Magritte Show
Nina Zivancevic
It is rather boring to repeat oneself or to repeat other people’s interests and comments. It is equally uninteresting to get always and exclusively involved with the tradition in art; however, when the whole town talks about a show it is impossible not to get involved in a discussion. Partly also because the work of René Magritte which, exhibited at the National Gallery Jeu de Paume, has always been an enigma even to the Surrealists themselves. My father, a Yugoslav Surrealist painted had adored him. His work was at the essence of something which came to be known as the "Surrealist spirit of the game itself." When Magritte said "that his title did not explain his painting as much as his painting did not manage to explain his title" he really meant what he said. And what he tried to say remains an enigma to all the critics and commentators of the Surrealist movement who were dazzled by Magritte’s calm metaphysics and philosophy. Each of his two hundred paintings at this show gives us that very expression of disturbing strangeness and bizzare approach to reality that made him famous in the 1920s. The painter’s biography gives us some insight into his work but this insight is not sufficient enough for us to understand the work as such. Magritte was born in Belgium in 1928. At an early age he suffered the suicide of his mother who got drowned near the Sambre and was found dead , her face covered with a fabric of her nightgown. The motive of the veiled female will inhabit many of his paintings like The invention of life where we find a shadow of a female figure covered by a white sheet. He was later encouraged by his father to attend the Art Academy of Bruxelles where he learnt how to treat the real themes and reality as such only to be able to deconstruct them better later on. Young Magritte freed himself from some tedious painterly techinques and launched himself into the universe of the experimental. If he was ever interested in Cubism and Futurism it was for the sake of De Chirico’s paintings which he tried to master in his flight into the imagination. Like De Chirico, Magritte decided to turn the everyday images upside down. He would call a stain in black ink placed in front of a closed door the "School Exit." He definitely tried to offend good middle-class taste and managed in his attempts. At that time, one could not call him a real Surrealist yet. However, after a short trip to Paris, where he met with Eluard, Miro and Dali, he accepted the Surrealists’ way of thinking, had a clash with Andre Breton and finally decided to return to his native country where he remanined a solitary figure. Until the end of his life Magritte tried to keep a singular, solitary vision of his art. One thing he had learnt from the Surrealists though, that the borders of reality were there only to be crossed over even if the crossing was forbidden by some established laws. In his famous painting The forbidden reproduction we find a man’s back facing a mirror in a rather classical setting. The reflection of the man or rather of his own back is the one that defies logic–we are at home with Magritte here and there’s no one to present us with the ambiguity of things better than he does in this very painting.
Despite the fact that Magritte was an unusual painter, his work has found numerous replicas mainly on contemporary plates and Tshirts that one often buys in the bookstores of all major museums worldwide. This interesting retrospective brings us back most of these well-known paintings and images, but aside from these it has a few nice surprises in stock too. Here we find a couple of works that have been almost hidden to us for years, dwelling forgotten in some small Belgium museums not even indicated on the local guide maps. This show also brings out something else readily forgotten when it comes to reviewing Magritte and his shows and that is his distinct sense of humor, an irony which does not strike us often when we come to think of his work. I went there with my eight year old son who usually does not enjoy the art of our major contemporary artists: the kid was laughing with Magritte all the time at the same time telling me "Mom, but these paintings are so clear, so clear and unlike the others!." Perhaps Magritte has all these hidden messages saved for all sorts of generations, those of the past and those of the future. One of the qualities of this show is that it tries to bring many of the qualities of his rich work and show them under a different light.
