Like many artists of the period, René Magritte went through an existential crisis following World War 2 when he reconsidered his practice.
He’d been living in occupied Brussels and forced to paint clouds on bottles rather than canvasses which were difficult to procure.
Was Surrealism really the answer to a world in turmoil? Would the movement be stuck between the wars? What if he painted sunlit surrealism in an expressionist style and showed up his former colleagues to be crude psychologists with their poses?
Magritte’s post-war exhibition of 40 paintings, called vaches (cows), did not go down well in Paris, cartoonish grotesque figures that belied the refined beauty of his painting style and took aim at the Surrealist establishment.
These works have been included in the first major exhibition of the famous Belgian painter’s work in Australia and are attracting attention amongst the more recognisable images that are now iconic in visual culture.
“There are some aspects of his practice we made a decision to include that are often not,” curator Nick Chambers told Australian Arts Review in a behind-the-scenes interview at the launch of Magritte at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Friday 25 October.
The exhibition begins, for example, with a double-sided self-portrait in the cubist style that would not be recognisable as a Magritte, as with the sunlit almost impressionist paintings of the early ‘40s and the vache works, come to be seen as precursors to the Bad Painting of the 1980s and graffiti art.
“We began very early. I do like the first thing you see. It’s not what you’d expect. We wanted to tell the whole arc,” said Chambers.
Despite this small frisson in the world of curation, there is no denying that André Breton’s surrealist manifesto in 1924 was a crucial point in Magritte’s career. He moved to Paris to be close to his artistic mentors but even then he was critical of the group’s ideas of the subconscious and psyche. It didn’t help that he lived on the outskirts of the city, 20 kilometres from Montmartre.
His paintings were conceptual, says Chambers, rather than psychological. He was more interested in depicting the mystery of objects of everyday life. He didn’t think of them as paintings but representations of objects in oil.
That perceived difference led to the beginning of Magritte’s most successful artistic period when he moved back to Brussels in the 1930s and turned his mind to the underlying poetics of the everyday. He wanted to paint “visual thoughts” using words and recognisable images.
A tree could be called a leaf in his imagination, a cloud a recipient of rain, a friend a classical beauty lit up by the colour blue. He took great trouble with his titles. The cloud painting was called The song of the storm. He also wrote blurbs.
“Colour appears as an element of thought,” he wrote about Black Magic in 1934. “A thought is made up of a woman’s body which is the same colour as the sky. You can also like the colour of the sky for itself.”
Chambers has organised the exhibition of more than 100 works chronologically, bringing all six chapters of Magritte’s life to the Australian stage to coincide almost to the day with the centenary of the Breton moment.
Magritte’s images may be the stuff of art history, the apple that fills a living room, the man in the bowler hat, the floating pipe, the lovers with their heads in bags, but apparently we’re virtually the last country to see them, according to Charly Herscovici of the Magritte Foundation in Brussels, who knows the provenance of every painting and was in Sydney for the launch.
“You’re the last country where Magritte hasn’t been analysed to such a degree,” he said. “You’ve been able to re-unite many works.”
The last painting in the show is The childhood of Icarus, painted in 1960, and it has not been shown since an exhibition at MOMA in New York in the 1960s because the owner refused to lend it.
The painting attracted the attention of Michael Brand, director of the Gallery of NSW and the proud visitors from Brussels. It depicts two paintings, one of clouds and the other of a building, plus a horse inside a garden pavilion.
“I love the way Magritte sums up the cityscape in the two paintings resting against the wall,” said Brand.
Magritte
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road, The Domain (Sydney)
Exhibition continues to 9 February 2025
Entry fees apply
For more information, visit: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au for details.
Images: Duane Michals, Magritte tipping hat, 1965 © Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York | AGNSW Curator Nick Chambers at the Media Preview of Magritte – photo by Rhonda Dedge | René Magritte, Self-portrait (recto); Woman playing piano (Georgette plays piano) (verso) (Autoportrait (recto); Femme au piano (Georgette au piano) (verso))’ 1923, 1921, Collection Sisters ‘L’ © Copyright Agency, Sydney 2024, photo © Ludion Image Bank | Rene Magritte, The childhood of Icarus, 1960, installation view at Art Gallery of New South Wales – photo by Rhonda Dredge
Words: Rhonda Dredge