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The Enigma of Poetry
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Rene Magritte
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Artistic life is not possible in
Charleroi. That was the case in 1916, and nothing has changed in this
respect down to the present day. Creative figures are confronted with
the choice between omnipresent indifference and intellectual
stagnation on the one hand, or the difficulties of exile on the other.
Magritte chose to move to
Brussels, enrolling at the Academie des Beaux-Arts, where he
unenthusiastically and irregularly attended courses on literature
given by Georges Van Eckhoud and on painting by Constant Montald, the
Symbolist. The latter was also the teacher of Paul Delvaux and Andre
Masson, the young Frenchman whose precocious talent had resulted in
his being admitted to the courses from the age of thirteen.
Masson had already left by the time Magritte arrived in the Belgian
capital, experiencing the indescribable horror of war as an infantry
soldier right at the front. Neither Kubrick's Paths of Glory,
nor Celine's Journey to the End of Night, nor even Ernst
Junger's The Storm of Steel come near to portraying the
military horror of which Masson spoke and which remained a harrowing
memory for him his whole life long. The author had numerous
discussions with him, in which Masson spoke of Heidegger's
considerations regarding Sartre's Being and Nothingness ("he's
put in too much of the Nothingness"), as well as of the German
thinker's view that he had discovered and come to an understanding of
painting "too late". In the course of these conversations, Masson
inevitably came to speak of the "cleansing of the trenches", that
moment in which Frenchman shot at Frenchman, German at German, so that
the lines might be "set up again" in order that the command to launch
an assault issued the following day could be executed with the minimum
of complications.
Magritte, who - unlike Max Ernst and others - always shared the
utmost admiration felt by Masson for the author of "Being and Time",
had no first-hand experience of the horrors of trench warfare. What he
did know, however, was deprivation and constraint, that loathing of
the gulf fundamentally separating artistic doctrine from the
requirements and mysteries of poetry. He consoled himself about such
defects through reading, for example "Fantomas", the figure mentioned
earlier, to whom he remained loyal all his life, but especially the
works of Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom he paid ardent homage in
several versions of "Treasure Island". When leaves are transformed
into birds, their stalks into perches, then one ceases to be amazed at
anything any more. Such a metamorphosis of flora to take on the form
of fauna occurs in The Companions of Fear and
various other works. Stevenson alternates in a highly artistic manner
between realism and romanticism, strict description and the wonderful:
Magritte, similarly, abandons and calls into question the firm basis of common perception through the unexpected
manifestation of the unreal. What he was seeking, stimulated by his
reading of Stevenson but as yet without any firm direction, was
concerned less with the relationship of form and colour, or other
questions affecting the form of pictorial composition than with the
concept of visible reality and its inherent fragility.
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The Companions of Fear
1942
A further variant of Magrittc's leaf-birds, here owls - thus definitely nocturnal animals.
The plant-creatures appear to be growing out of the rock, like some
living - albeit frozen -
monument or memorial, watching over the
expanse of a bleak mountainous landscape.
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The Natural Graces
1967
The bronze sculpture by Berrocal
takes up the "Treasure Island" theme.
Robert Louis Stevenson
understood how to allow that which arouses wonder to look out from a
realistic description.
These magnificent leaf-birds without branches
or trees are dedicated to him.
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La isla del tesoro
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It is not only to Stevenson that Magritte makes reference in his
pictures. Mention should be made of Hegel as regards In Praise of
Dialectics, Baudelaire in connection with Flowers
of Evil and The Giantess, as well
as Verlaine, Heidegger and Lautreamont. More than any other writer or
philosopher cited here, however, it was without doubt Edgar Allan Рое
who exercised the most powerful and lasting influence upon Magritte's
thinking and on his work as a whole.
Take, for example, the well-known story "The Purloined Letter". A
minister who enjoys the confidence of the royal couple observes the
Queen trying - successfully - to conceal a letter from her august
spouse. Before the Queen's eyes, the minister steals the letter,
substituting another for it. The Queen has no choice but to remain
silent; any protest at the theft would inevitably bring with it the
disclosure of the very piece of evidence which she is seeking to keep secret. In
order to extricate herself from this dependence, the Queen instructs
the Prefect of Police to recover the stolen letter, taking care to
describe to him the seal of red wax with which it was closed. The poor
official sets to work, blindly and without further thought, yet all
his investigations come to naught. In contrast, Dupin, whom he has
told of his misfortune, strikes it lucky, immediately espying the
letter in the minister's cabinet. On a second visit to the cabinet, he
sees no more than the reverse of the letter, crumpled and closed with
a black seal. He nevertheless manages to recover it by means of a
clever tactic: he arranges for a shot to be fired outside in the
street, and when the minister opens the window to see what has
happened, the cunning Dupin seizes the letter, conjurer-like,
substituting another letter for it, in which is written -in Dupin's
own handwriting, with which the minister is familiar -some lines by
Crebillon the Older: "... such a sinister plan, if unworthy of Atreus,
is worthy of Thyestes."
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In
Praise of Dialectics
1936
"An interior with no exterior could itself hardly constitute an
interior." G. F. Hegel
Magritte's most frequent concern
in selecting his motifs is the inversion or fusing of interior and
exterior views,
or of opposites or extreme positions, to put it in more general terms.
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Flowers of Evil
1946
''It was the unexpected picture
of a statue of flesh and blood, of a woman holding a rose of flesh in
her hand.
I saw the sea behind her through two red curtains.
The
title, 'Flowers of Evil", complements the picture like a name
that
refers to its object without cither illustrating or explaining it." Rene Magritte
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The Giantess
1929-30
Baudelaire's poem - it also exists in other versions to the one
which served Magritte as inspiration -
describes the wonderful and
sensuous powers of poetry. It is precisely that which the artist is
seeking to render here in pictorial form.
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Georgette
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The letter, the written word, which has been stolen here, alters
its meaning upon changing owner, since the new owner, the
communication falling into his possession, himself becomes one
possessed. What in the Queen's hands is a declaration of love proving
her infidelity becomes in those of the minister a means of blackmail,
albeit one which turns out to be unusable, since it calls into question the very unity between
King and Queen from which he, the minister, draws his entire power.
The letter in his hand simultaneously provides evidence of the
disorder which it is his job to prevent; he cannot restore order
without doing himself harm. Dupin, in stealing back the letter,
reveals the conceited, narcissistic superiority of the minister to be
no more than illusion: all that is lacking is that the latter,
following the example of Thyestes, should devour his own children.
Dupin sells the letter to the Prefect of Police, who, for his part has
seen nothing and understood less. The Prefect's mistake lay in
searching for the real letter, rather than for its sense, which is
modified every time the letter changes owners or external appearance.
This story by Edgar Allan Рое, in which the actors are divided into
observers of action and observers of reflection, reads like an
introduction to the art of Magritte. It is not sufficient, upon
looking at his pictures, to study what can be seen, to check
identities; rather, it is necessary to reflect upon what one sees, to
imagine it.
It is only through such a meditative attitude that the observer can
gain access to Magritte's subtle game of enigmas. This does not mean,
however, that it is possible to grasp this mystery as one would a
possession. Reflection merely enables one to sense the mystery; it
does not offer any concept, any formula, any key. Patrick Waldberg has
rightly remarked that one could speak here of a "key of ashes", one
which opens up nothing and fits no lock. The thoughts which become
visible in Magritte's pictures lock up their secret as soon as the
observer believes that he has completely plumbed the depths of their
meaning. The images are poetic through and through.
The Domain of Arnheim, a principal work which
exists in different versions on canvas and in gouache, emphasizes in
another way the unreserved admiration which Magritte evinced for Edgar
Allan Рое. The artist borrowed the title from Рое, depicting a
mountain with the form of an eagle, while two bird's eggs in the
foreground refer to the lightness of poetry, to the affinity of the latter's nature to that
of air. In so doing, he was establishing a lasting monument to his
greatest source of inspiration.
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The Domain of Arnheim
1938
The story of "The Domain of Arnheim", by Edgar Allan Рое, the
American writer,
contains some passages with descriptions of
landscapes and mountain ranges.
Рое, renowned for his stories dealing
with "that which is uncanny, gruesome, supernatural, in oppressive
suspense",
writes in this work: "... no such combination of scenery
exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce."
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La llamada de las cimas
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La primavera
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The Domain of Arnheim
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In addition to what he read, the significance of which has often
been underestimated, Magritte was also inspired by contacts and
acquaintances in Brussels, which were calculated to intensify both his
hatred of the established order and his passion for the poetic. The
first of these acquaintances was Pierre Bourgeois, together with whom
Magritte had done his military service. Bourgeois introduced Magritte
to the Futurists, whom he joined for a few years, albeit in a highly
unorthodox manner. He was far more inspired by their eroticism than by
their belief in progress and the grandiose promises that technology
held out for the future. It was for this reason that the poets Edouard
Mesens and Marcel Lecomte were able to so decisively support Magritte
in the initial years of his development. Mesens, the piano teacher of
Magritte's brother Paul, already held the artist's work in some esteem
at an early stage, and arranged for him to have a considerable number
of stimulating contacts with the Dadaist circle. He also provided him
with financial assistance by purchasing his pictures, becoming
Magritte's London agent at the beginning of the 1930s, supported by
Penrose. Lecomte likewise felt an allegiance to Dada, for example with
Clement Pensaers, who produced strange little pamphlets with such
titles as "Bar Nicanor" or "Le pan pan au cul du nu negre". Magritte,
discouraged by his first financial setbacks, had just commenced
working as a textile pattern designer in a wallpaper factory - together,
incidentally, with Victor Servranckx, the Cubist painter - when he met
Lecomte again. Lecomte showed him the picture of a painting by de
Chirico, entitled Song of Love. The painter was
later to write: "That was one of the most moving moments in my life;
for the first time, my eyes saw thought."
It is astonishing that Max Ernst was gripped by a similar feeling
in Munich in 1919, as was Tanguy in 1923, who even jumped out of a
moving bus in order to admire a work by the master of enigma. And it
was also de Chirico, whom Andre Masson held to be "one of the greatest
painters in the whole world", who would inspire and enthuse the other
important representative of Belgian Surrealism, namely Paul Delvaux,
born in Huy in 1897 and also a Walloon. In fact, Magritte did not
regard Delvaux especially highly, calling him "Monsieur Delvache" (Mr.
Delcow), who "has once again done something or other". There was much
to separate these two great painters from each other, for example
their reading matter (Delvaux preferred the powers of imagination of
Jules Verne, Magritte the poetic austerity of Edgar Allan Рое); the
principal difference, however, lay in their respective manners of
painting. Delvaux was a "retinien", a "retina-cretina"; he loved
beautiful materials and simple visions, appealed to the emotions and
prompted dreams rather than reflection. He was from a well-to-do
family, and therefore never had the material worries of Magritte, the
rebel; he was a painter of the grey subject-matter, a child more of
metaphysics than of the seductive sweetness of the imagination.
Magritte did not like Delvaux' populist art, but was nonetheless
capable of expressing the admiration due his inspired countryman, who,
moreover, had been a great source of inspiration for him, as had once
de Chirico. Divergences in mentality and temperament aside, the
Surrealists considered that they owed an extraordinary debt to the
Italian master of the metaphysical.
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La llave de los campos
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The Forest
1926
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1922 was the year in which Magritte married Georgette, the woman of
his life; it was also in this year that he made his most far-reaching
and most inspiring discovery of the visible, one which without doubt
surpassed both the Blind House (1853) by Degouve de Nuncques,
the source of The Empire of Lights, and Max Ernst's
overwhelming collages, for which Magritte had always felt great
admiration. In addition to E. L. T. Mesens and Marcel Lecomte, Camille
Goemans was also of great importance for the painter, who settled in
Paris in 1927. In October of that same year, the Magrittes went to
Perreux-sur-Marne. Nor should Andre Souris, Van Bruaene and - in
particular - Paul Nouge be left out, the latter a man of letters whom
Magritte perhaps admired as deeply as he did Stevenson and Рое, not
forgetting Mallarme. The best commentary on the picture The Blank
Page, in which the moon is visible in front of,
rather than behind, a curtain of leaves, may be found in "Brise
marine", while the flower that is "present in every bouquet", formed
purely of words found by poetry, surely receives its finest hymn of
praise in the thoughts behind such works as The Ready-Made Bouquet or
The Tomb of the Wrestlers. For
reasons unknown to us, Paul Nouge fell out with Magritte to such an
extent that he advised Max Loreau, the philosopher, against ever
visiting him, and always replied to every one of Patrick Waldberg's
questions: "The dear fellow no longer interests me." Nouge nonetheless
was later to write, in "Les Images defendues", one of the most
heartfelt homages ever dedicated to Magritte: "A bell, a forest, a
woman's torso, a piece of sky. A curtain, a hand, a mountain, in the midst of the silence of proclamation. And
a mysterious wind is getting up; the experiment is about to begin."
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The Blank Page
1967
Further homage to Mallarme, who
meditated upon the impossibility of handwriting upon a blank page.
In
this picture, the moon is rising in an impossible constellation - it
is located in front of, and not under or behind, the leaves.
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The Ready-Made Bouquet
1956
For a time, Magritte enjoyed
combining motifs from his own repertoire with those from art history:
so here, where we see the rear view of his man in a bowler hat
together with Botticelli's famous Flora from The Primavera.
The combination has an effect that is equally unfamiliar and
mysterious,
a further example of Magritte's poetic and surreal
intentions in his art.
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The Tomb of the Wrestlers
1961
"A rose is a rose is a
rose..." Gertrude Stein's famous observation could be taken as
commentary on this picture.
The overdimensional, blossoming red rose
reveals characteristics of a pronouncedly bodily nature;
it
accordingly possesses an aura that is almost erotic.
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It was also through Paul Nouge that Louis Scutenaire met Magritte.
This encounter occurred in 1926, in "Cirio", a Brussels cafe, which
has remained unchanged down to the present day. Scutenaire's
"Inscriptions", published in Paris in 1945, contains a sentence on
Magritte which precisely sums up the latter's singular genius: "He
made use of his prison in order that he might escape." There exists no
apter commentary on Beautiful World. The picture
demonstrates how the painter employs what is visible as a curtain, as
a means of concealment, making use of this concealment to prepare a
trap for it by compelling it to reveal itself. The same obsession may
be observed in Transfer, a work stolen from Charm
Perelman, the philosopher, shortly before his death, to appear again
later in London. Like Alphonse de Woulhens, this specialist in
rhetoric and argumentation was very well known to Magritte, who also
read Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault, Husserl, Nietzsche and Plato. The
artist's reading matter further included "The Songs of Maldoror" by
Lautreatreamont, published in Belgium in 1870 but not until 1885 in Paris
(by Huysmans and Leon Bloy), Iwan Gilkin deciding only now to present
to the French the poet who had sent Max Waller, Camille Lemonnier,
Rodenbach, and all the Symbolists of the "La Jeune Belgique" group
into raptures. There can be no doubt that Magritte's illustrations to
"The Songs of Maldoror' belong to the finest examples of a genre in
which the Surrealists generally shone.
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Beautiful World
1962
"I could see the world, as if I had a curtain in front of my eyes." Rene Magritte
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La Gioconda
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Transfer
1966
The left-hand silhouette appears to have been cut out of the folds
of the curtain, as sand and sea are rendered visible.
This is
incorrect, however; the cutout is not identical.
It is all merely
painting, demonstrating to us that what we see, from which painting
selects a part,
consists of a close network of coverings-up that are
endless in number.
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Duane Michals
Rene Magritte, double portrait
1965
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Since 1926 and his picture The Lost Jockey,
Magritte had conceived of himself as a Surrealist; inevitably,
therefore, he was tempted by the Parisian adventure. He accordingly
went to further the respect accorded the foreign painters, who were
bestowing such splendour upon a movement which was in fact so
"Parisian" in nature. It was during these years, between 1927 and
1930, that his deep friendship with Max Ernst, Dali and - especially -
Paul Eluard developed. After growing up in the Belgian country,
serious, profound, frail socially but stable intellectually, easily
hurt but basically unshakeable, Magritte had decided to live in a
suburb of Paris. However, his unassuming origins and fear of failure
did not fit in well with the lavish and expensive Parisian lifestyle.
He accordingly returned to Brussels with his wife in 1930, where he
found new friends, among them Harry Torczyner, a lawyer from Antwerp
living today in New York, and Marcel Marie'n. However, Magritte was
later to break with the latter, after Marien had had a leaflet in the
form of a bank note depicting Magritte distributed at the official
opening of The Enchanted Realm fresco,
intending in this way to denounce the petty-bourgeois nature of his
friend, who had been granted this late -if important - success.
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Carte Blanche
1965
"Visible things can be invisible. If somebody rides a horse through
a wood,
at first one sees them, and then not, yet one knows that they
are there.
In Carte Blanche, the rider is hiding the trees, and
the trees are hiding her.
However, our powers of thought grasp both
the visible and the invisible -
and I make use of painting to render
thoughts visible." Rene Magritte
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Eternidad
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The Window
1925
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El nacimiento del idolo
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The Difficult
Crossing
1926
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Left Behind by the Shadow
1926
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Magritte twice joined the Communist Party in the years prior to the
Second World War, in 1932 and 1936; despite his socialist
inclinations, however, realism was not for him, and doctrinaire
attitudes put him off again and again. He spent the war years in
Brussels, constantly afraid of arbitrary raids and attacks upon his
"degenerate" art. This presumably constitutes a further reason why he
felt the need after 1945 to change his style of painting, now creating
pictures in the style of Renoir, cheerful and ironic works. A series
of crude, coarse pictures followed, described by his friends as "vache" (literally, "cowlike", meaning "crude",
"unfashionable"). Jean Dubuffet would certainly have approved of this
style: one can hardly deny the affinity that his Bird-eaters
share with the savage wildness of such a work as Pleasure. Yet neither the sensual gracefulness of a Renoir nor the
coarseness of a Jean Dubuffet would ultimately provide Magritte with a
path that he could take. For this reason, he soon returned to his old
style, which had experienced enrichment through refined shades of blue
and a painting technique that was more flowing, more sensuous. Success
gradually arrived, thanks to Iolas, his agent, and to America. Despite
all the disagreements which they had gone through earlier, Breton
opened his American exhibition in 1964 with words which have stuck in
Patrick Waldberg's memory: "Everything that Magritte has done
represents the culmination of that which Apollinaire once described as
'true common sense' - that is, that of the great poets."
Magritte disproved the legend of the exceptional longevity granted
painters, dying of cancer at the age of 69.
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Illustrations for
"Les necessites de la vie" (The Necessities of Life) by Paul Eluard
1945
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