually have meaning in the systems in which the alligator is in the past"

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    1. not a chicken type of bird, but a bird, nonetheless. no psychic, birds comes from eggs.
      when you look at eggs, you think that it would rather come out a bird from it, not an alligator. what is most common.
      but it is not about that precisely. it is not a lecture about birds coming from eggs and him predicting this future, because nobody else knows this other than him.
      it is about the fact that he is an artist and he can see things differently.
      and seeing things differently is not necessarily out of the blue or pure fiction or completely alien.
      and even if he would be psychic, what? this does exist.

      Delete
  11. this are some images showing what does music look like, as sounds.
    http://butdoesitfloat.com/What-does-music-look-like
    I think they are very effective.


    "The Menaced Assasin", it reminds me of a painting by Mucnh.
    do not recall the name of the painting now.
    a woman with a dead child in her arms. the child has a dreamy out of the world look, devoided of any emotion. the woman looks desperate.

    you are dead and thats it. it is useless.

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  12. the girl eating the bird, she really looks absent. she could eat anything horrific, for what is worth. I find it depressing. nothing matters in art, anything goes. but I never believed that.

    you said "Paintings may cut us off from reality, but in doing so, they can also be empowering. "
    in what way they are empowering?
    because I do not believe they are empowering us.

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  13. your interpretation of the girl eating a bird is different than mine. i dont see it as a metaphor for seeing art.
    seeing art is not a depressing act or a mechanical act, as its purpose. I assume.
    living is more like that.
    when you do art, it is pleasure. because you can do it, nobody else can do what you can, it is a dialogue with what has been done previously and it is enjoyable. like watching a good movie. ideally. some particularities may apply at times.

    I might be wrong though.
    the girl just looks depressing or beyond depression. powerless.

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  14. I am curious what do you think about Munch paintings " The Scream"?
    I never saw anything in this paintings. I do like Munch.
    should resonate with me about desperation, screaming it and mental distress. it does not.

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  15. "The Menaced Assassin", the woman is dead and naked. there is a scarf but does not cover her nudity in any way. she had to be naked? the three men at the window do not even seem to look at her, they seem to look at the criminal. the criminal is so casual, but not happy. absurd.
    the dead woman, the way she is there, in the bed, looks like a phantasm of the man. so it looks to me now. I do not understand the two men at the door.

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  16. the dead woman on the bed in The Menaced Assasin does not seem to resemble that dead child from Munch painting.
    here, the woman looks like from a fantasy, if not a sexual fantasy. that dead child looked like he would actually tell us about what death is like, something objective.
    if I am not actually perceive things wrong right now.

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  17. the menace assasisn, the two men at the door, they are painted like they are photographed given the shadow their bodies make on the wall. It is unusual for a painting. They also look static, which is common to a painting.

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  18. the two men at the door, the expression on their faces looks like they are immersed in their thoughts. they are not alert, or paying attention to the assassin from inside the room, catching/hearing his every move or breath, they are absent by being present. you could hardly believe that they would actually take any action. nothing moves in that room or outside the room ( referring to the two men at the door, their attitude seems to be different than the attitude of the three men at the window, they seem more engaging by being present, looking inside the room, being curious, as having more enthusiasm?
    It is what curiosity implies, after all. )

    when you are immersed in your thoughts, is this a dynamic act or not? Because it does not look like it is . It is not strange to assume that it should or could be.
    There are also differences. The assassin does not look immerse in his thoughts/ as being lost, or preoccupied by something. He just seems indiferent.

    The two men at the door look static, or as having a thought that can not be solved or being blocked in it. Nothing moves there. This is something common when you look at painting as opposed to looking at a photograph, in general.
    You look inside when you paint, to paint rather than outside. If I am not terrible mistaken, because things can and always have changed by the nature of what art states for.

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  19. I was so impressed by your idea ! Thank you so much :-)

    ReplyDelete
  20. Writing is an art form that reaches a multitude of people from all walks of life, different cultures, and age group. As a writer, it is not about what you want. examples for idioms

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  21. allez-y et remettez-les. Mais n'imposez jamais de mains sur quelqu'un qui pourrait être tout simplement trop poli pour refuser.
    شركة تنظيف خزانات بالطائف
    شركة تنظيف بالطائف
    شركة تنظيف شقق بالطائف

    ReplyDelete
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