Master of mystery

Different Strokes

For nearly two and half decades from 1930, Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte and his wife Georgette Berger lived in a modest residence located in a quiet suburb in Brussels.

It was in this house - rue Esseghem 135 - that Magritte experienced the most creative period of his life. He never had a studio as such, but painted in the dining and living rooms of his home where he produced nearly half of all his paintings. It was but natural that several elements of the house got featured in his famous paintings. 

The Esseghem Street home also became an epicentre for many Belgian surrealists. Magritte’s friends met here regularly and those meetings are said to have resulted in many subversive activities, books, and magazines.

After his death in 1967, the house was turned into a museum hosting a collection of documents, drawings and paintings of Magritte and other important surrealist artists like Marcel Marien (1920-93) and Rachel Baes (1912-83).

Last year – on September 24th - rue Esseghem 135 became the setting for an unusual incident.  At around 10 am, the doorbell of the museum was rung by a man who seemed to have a casual enquiry about the visiting hours. In an instant, he was to pull out a gun, and order the museum attendant and others present (including two visitors from Japan) to kneel down in the courtyard. 

Within minutes, the gunman and his friend (who had followed him) had broken up the glass plate that protected Magritte’s 1948 painting ‘Olympia’ and escaped with their prized possession said to be worth upto three million Euros. ‘Olympia’ was a celebrated painting which showed Magritte’s wife reclining in the nude with a sea shell on her belly.

Veiled characters

René François Ghislain Magritte (1898 – 1967) started to draw and paint as a very young boy. When he was 13, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. When the body was found, her dress was covering her face which made a profound impression on the young Magritte. In later years, he was to paint several veiled characters and faces obscured by cloth.

Magritte worked in a wallpaper factory, and later as a poster and advertisement designer.  His first successful surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu) was produced in 1926.  His first exhibition in 1927 at the gallery ‘Le Centaure’, Brussels was severely ridiculed by critics.  Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton (the author of The Surrealist Manifesto) and Paul Eluard, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. Magritte actively associated himself with the movement before returning to Belgium.

Over the years, Magritte’s work became well known for successfully challenging the viewers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality and compelling them to become sensitive to their surroundings. He painted many self portraits and his wife’s nude studies with stunning effect. Inverting and blending interior / exterior views of rooms, homes and landscapes he came up with magical and mysterious compositions.

Presenting ordinary objects like chairs, tables, windows, shoes, cupboards, trees, fruits, and people in strange settings and unusual spaces, he provided a new – and often, disquieting – meaning to them. It became clear that he wanted to be understood through ordinary objects and situations. The act of painting was, for him, ‘the art of putting colours side by side in such a way that their real aspect was effaced, so that familiar objects became united in a single poetically disciplined image’.

Magritte declared that his paintings were visible images which concealed nothing. “When one sees my pictures, s/he asks oneself this simple question, ‘what does that mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either. It is unknowable.”

Picturing the paradox

Humour, eroticism, sexuality and paradoxes formed the core of many of Magritte’s iconic paintings. In The Treachery of Images (1928/29), he painted a common pipe and below it, “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). The simple act of putting the words in the painting altered the whole content and context of the image. When asked, Magritte replied that it was, of course, not a pipe. To drive home his point, he added, “Just try to fill it with tobacco!”

Magritte averred that no matter how closely one came to depicting an object accurately, we never do catch the item itself.  He detested the idea of the symbol in relation to his work, disliked psychoanalysis, and dismissed the notion of interpretation. “The poetry of the image dispenses with any symbolic significance, old or new,”  he said.

Among his most intriguing paintings is The Son of Man (1964) which shows a man in an overcoat and a bowler hat under a cloudy sky; his face is almost completely obscured by a green apple. Magritte believed that there is always an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us.

If the sexually charged painting titled The Rape (1934) fashioned the face of a woman made up of breasts, navel and pubis, in Carte Blanche (1965), he brought out an extraordinary juxtaposition of a horse rider hiding the trees, and the trees hiding her.  “Visible things can be invisible.  However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.”

Critics have observed that how as a master of puzzle painting Magritte painted his images which stemmed from revelations of the mystery of the visible world; and how his work were snapshots of the impossible making a constant call on the viewer to relinquish, at least temporarily, usual expectations of art. 

“Magritte possessed one of the most remarkable imaginations of his century,” wrote eminent art critic Robert Hughes. “His work sets up a parallel world, extremely strange and yet familiar, ruled by an absolutist imagination.” When Magritte, an enthusiastic film buff, died of pancreatic cancer in his own bed, he was 69.