An Evening on the Edge of Reason

After Magritte by Tom Stoppard

About Reason in the Theatre

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About Gender

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About Magritte

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About Many Other Things

René Magritte (1898-1967): Painting the Paradoxes of "Reality"

How can anyone enjoy interpreting symbols? They are 'substitutes' that are only useful to a mind that is incapable of knowing the things themselves.

René Magritte, 1960

Looking at René Magritte's oil painting of a pipe from 1929, you will surely ask yourself why it is considered an essential tribute to Surrealism. Beneath the pipe you can read in a beautiful handwriting Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe), but this is no more than a truism, because the representation of a pipe is obviously not identical with the object. A closer look reveals the seemingly easy comprehensibility of the picture as a labyrinth of inextricable paradoxes. For example, there exists no clear hint about the sentence's reference is it the pipe, the sentence itself, or even the whole painting? Perhaps the representation of handwritten signs is actually more important than their meaning - who knows? Besides, the picturesque qualities shouldn't be neglected, foremost the ambivalence of the background which induces the impression of an undefined picture space, while at the same time the lower part appears as two-dimensional underground of the writing. And what is this about "The Treachery of Images" - La trahison des images - being announced in the title? Does it accentuate the fact that Magritte "betrays" an important norm since the Renaissance the illusion of an autonomous picture space? On the other hand the painting could visualize the illusionism as "betrayal" of the recipient, since he is being mistaken about the flatness of the pictorial arts.

This subtle strategy of confusion is typical of Magritte, who continues in his Surrealistic oeuvre beginning around 1926 in a refined way the Cubist's intention to break with the traditional picture space. This quality doesn't surprise, if you know that his early works were executed in a Cubist style. Although he is called a Surrealist, his ties with the group were relatively loose. Magritte joined them only during his Paris years, from 1927 to 1930, while this circle around the writer André Breton existed from 1924 until approximately 1938. The born Belgian spent the rest of his life mostly in Brussels, and apart from a short period during World War II, he made pictures in his unmistakable style until he died in 1967.

Corresponding to the Surrealist spirit, his works follow an aesthetics of montage leading to unresolvable tensions due to the confrontation of incompatible facts and objects. The aesthetic credo of the group is still best expressed in their motto, Comte de Lautréamont's famous phrase from 1868 concerning "a fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table." The subconscious served as inspiration for the Surrealists, who wanted to preserve its paradoxes in order to defamiliarize the perception of everyday life. They weren't interested in analyzing the subconscious as Sigmund Freud, who nevertheless was considered by them as their ancestor. This approach led to a broad spectrum of stylistic solutions as the works of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and André Masson prove. Thus Surrealism has to be understood as an attitude of mind as well as a way of life aiming at the utopia of an unrepressed society, especially at the liberation of sexual desires. Lit tle wonder that many Surrealist artists supported the Communists.

Although sexuality also occupies an important place in Magritte's oeuvre, the painter is lacking the overtly aggressive anti-bourgeois and anti-clerical attitude of his colleagues. Instead he exploits a distinct repertoire of motives which are always newly combined in an ironic-reflexive and poetic manner. Among those motives are: men in suits and bowler hats; nude women; oversized objects; wrong assignments of words and objects; the fusion of paintings with the background; daylight skies sheltering streets by night; petrified or burning objects, among others the tubas mentioned in Stoppard's play.

Magritte's images owe their fascination to the confrontation of a deliberately trivial and "realistic" style with paradoxes that defy easy interpretations. If there are any beings they appear mostly like objects, and one fundament of classic painting - the visualization or at least the evocation of a story - seems to be missing, especially after 1930. Most of his paintings thus take on the quality of still-lives, even more than Giorgio de Chirico's works, whose oeuvre was a major source of inspiration. Like the Italian, Magritte created a cosmos of allusions to works of art and literature. His affinity to intertextual or better: inter-iconic methods might well have been an occasion for Tom Stoppard to refer to him so explicitly in After Magritte, since he pursues a similar approach within a different medium.

The theoretical writings of Magritte reflect partly the Surrealist's striving for social change. By undermining traditional conventions of seeing, he intended to focus the perception on the "true" image of reality in order to revolutionize the thinking of his contemporaries. To him, art was always strongly connected to ideas (in a Platonic sense), but like many modern artists Magritte developed a theoretical framework that fell behind his practice: While describing his pictures as windows to reality, he created self-reflexive works that actually call his own traditional understanding of images into question. Viewed in this way, Magritte reached his aim to mediate "reality", but in a different way: Instead of showing the nature of the world, his enigmatic paintings reveal something about the nature of pictures as well as the way we look at them and the world.