Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

Surreal world

Magritte

As the largest collection of René Magritte’s paintings opens in Brussels, Adrian Mourby explores the works of one of Belgium’s most famous sons

Image Lothar Wolleh (courtesy of Estate Lothar Wolleh, Berlin)

René Magritte is such an important figure in the contemporary mindset that his works can sometimes seem simultaneously unique and yet commonplace, simply because we are so familiar with them. The man in the bowler hat, the pipe that is not a pipe, the green apple, the domestic fireplace (with or without a train coming out of it), the curved window frame, the nocturnal house lit by a lamppost while the sky above is lit by daylight…

All these precisely executed images take everyday objects and give them an unexpected twist. There’s something we cannot trust about reality, Magritte tells us, but he seems unwilling to say why.

One of his most iconic paintings, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images, 1928-9) appears to be a still-life of a pipe and yet the caption specifically denies this. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” What are we to make of that? Is it just perversity or a joke?

When Magritte was asked about the painting, he replied: “Of course it is not a pipe because you could not smoke with it.” He was speaking like a surrealist but his underlying, more serious, point was that the image can never be the thing itself. For this reason, many of Magritte’s paintings feature an easel on which sits a canvas that’s apparently a continuation of the landscape beyond. Typical of this is the series La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition, 1933-35) in which the paintings look identical to the things they depict but Magritte makes sure we realise they are not.

But while Magritte was certainly a surrealist, he was unlike some of the more political members of this brotherhood and very much at odds with the surrealist automatists who drew on the imagination in an unconstrained and even random way. Magritte also distanced himself from talented showmen such as Salvador Dalí, whom he described as a businessman (in fact, in his private life Magritte made wicked parodies of Dalí). In his youth, Magritte followed the surrealist practice of allowing a group of fellow artists to decide, however capriciously, the title of each other’s paintings, but he developed what was for the time an unusual fascination with drawing almost exclusively on the everyday world around him to illustrate his ideas.

A visit today to the artist’s house in the Brussels suburb of Jette reveals how the fireplace featured famously in La Durée Poignardée (Time Transfixed, 1938) was actually in Magritte’s own front room. The enclosed metal and glass grate protrudes from it very much like a steam train. In the breakfast room, we see his easel looking remarkably like the easel in those landscape pictures of the La Condition Humaine series. The lamppost outside his house is the one featured in L’Empire des Lumières (The Empire of Lights, 1953) and his rounded front window is the one featured with broken glass in Les Promenades d’Euclide (Euclidean Walks, 1955). To encourage these links to his paintings, the house – which is now a museum – even displays Magritte’s bowler hat and a green apple in a dish.

Apples occur frequently in Magritte’s works, but he resisted any idea that they were symbolic. “I hate symbols as much as I hate tradition,” he said in 1947. “Symbols are what you learn at school, but to be a surrealist, as I am, means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen and being always on the lookout for what has never been seen.”

The function of the apple in Le Fils de l’Homme (The Son of Man, 1964) was to prevent us from seeing the face of what Magritte claimed was his own self-portrait. Such obscurings are a reference to Magritte’s belief that everything seen prevents us seeing something else. In La Chambre d’Écoute (The Listening Room, 1952), an oversized green apple fills an empty suburban room. Magritte enjoyed juxtaposing two such ordinary objects, shocking us by subverting their relative sizes, just as he enjoyed startling us with a train emerging from a fireplace.

In Les Affinités Électives (Elective Affinities, 1933) Magritte went one stage further. “One night, I woke up in a room in which a cage with a bird sleeping in it had been placed,” he himself described. “A magnificent error caused me to see an egg in the cage, instead of the vanished bird. I then grasped a new and astonishing poetic secret, for the shock which I experienced had been provoked precisely by the affinity of two objects – the cage and the egg – to each other, whereas previously this shock had been caused by my bringing together two objects that were unrelated”.

Magritte continued to reshuffle all these images throughout his mature period. Add in doves, suburban houses, women transforming into fish, wooden doors (of the kind found in his house) and clouds against a blue sky (the same shade of blue as used in his parlour) and you’re pretty much describing 90% of his output.

By this continual reworking and rejuxtaposing of his own imagery, Magritte, perhaps more than any painter of the 20th century, created his own landscape. We only have to see an apple and a bowler hat in proximity to each other to be transported to his world. And yet it was a world in which he wished us to know that nothing was truly knowable — an all the more remarkable achievement given that Magritte was asking us to question rather than believe in his painting.

A life in art

How Magritte became a leading surrealist

René François Ghislain Magritte was born in the Wallonian town of Lessines in 1898. During the First World War he was an art student in Brussels, where he met Georgette, whom he married in 1922. Initially Magritte worked as an assistant designer in a wallpaper factory to pay the bills. Most of his works of this period are cubist female nudes, mostly of Georgette. She continued to appear naked when Magritte embraced surrealism in 1926. His first exhibition in Brussels was met with abuse from critics, so they moved to Paris where they shared the surrealist cause with André Breton. In 1930, Magritte still wasn’t earning a living from his painting, so he returned to Brussels and formed an advertising agency with his brother. Financial worries began to ease in the 1940s after an exhibition in New York. Magritte died of cancer in 1967 just as his work was being embraced by the public and pop artists.

FR Un monde surréaliste

Les oeuvres de René Magritte dégagent une certaine ambivalence. Nous regardons ses tableaux comme des œuvres uniques mais aussi comme des images connues, parce qu’elles nous sont tellement familières. Toutes ses images – un homme sans visage avec un chapeau melon, une pipe qui n’est pas une pipe, une pomme verte emplissant la pièce d’une maison, un feu ouvert d’où sort un train – reproduisent des objets de la réalité concrète et les placent dans des contextes inattendus.

“La Trahison des Images”, l’un de ses tableauxphares représente une pipe - une nature morte – et toutefois le titre dit “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Lorsque l’on a interrogé Magritte sur ce contresens, il a répondu : “À l’évidence ce n’est pas une pipe. Pourriez-vous la bourrer cette pipe ? Non, n’est-ce pas ?” Sous ces propos surréalistes, il s’interrogeait plus sérieusement sur la nature de l’image, qui n’est qu’une représentation de la chose et pas la chose en soi.

Les pommes reviennent fréquemment dans l’œuvre de Magritte, dans “Le Fils de l’Homme” et “La Chambre d’Écoute” notamment, mais il n’a jamais établi leur côté symbolique. “Je déteste les symboles autant que la tradition,” ditil en 1947. “Les symboles, c’est ce que l’on vous apprend à l’école. Mais pour être un surréaliste, comme moi, cela implique de vous vider l’esprit de tous les souvenirs que vous avez vus et d’être toujours à l’affût de ce qui n’a jamais été vu.”

Magritte a continué à remanier ses objets du quotidien. En retravaillant constamment et en juxtaposant sa propre imagerie selon une nouvelle ordonnance, il a façonné son propre paysage. Il nous suffit de voir une pomme et un chapeau melon dans un rapport de proximité pour être transporté dans l’univers du peintre. Un monde dans lequel il souhaitait que nous comprenions que rien ne peut jamais vraiment être connu. Magritte nous posait des questions avant même de nous demander d’adhérer à sa peinture.

NL Een surreële wereld

De werken van René Magritte lijken soms uniek en toch alledaags, om de eenvoudige reden dat we er zo vertrouwd mee zijn. In al zijn beelden – de man zonder gezicht met een bolhoed, een pijp dat geen pijp is, een groene appel die een kamer vult, een huiselijke open haard waar een trein uit komt rijden – krijgen alledaagse objecten een onverwachte draai.

Een van zijn meest tot de verbeelding sprekende schilderijen, La Trahison des Images, lijkt op een stilleven van een pijp. Het bijschrift luidt echter “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. Toen men Magritte om meer uitleg vroeg, zei hij: “Natuurlijk is het geen pijp, je kunt ze toch niet roken?” De uitspraak van een surrealist maar dan wel met een serieuzere ondertoon; de afbeelding kan nooit het object zelf zijn.

Appels keren vaak terug in de werken van Magritte, o.a. in Le Fils de l’Homme en La Chambre d’Écoute, maar hij vocht het idee dat ze symbolisch waren steevast aan. “Ik haat symbolen bijna evenveel als ik traditie haat”, liet hij in 1947 optekenen. “Symbolen, daar leer je op school over. Een surrealist zijn, zoals ik, betekent je verstand afsluiten van elke herinnering van wat het gezien heeft en voortdurend uitkijken naar wat nog nooit eerder gezien is.”

Magritte bleef voortdurend de voorwerpen die hij gebruikte door elkaar gooien. Omdat hij steeds opnieuw zijn eigen beelden herwerkte en door elkaar haalde, wist hij een heel eigen landschap te creëren. Een appel met een bolhoed in de buurt is voldoende om ons meteen mee te nemen naar zijn wereld. En toch is het een wereld waarin hij net wilde dat niets echt helemaal geweten kon zijn. Magritte vroeg ons in feite om zijn schilderkunst in vraag te stellen in plaats van ze zomaar te geloven.

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