![]() ![]() ![]() Other repetitions – of faces, types, the shuffling of things and the names we give them – seem products of genuine anxiety. He painted continually – more than 200 paintings in a few years during the late 1920s – and inevitably some of them are duds: a recycling of motifs rather than repetitions born of obsession. But Magritte can be boring, too, the surreal and uncanny becoming no more than a stock-in-trade. Magritte had real imagination, turbo-charged in flight from childhood trauma. It is also the sort of thing critics use to explain the inexplicable in an artist's work. Whether Magritte ever saw her body, or heard secondhand how she had been found, or just invented the scene (I know from experience what can go on in the mind of an adolescent who has suddenly lost his mother), the shocking image of his mother's suicide – she had tried before – became an enduring myth in his art. There is the philosopher whose phallic nose delves into the pipe he's smoking and the lovers with swaddled heads, kissing through the silk (a memory, perhaps, of the artist's mother, who drowned herself when Magritte was 14, her body bought ashore with her nightdress tangled around her head, her corpse exposed). There is, for instance, the bloodied, murdered woman in The Menaced Assassin and the corseted woman wearing the peculiar surgical mask and standing in the cupboard, in the corner of The Secret Player, with its men playing baseball and a decapitated turtle swimming through the garden. There is more to him than skies raining bowler-hatted gents over Brussels streets. It's not all giant apples filling the attic, wine bottles turning into carrots, or pictures of a pipe that is not a pipe. There is a lot of unpleasantness and goings-on of one sort or another in Magritte's art. Meanwhile, while the Magritte everyone knows remains untouchable, an influence only on advertisers, philosophers such as Michel Foucault, and essay-writing psychoanalysts keen to unravel his mysteries. The Vache paintings, long out of fashion, as well as beyond the pale, have been admired by younger artists for years. In Ellipsis, a green-headed man wearing a Magritte bowler (with an eye in its crown) has a rifle for a nose, ping-pong eyeballs and one hand that seems to be disembodied. They also allow Magritte to laugh at himself. Daft, cartoonish and lumpen, they have a particular Belgian humour. The Vache paintings erupt from Magritte's oeuvre, as they do from Tate Liverpool's exhibition, like a fart in church. ![]() They were a retort to the snooty Parisian art world and to surrealism itself, from whose ranks Magritte felt he had been excommunicated. These were a joke about the Fauve painters, who thought of themselves as "wild beasts". It was then he embarked on a kind of sickly pseudo-impressionism, with depictions of women licking and fondling themselves (these images may have owed something to Francis Picabia), followed by his repulsive and wonderfully coarse "Vache" (cow) paintings. Sometimes something unexpected – even for a surrealist – slipped out, particularly during and just after the war. Magritte's best disguise was being himself. After the second world war he joined the Belgian communist party. In fact he was always a political rebel, an anti-fascist (and there were plenty of fascists about in Belgium, even before the war). His decision to paint in an utterly conventional, inexpressive, even illustrational manner was as conscious and deliberate as his dress and habits: the bowler hat, the overcoat, his affectation of the suburban lifestyle of the French-speaking Belgian petit bourgeois. ![]() Magritte is asking us not what is in the sky, but what unseen thing is impending. One painting of an inoffensive sky is called The Curse. With Magritte, even the bland Belgian sky becomes something other: a sky dreaming of itself in the plainest blue, in his favourite greys and white. The lamps are lit in the darkened suburbs, but there is broad daylight in the sky above. Sometimes in Magritte it is hard to tell. It must be lunchtime, unless it's gone midnight. It records and describes, whether it is a windowsill, a view, a room and the people and things in it, a steam train emerging from a fireplace and the clock on the mantelpiece stuck at twenty to one. Magritte's paint does its job, no more, no less. ![]()
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