René Magritte

It's raining men ("Golconde", 1953)

(New South Wales Art Gallery, 18 November 2024)

René Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was one of the leading Surrealists, along with Chirico, Meret Oppenheim, and (of course) Dali, who tried to represent the “elusive dream of a private person to which we hold no key.” Magritte’s entire oeuvre “is not copying reality but rather creating a new reality, much as we do in our dreams…painted with meticulous accuracy and exhibited with puzzling titles, [which] are memorable precisely because they are inexplicable.”*

Magritte at the NSW Art Gallery in Sydney is described by the curator as “an in-depth retrospective featuring more than 100 works, most of which have never before been seen in Australia. It journeys from the artist’s first avant-garde explorations and commercial works in the 1920s, to his groundbreaking contributions to surrealism, his surprising provocations of the 1940s, and the renowned paintings of his final years, before his death in 1967.” It was organised with cooperation of the Magritte Foundation, Brussels and the Menil Collection, Houston. The exhibition is on until 9 February 2025 and is well worth $30 per ticket.

“Thus the play between image and reality suggests that the real world is only a construction of the mind.”**

“The first characteristic of Magritte’s work is dread – sometimes at the harsh, schematic level of the silent movies he doted on…the formal solemnity with which Magritte’s work set forth its paradoxes…can produce a gaping sense of erotic alienation, as with The Lovers, 1928, whose two anonymous but sibling-like heads are trying to kiss one another through their integuments of grey cloth.”**

“He lived in respectable Brussels, and stayed married to the same woman, Georgette Berger, till his death; by the standards of the Paris art world in the thirties, he might as well have been a grocer. Yet this stolid enchanter possessed one of the most remarkable imaginations of the twentieth century.” **

“His images were stories first, paintings second, but the paintings were not slices of life or historical scenes. They were snapshots of the impossible…vignettes of language and reality locked in mutual cancellation. As a master of puzzle-painting, Magritte had no equal, and his influence on the formation of images – and on how people interpret them – has been very wide.”**

 

“…if his art had confined itself to the administration of shock, it would have been as short-lived as any other Surrealist ephemera. But his concerns lay deeper. They were with language itself, transposed into pictorial representation. Magritte was obsessed by the hold that language has on what it describes…the extreme tenuousness of signs.”** In fact, one could say that our contemporary world, with its counterfactual social mores and stances, is a kind of toxic, unwelcome, uninvited homage to Magritte.

[* E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art] [** Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New”]