René Magritte: What You See, What You Don’t

The Return

The Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte first caught my attention some forty years ago when I saw one of his paintings, Time Transfixed, the apparently puzzling scene of a locomotive steaming out of a fireplace into an empty room.

Many of his paintings are equally puzzling at first glance, or at many more glances. A visit last winter to the Magritte Museum in Brussels helped me begin a new understanding of the puzzling painter.

In the case of Time Transfixed, which is at the Art Institute in Chicago, Magritte actually offers some clue: he “decided to paint the image of a locomotive . . . In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery, the image of a dining room fireplace, was joined.”

In nearly every Magritte painting, we need to look for the join between the very real world and the seemingly not possible one—and also to see what is not there, in this case the reflection of the right-hand candlestick.

Before he began expressing these disconnects in painting, he published a sketch page in the journal La révolution surréaliste, pointing out many conflicts between words and images, including “An object is not so attached to its name that one cannot find another that suits it better.” He illustrates that with a leaf labeled as a cannon, but it’s not so far from that to his most famous image, of which he made many versions… the pipe clearly labeled “This is not a pipe.”

Many of his paintings play with the relation between physical objects or actors and their representation: “Now, the visible contours of objects in reality touch each other as if they formed a mosaic.”

“Vague figures have a meaning as necessary, as perfect, as precise ones.”

“An object made supposes that there are others behind it.”

By now, one of the slogans begins to make more sense, and less: “Everything tends to suggest that there is little relationship between an object and what it represents.” And yet, everything depicted has a meaning, so perhaps the question is about ‘what it represents.’ It might be fair to say that Magritte is not painting an imaginary world so much as he is persuading us that the world is not what we imagine it to be.

You’ll have noticed by now that Magritte employed a variety of styles while staying close to his intentions and ideas. There are crayon and chalk sketches, carefully-composed and precise oils and more. Over the years, his styles changed, though he often went back to themes or materials used before; near the end of his career he even entered what some have called his ‘stone age.’

One great advantage of a museum devoted to a single artist is the opportunity to see a wide variety of work and style, and to learn more about the artist himself. In Magritte’s case, the museum that bears his name is both administratively and physically part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, in a building where the first King of Belgium was crowned in 1831. The Magritte Museum opened in 2009. Much of the original collection was given by his widow, Georgette.

Magritte, like Hopper and others, began his career as an illustrator for advertising agencies.

Aside from the drawing of Georgette, the museum displays a few more portraits, including two caricatures of Erich von Stroheim, done for an event in 1955, the 30th anniversary of von Stroheim’s film of The Merry Widow, his only commercially successful film (note for you TCM viewers…)

A pair of double portraits, each with a ‘window on the world’ from within stone walls—although, in the portrait of Baron Joseph Van Der Elst and his wife, the wife is placed outside the wall. Van Elst was a Belgian diplomat, art collector and scholar.

A tragedy lies behind the portraits of Bazou and Pilette Spaak and their mother Suzanne, daughter of a prosperous banker, wife of a playwright and brother-in-law of Paul-Henri Spaak, later prime minister of Belgium and Secretary General of NATO. Her husband had bought Magritte paintings, and in 1936 he painted her and the children.

During World War II, Suzanne Spaak was an active member of the French Resistance, and part of the Red Orchestra espionage ring that infiltrated German intelligence agencies. She was executed by the Nazis days before the liberation of Paris.

A few more favorites from the museum’s collections…

In very bright color…

A bit more subdued…

And finally, one of the best-known scenes—The Empire of Lights, with its dark streetscape and brilliant sky. Magritte painted it 27 times from the 1940s to the 1960s. There are 17 oils and 10 gouaches, each with subtle differences, but all reminding us again: These are not images of an imaginary world; they are reminders that the world we see is not what we imagine it is.