Between 1926 and 1938 René Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967) developed key strategies and techniques to defamiliarize the familiar—to make, in his words, “everyday objects shriek aloud.” During this period of intense innovation he was closely aligned with the Surrealist movement, and his work of these years constituted an important new approach to Surrealist art.

This exhibition begins with paintings and collages Magritte created in Brussels in 1926 and 1927, in anticipation of and immediately following his solo exhibition at the Galerie Le Centaure—the exhibition that launched his career as Belgium’s leading, indeed only, Surrealist painter—and then follows him to Paris, where he lived from 1927 to 1930, to be closer to the movement’s center. It concludes in 1938, the year he delivered “La Ligne de vie” (“Lifeline”), an autobiographical lecture that provided an account of his career as a Surrealist.

Like the other artists and poets associated with the Surrealist movement, Magritte sought to overthrow what he saw as the oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society. His art during these essential years is at times violent, frequently disturbing, and filled with discontinuities. He consistently interrogated conventions of language and visual representation, using methods that included the misnaming of objects, doubling and repetition, mirroring and concealment, and the depiction of visions seen in half-waking states—all of them devices that cast doubt on the nature of appearances, both in the paintings and in reality itself. The persistent tension Magritte maintained during these years between nature and artifice, truth and fiction, reality and surreality is one of the profound achievements of his art.

This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, The Menil Collection, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

The exhibition at MoMA is organized by Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Danielle Johnson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.



Bank of America is the National Sponsor of Magritte: Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938.

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MoMA

Curatorial Direction and Text
Department of Painting and Sculpture
Anne Umland
Danielle Johnson
Janet Yoon
Lee Hallman
Jessica Womack

Design Management
Department of Digital Media
Allegra Burnette, Creative Director

Project Management
Chiara Bernasconi, Project Manager
David Hart, Media Producer

Editorial
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Jason Persse, Editorial Manager

Major support for the MoMA
presentation is provided by the American Friends of Magritte, Inc., and by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
Additional funding is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Support for the accompanying publication is provided by Charly Herscovici.

Special thanks to conservators Anny Aviram, Cindy Albertson, Jim Coddington, Michael Duffy (The Museum of Modern Art), Allison Langley (The Art Institute of Chicago), Brad Epley, Katrina Bartlett (The Menil Collection).

Unless otherwise noted, all images of and by René Magritte © Charly Herscovici – ADAGP – ARS, 2013

INTO
THE
VOID

Magritte’s first solo exhibition, held at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels in 1927, included 12 papiers collés, or collages. Such works were made of printed paper along with watercolor, pencil, and charcoal, juxtaposing mass-produced imagery with the handmade. Most of the printed paper is sheet music, cut from the score of a 1907 English operetta, The Girls of Gottenberg, by George Grossmith, Jr., and L. E. Berman. These early collages include what would become the artist’s signature motifs: bowler hats, theater curtains, mysterious landscapes, and bilboquets (a term that refers to a toy but in Magritte's work evokes many other objects). Among them Le Jockey perdu (The Lost Jockey) has a singular status: In September 1926 the poet Camille Goemans, Magritte’s friend (and later his dealer), compared the figure of the mounted jockey “hurtling recklessly into the void” to the artist himself.

“I like a lot Le Jockey perdu in the world of bowling pins. [...] The papiers collés go back to outdated processes: music paper cut in the form of pins, fashion plates headless and without hands arranged on abstract surfaces.” – Armand Eggermont, Review of Exposition Magritte, Galerie Le Centaure, 1927, in Le Thyrse, May 8, 1927, p. 214

OMNIPOTENCE
OF THE DREAM

In 1924 André Breton, a poet and the leader of the Surrealist group, wrote that the movement was based in the “omnipotence of the dream.” This is a realm Magritte explored to deliberately mysterious effect in this dramatically lit scene. A motionless, bowler-hatted figure with closed eyes stands upon a beachlike platform strewn with puffy, oddly earthbound clouds. Behind him is another man, his back to us, apparently identically dressed. The pair appear oblivious to the disturbing and erotically suggestive form, half-human and half-fur, that intrudes at the lower right, a hybrid creature that is reminiscent of the commercial catalog illustrations that Magritte produced in 1926 and 1927 for the Brussels furrier La Maison Samuel. Paintings like L’Assassin menacé and Le Sens de la nuit mark the first appearance in his art of the bowler-hatted man, a figure Magritte would later adopt as a signature motif and alter ego.

"In this room, amidst a minimal litter of underclothing, there is an almost naked woman, a corspe of rare perversity. Were it not for this dead woman, nothing could disturb so peaceful an interior. Everything in it is neat and tranquil: the spotless floor, the uncluttered table, a tall pedestal table of dark wood. And with the scarf draped softly over the neck, over the shoulder, over the astonishing wound, it would require a certain effort to imagine a severed head. On the table—fittingly enough—a meditative cat observes the corpse. Turning his back on the dead woman, a young man of great beauty dressed with the most restrained elegance, leaning slightly foward, leaning even so slightly over a gramophone, listens.On his lips, perhaps a smile. At his feet, a suitcase. On a chair, his hat and his overcoat. In the background, at the level of the window sill, four heads stare at the murderer. In the corridor, on either side of the wide-open door, two men are approaching, unable as yet to discern the spectacle.They are ugly customers. Crouching, they hug the wall. One of them unfurls a huge net, the other brandishes a sort of club. All this will be called: 'The murderer threatened.'" – Written 1927, Published in Paul Nougé, Histoire de ne pas rire. Brussels: Les Lèvres nues, 1956.

Paul Nougé was a biochemist and the leader of the Brussels Surrealist group, and from 1924 on he and Magritte were close friends and collaborators. Magritte's portrait of Nougé is reminiscent of images made for the stereoscope, a precinematic device in which two slightly overlapping photographs are viewed side by side to create the illusion of depth. Here two seemingly identical, formally dressed men stand in front of a wall perforated by biomorphic shapes that resemble cells, partially separated by fragments of what might be a door. Commenting in 1960 on his use of the doppelgänger, Magritte remarked, "The appearance of the figure assumes its mysterious virtue when it is accompanied by its reflection.” Through the use of doubling, Magritte challenges the conventional idea that a portrait should represent a singular self or an individual. Neither image is Nougé: both are representations.

Doubling was one of Magritte’s favorite strategies for reminding us that pictures of things are not the same as the things themselves. This precisely doubled image, interrupted by three black lines, resembles a card for a stereoscopic viewer, a device that produces the illusion of three-dimensionality from two identical but slightly offset photographs. The twin figures with their stiff posture, bald heads, and round modeling recall shop-window dummies, while the jaggedly cut edges of their faces and torsos suggest a contradictory two-dimensional thinness. This image imitates the cut-and-paste technique of paper collage, and in a rare and whimsical introduction of a nonpainted element, Magritte “attached” the abstract white shapes with 12 actual snap fasteners pushed into the canvas’s surface.

This violent and erotically charged image combines the artist's enduring fascination with popular crime dramas and his more recent experiments with formal metamorphosis. Magritte confirmed that the painting represented "an attempted rape[. . .]. I have treated this subject, this terror that grips the woman, by means of a subterfuge, a reversal of the laws of space[. . .]." The bulky, sculptural bodies of the nude woman and the man who attacks her are superimposed within a single silhouette. Magritte's radical cropping of the man's body performs its own type of violence, as does the exaggerated musculature of the woman's right forearm. Firmly pressed against her attacker's shoulder, it introduces a wedge of space between what might otherwise read as flat images, collaged one upon the other, fundamentally subverting the physical rules of pictorial representation.

A man in an overcoat and fedora hat stands among a cluster of amorphous forms, each inscribed with a single word in carefully lettered script: fusil (gun), nuage (cloud), fauteuil (chair), cheval (horse), horizon (horizon). One of the first word-and-image paintings Magritte completed after moving to Paris, the work recalls one of the propositions Magritte would publish the following year in La Révolution Surrealiste: "Sometimes the names written in a picture indicate definite things and the images indefinite things. Or vice versa." Some of the ambiguous shapes occupy the physical space suggested by their inscription: nuage floats in the sky, and horizon rests at the meeting point of sky and ground. The irregular forms evoke the biomorphic motifs of his Surrealist colleagues Joan Miró and Jean Arp, but Magritte also seems to parody such types of abstraction by attaching specific words to his forms and granting them physical presence through the shadows they cast on the ground.

This image of an artist in the process of depicting a nude woman is one of Magritte's most direct interrogations of the act of painting. The female subject is clearly Magritte's wife, Georgette, and Magritte likely modeled the painter on himself. Like a sculpture, the woman seems to inhabit the same dimensional space as the painter, and yet Magritte points to the powerful artifice of his own pictorial illusionism by leaving the female figure in a partially incomplete state. The painting pays homage to his wife, even as its title invokes the impossibility of fully capturing the object of desire on a canvas surface. Tentative de l'impossible is frequently interpreted as a reimagining of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which a sculptor falls in love with his carving of an ideal woman and solicits the intercession of the goddess Venus, who brings the statue to life. Long recognized as an allegory of artistic creation, it remained a popular theme among the Surrealists for its emphasis on transformation, eros, and desire.

In this work Magritte presents the equivalent visual and verbal signs for the concept ciel (French for “sky”) in two identically shaped panels: on the left in a trompe l’oeil depiction of an atmospheric patch of blue sky, captured and brought down to earth, and on the right with the word ciel in black script, austerely flat and precise. Set in a nondescript interior with a wood-paneled wall and floor, the angular framed panels of this word-image pair recall the backs of stretched canvases leaning against a wall, yet the deep shadows they cast suggest freestanding objects, propped up by some invisible mechanism. In combination, these puzzling components probe the complex relationship between words and images, as well as the tropes and conventions of painterly representation.

Magritte was an important contributor to the final issue of the Surrealist journal La Révolution Surréaliste, which was published in December 1929. This issue opened with Surrealist leader André Breton’s “Second Manifeste du Surréalisme” (“Second Surrealist Manifesto”), which began to orient Surrealism away from the escape of rational control and toward social issues and self-observation during the artistic process. It was within this new atmosphere that Magritte’s contributions appeared, announcing his new prominence within the Surrealist movement.

One of Magritte’s contributions was a word-image essay entitled “Les Mots et les images” (“Words and Images”). This essay summed up his two years of intense exploration into how language and images function. He began his essay, “An object is not so possessed of its name that one cannot find for it another which suits it better.” Below this appears a drawing of a leaf labeled with the words “le canon” (“the canon”). This sets up the idea, developed throughout the essay, that reality as we know it is not fixed but constructed. He later explained that the pairing of words with images and the misnaming of objects were “means devised to force objects out of the ordinary, to become sensational, and so establish a profound link between consciousness and the external world.”

Magritte’s second major contribution comprised photo-booth portraits of 16 Surrealists arranged around a reproduction of Magritte’s 1929 painting La Femme cachée (The Hidden Woman). This painting depicts a nude woman with the words “je ne vois pas la…cachée dans le foret” (“I do not see the…hidden in the forest”) written above and below her. The 16 Surrealists were photographed with their eyes closed, evoking the worlds of dreams and the unconscious. Magritte is pictured on the right, in the second row from the bottom.

The two sections of this divided image juxtapose the painting’s representational tricks with the flat artificiality of icons. Below the schematic silhouettes of four common objects on the right section, a trompe l’oeil tear appears to rip through the canvas, penetrating it to reveal a black space like that of the section adjoining. The skillful naturalism of the painted tear and faux-bois edging makes a stark contrast with the abstract, indecipherable form of the tangled wire on the left and the flat, cut-out silhouettes.

"The marvelous extends insidiously to more familiar objects and here they take on a disturbing and unusual air.... "The alphabet of revelations" truly gives new meaning to things, draws attention to everyday objects so that one loses the habit of considering them, a glass, a key, and suddenly illuminating them, at the instant when one least expects it, tears them from their quotidian character and imposes them on our spirit, heavy with a mysterious weight. This with such persuasive power that we forget the names of these objects and their essence, to only see in them a new form, a form truly "strange", free from habit, whose the destination will reveal itself." – Guy Mangeot. "Après la peinture: Dalí, Max Ernst, Chirico, Picasso, René Magritte." Documents 33, no. 1, April 1933. p. 20

Le Faux miroir presents an enormous lashless eye with a luminous cloud-swept blue sky filling the iris and an opaque, dead-black disc for a pupil. The allusive title, provided by the Belgian Surrealist writer Paul Nougé, seems to insinuate limits to the authority of optical vision: a mirror provides a mechanical reflection, but the eye is selective and subjective. Magritte’s single eye functions on multiple enigmatic levels: the viewer both looks through it, as through a window, and is looked at by it, thus seeing and being seen simultaneously. The Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who owned the work from 1933 to 1936, recognized this compelling duality when he memorably described Le Faux miroir as a painting that “sees as much as it itself is seen.”

"Tell Rene Magritte that I'm delighted he wants a photograph of mine, and I await with great curiosity the drawing he is sending me. His 'eye of the sky' is hanging in my apartment, and it sees many things! For once, a picture sees as much as it is seen itself." Letter from Man Ray to E.L.T. Mesens, July 12, 1933. E.L.T. Mesens Papers, The Getty Research Institute Special Collections

L’évidence éternelle is one of three unusual multipart toiles découpés (“cut-up paintings") that Magritte created in anticipation of a one-man show at Galerie Goemans, Paris, in the spring of 1930. Magritte specifically referred to this work as an “object,” thus underscoring its unique position between painting and sculpture. It appeared in many early Surrealist exhibitions and predates the vogue for Surrealist object-making launched by Salvador Dalí’s essay, “Objets surrealists” (“Surrealist objects”) in 1931. In a simultaneous challenge and homage to the traditional artistic subject of the female nude, Magritte divides the body into five framed and isolated sections. “[Of] the woman I show only parts of the body, but situated where they should be,” he wrote. The fragmentation underscores the tendency of the human eye to focus selectively rather than comprehensively in its vision. As Paul Nougé later described: “The act of seeing is discontinuous…we see only things we are interested in seeing.”

Light, Magritte wrote in 1938, "is manifest only on condition that it is accepted by objects . . . the object illuminated itself gives life to light." The nude white torso in La Lumière des coïncidences—most likely based on a plaster model of the Venus de Milo—seems to receive the light from the candle to its right, as evidenced by the orientation of its shadows. But while the torso seems to be modeled in three dimensions, the frame and easel surrounding it suggest that it is painted: a painted depiction of a sculpture in a painting. At the same time that Magritte undermines our assumptions about the art of representation, he alludes to the history of representational art. The dark, candlelit interior recalls Baroque paintings, and the stark still life arrangement evokes a vanitas or memento mori, designed to remind us of the transience of life and its material pleasures.

"As regards light, I reflected that while it has the power to make objects visible, its existence is manifest only on condition that it is accepted by objects. But, for matter, light would be invisible. This is made obvious, I think, in 'The Light of concidence,' where an ordinary object, a female torso, is lit by a candle. In this case, it seems that the object illuminated itself gives life to light."

Le Viol, as Magritte wrote to André Breton in 1934, emerged out of his continuing desire to demonstrate affinities between related objects, proposing a startling direct visual correlation between a woman’s face and her body: “The breasts are the eyes, the nose is a navel and the vagina replaces the mouth.” The grotesque result recalls Breton’s concept of humour noir, or black comedy. Breton considered the image a key Surrealist work and reproduced it on the cover of the book Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme? (What Is Surrealism?) in 1934. When first displayed publicly in Brussels the same year, the painting was hung in a separate room behind a velvet curtain, alongside other provocative works by Salvador Dalí, Balthus, and Victor Brauner. Later, in 1943, Magritte deliberately omitted it from a monograph to avoid the scrutiny of World War II censors.

Whereas Magritte put an egg in the place of a bird in Les Affinités electives (Elective Affinities) (1932), in this work a painter conjures a bird from an egg. The artist in the painting is Magritte himself, engaged in his profession. The unframed canvas, easel, and painter's palette are rendered with convincing naturalism, but the table tilts strangely and sharply forward, putting the egg on display for the viewer. Here Magritte shows not only the physical act of painting but also his ideational process, that of associating one object (an egg on a table) with another (a bird on a canvas).

Magritte employed English text rather than his usual French for this small-scale variant of La Clef des songes, produced for his first solo exhibition in the United States, at Julian Levy Gallery in New York in 1936. This version utilizes the same didactic school-primer format of paired words and images as earlier examples, but the specific pictures and words are new. “Valise,” a word used in both English and French, is the only word that appears to designate the object with which it is paired. This reinforces the puzzlement of the other disjunctions while simultaneously estranging the expected.

A simply laid-out meal is not as simple as it seems. Each singular object is rendered with equally sharp focus and pictorial realism, yet any expectation of everyday reality is overturned, above all by the unblinking eye that stares inexplicably from a slice of ham on a plate. The Belgian Surrealist writer Louis Scutenaire described Magritte’s objects as totems, and the spare arrangement here points toward the significance of a ritual meal. The perspective of this still life tilts dramatically toward the surface of the picture plane, as if to confront or perhaps invite the viewer to join the table. After exhibiting the canvas in several international Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s, Magritte produced a life-size, three-dimensional version for a 1945 Surrealist display in Brussels.

The double or doppelgänger motif that had fascinated Magritte since the 1920s appears here in the form of a man looking at himself in a mirror that, instead of reflecting his face, shows him (and us) his back. This is one of two portraits—the other being Le Principe de plaisir (The Pleasure Principle) (1937)—commissioned by Edward James, both of which take the form of a portrait manqué, a failed or “anti” portrait in which the subject's face is hidden. Magritte achieves this enigmatic illusion with scrupulous detail, modeling the figure on a photograph he took of James with his back to the camera. The book on the mantelpiece, however—the French edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), by Edgar Allan Poe—is reflected, as expected, reversed.

“Your portrait from behind is finished, and 'The Poetic World' as well. They are just waiting to be thoroughly dry before being sent to you. I think you will very much like your portrait, which is called 'Not to Be Reproduced,' and I am eager to know how it strikes you, and Dalí as well (I suppose he is in London for some time?).” – Letter from Magritte to Edward James (May 18, 1937). Quoted in Daniel Abadie, Magritte Paris: Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, 2003, p. 250

The compartmentalized walls of this imaginary room read as both flat wallpapered panels and windows opening onto bizarrely incongruous scenes. The closely cropped images bear no discernible relation to each other, although they seem to compile of some of Magritte’s favorite motifs. The cannon—a World War I howitzer—faces suggestively in the direction of the female torso, suggesting the possibility of violently breaking out of the confined room, across the threshold to the unspecified freedom of the title. Magritte’s signature appears on the lower-right edge of the cannon, as if cast into metal during the manufacturing process. Au Seuil de la liberté is the largest of the three decorative panels Magritte painted for Edward James’s ballroom in London. James likely saw a smaller version of this image at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London before commissioning the project.

The idea of placing a painting of a piece of cheese under a glass dome came from the Belgian Surrealist poet Paul Colinet. In an annotated drawing of the proposed object, Colinet described the work as related to “the principle of the ‘beautiful captive,’ with something in addition.” Trapped under glass, the painting assumes the status of a rarified object removed from its traditional context. The title is a joking play on the “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe) inscription on La Trahison des images (1929) and a humorous reversal of that negative statement into a positive declaration: this is a piece of cheese, although of course it is not. Magritte made three versions of this painting-object, although he likely left the selection of the glass dome and pedestal for this version’s first public appearance, in the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition at the London Gallery in November 1937, to the exhibition’s organizers.

Le Chant de l’orage is the second of three paintings Magritte produced in response to what he saw as the problem of rain. In his public lecture “La Ligne de vie” (“Lifeline”), delivered in 1938, he reflected that “the problem of the rain led to a broad, rain-swept country landscape, with great clouds crawling over the ground.” In an inversion of gravity, the downpour of droplets falls onto the clouds instead of from them. After evading him for some time, this resolution appeared suddenly, “simple to an almost disconcerting degree,” as he wrote in a letter to André Breton.

Magritte’s mysterious substitution of one familiar but unexpected object for another—a train, in this case, for a stovepipe—creates a visual pun: the hearth suddenly resembles a train tunnel, and the train’s billowing smoke rises into the flue as if from a fire. The pairing of train and clock, both emblems of time, gives resonance to the poetictitle, whose literal translation is “ongoing time stabbed by a dagger.” Edward James purchased the painting in 1939, aware that Magritte had modeled the mantelpiece and mirror on those in James’s own dining room. These architectural details reappear in La Reproduction interdite (Not to Be Reproduced) (1937), one of Magritte’s portraits of James.

"I was thinking that the ideal place for 'Time Transfixed' would be at the foot of your staircase ... and in this way your visitors would be transfixed on the ground floor, and could arrive in an interesting fashion on the first floor."