The evolution of Magritte

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Stephen Bury reports on ‘Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938’, soon to leave New York for Houston and Chicago

On 20 November  1938, Magritte delivered a lecture, ‘Lifeline’, at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, where he traced his development as an artist. A set of slides for this illustrated talk survives: slide 1 is De Chirico’s Le Chant d’amour (1914), with its classical head, green ball and an outsized rubber glove, whilst a train is silhouetted against a bright blue sky. When Marcel Lecomte had shown him this as a reproduction, Magritte was moved to tears and later saw this as the moment when he could imagine a fusion of academic painting with poetry.

As New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) now possesses this painting, which formerly belonged to Nelson A. Rockefeller, it is extraordinary that the exhibition does not include this along with the Max Ernst collage from Paul Eluard’s Répetitions, which Magritte also showed in the same lecture – especially as this lecture features prominently in the public programme in a recreation by Joshua Marston.

Also absent from the exhibition, catalogue and chronologies is discussion of Magritte’s relationship with the Communist Party. He joined the Party in 1932, 1936 and again in 1945, all at its Stalinist height.  One can just about see the reluctance of James Thrall Soby to discuss this in his catalogue for the first Magritte exhibition at MoMA in December 1965.

To bring this up is not to score a cheap point against Magritte, but in order to suggest that the whole debate about what should be the art for a new socialist order – should it be Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism or Realism? – was fundamental to the discussions going on in Surrealist and other artistic circles generally. Magritte contributed to La Révolution surréaliste his ‘Words and Images’ essay – a wonderful set of manuscript pages for this from a private collection are on show – and a photomontage of Surrealist portraits from Maxine Alexandre to Albert Valentin, all with downcast eyes and surrounding a reproduction of Magritte’s The Hidden Woman.

But the same issue began with André Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in which the leader of the French Surrealists announced a change in direction from an interest in the irrational to one in the societal, the collective over the individual, and rejecting the self-absorption of the artist. This was published on 15 December 1929. The day before at a reception in his apartment, Breton had quarrelled with the Magrittes, apparently over Georgette Magritte’s wearing of a cross. ‘The breach between me and the Surrealists seems pretty definite’, wrote Magritte to the musician André Souris shortly afterwards.

This exhibition excellently brings in both Magritte’s work as a commercial illustrator and his involvement in a series of avant-garde publications – Le Centaure, Variétiés, Distances, Le Sens proper, LesMots et les images, Bulletin international du surréalisme, Minotaure and the London Gallery Bulletin. There is an interesting indeterminate crossover of the commercial and avant-garde in Magritte’s interventions in the 1928 Maison Samuel catalogue. Some of the images in these works are related to Magritte’s paintings, but the question of which came first is perhaps irrelevant, as they could have been contemporaneous.

The exhibition allows us to see the evolution of Magritte into the one we know through iconic images, and this is aided by the availability of one of the best catalogues raisonnés in existence, by David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield (1992–2012). The MoMA exhibition is not interested in Magritte’s flirtation with Cubism, Marinetti’s Futurism (1920–2), Purism and Dadaism. It focuses on Surrealism and the evolution of Magritte’s deadpan painting style and his motifs. Although the flat painting style is there in The Menaced Assassin (1927) and was perhaps reinforced after staying with Dali in Cadaqués in the summer of 1929, this style was not necessarily inevitable. The Prince of Objects (1927) has collaged bits of canvas on its surface and Magritte used collage sheet music (supposedly from the English operetta ‘The Girls of Gutenberg’ (1907). Biomorphs with Words (1928), an early work to include words (‘la pipe’), has an impasto pipe. The painted wood-grain in The Prince of Objects and in Discovery (1927) shows an interest (if a conceptual one) in Ernst’s frottage technique.

The motifs show development over time. The bilboquets (lathe-turned wooden shapes) started off horizontally orientated (as in Blue Cinema of 1925 – not in the exhibition – or in the untitled papier collé of 1926, which is in the exhibition) but they had more anthropomorphic potential vertical – as in The Lost Jockey (1926) or The Encounter (1926), where they seem to have an eye. The Key of Dreams (1927) inaugurates the motifs of frame and the use of words. A bag, knife, leaf and sponge are in four framed compartments, as if individual paintings. The words below in the style of a child’s primer – heaven, bird and table seem to have no connection with the objects depicted – only the sponge is juxtaposed with the word l’éponge. Is this Magritte’s equivalent of collage? Interestingly (and the topic of where Magritte signs his works would be fascinating), Magritte signs his name to the top right of the knife – the authors of the chapter in the catalogue, Josef Helfenstein and Clare Elliott, propose that Magritte is ‘slashing at the pictorial tradition’. A development of the frame motif is the toile découpé or cut-up painting, as in the five framed sections of a female nude, The Eternally Obvious (1930), although Magritte described this and the two other similar works, made for the abortive Galerie Goemans, Paris, exhibition in the spring of 1930, as objects.

The cancellation of that exhibition and the closing of the Galerie Goemans demonstrated the impact of the stock market crash on the art world. The Magritte’s moved back to the Brussels suburbs, Georgette got a job and Magritte set up a commercial design business in their home. In this exhibition we get to see the early Surrealist Magritte.

‘Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938’ is the first-ever retrospective exhibition of Magritte’s early Surrealist works. It also presents his commercial work and illustrations as well as interventions in books and periodicals for this period. It is curated by Anne Umland and Danielle Johnson.

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938, edited by Anne Umland, is published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013 (distributed outside the USA and Canada by Thames & Hudson), 256 pp., 225 colour illus, £45.00 US$60.00 (hardcover) US$ 50 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 87070 865 7 (hardcover).