Don’t Believe the Pipe: The Rise of René Magritte

Although he trafficked in the uncanny, or maybe because he did, the great Belgian Surrealist René Magritte was, in his personal deportment, as plain and innocuous as an aspirin. He was married all his life to the same woman and dressed most days like a bank clerk. Think of Alfred Hitchcock making Psycho and The Birds while appearing on TV as that droll gent in a suit. Though Magritte spent three crucial years in Paris, the fevered cockpit of Surrealism, he returned permanently to placid Brussels in 1930. To the French, it might as well have been Wichita. Toto, I think we’re back in Kansas.

All the same, this prosaic man refused to cooperate with reality, serenely uncoupling familiar images from the things we count on them to represent. His first adventures in that profound and weirdly pleasurable idiom provide the story arc for “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938,” a new show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, which runs from Sept. 28 through Jan. 12, then moves to Houston and Chicago. Though it covers just 12 years of Magritte’s life–he was 68 when he died in 1967–that was the period when he made many of his best-known images, the years when he discovered himself, to say nothing of whatever it is in us that he consistently enchants. The show is a beauty, but it’s also a reminder that however much Magritte was a Surrealist, in some ways he was much more.

He began as a would-be Cubist but in 1922 discovered the work of Giorgio de Chirico, with its enigmatic, tilted piazzas and puzzling air of anxiety. What de Chirico showed Magritte was that representational painting still had very interesting possibilities. As Salvador Dalí would later do, Magritte soon adopted the most realistic form of representation he could manage, so much the better to pull the rug out from under the whole idea of representation. So in The Muscles of the Sky, from 1927, he defamiliarizes that most basic feature of our world, the sky, by bringing stretches of it down to earth in cut paper shapes that land across a plank floor like actors on a stage.

Magritte’s paint handling and figuration, though they improved enormously over the years, were fairly drab early on. The men in The Menaced Assassin, from 1927, are so awkward, the paint surface so deadpan, you would think Buster Keaton had picked up a brush. But the very stiffness of the scene adds to its clenched mystery. As with the stolid figures in Edward Hopper, early Magritte actually benefits from its lack of academic fluency.

Though he dealt in complex paradoxes, Magritte was terse. His famous 1929 painting as mission statement, The Treachery of Images, simply shows a pipe floating above the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Got it: This is not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. Something like that, only better, is the point of The Human Condition, in which a painting on an easel is set before a window in such a way as to exactly duplicate the part of the view that it’s blocking. Once Magritte’s intentions snap into place, you recognize that, of course, the “real” view out the window is also a painting, part of the one you’re looking at. Ceci n’est pas une landscape.

More Than a Surrealist

Anne Umland, the moma curator who co-organized this show, is right to emphasize the importance of the Surrealist movement to Magritte. Certainly, none of the other isms of his time suited him, though fin de siècle Symbolism, which had cast its spell over Belgian art, left its mark. You sense it in the otherworldliness of The Lovers, his 1928 painting of two figures, heads enshrouded in fabric, locked in an embrace but unknowable to each other. Yet by the 1920s, Symbolism was a spent force. And once he put Cubism behind him, Magritte took little interest in distorted space and form, much less Italian futurism’s noisy faith in speed and force or the shock corridors of German Expressionism. Surrealism offered him a base sympathetic to his forays into the irrational and insoluble.

All the same, Magritte didn’t always share the Surrealists’ central concerns. In particular, the unconscious was a key notion for them. It’s impossible to imagine Dalí’s work of the late 1920s and the ’30s without Freud’s ideas about the expression of unconscious desire in dreams. The founding fathers of Surrealism, including André Breton and the poet Paul éluard, were devoted to techniques of free association, like automatic writing and drawing, that were intended to bypass the rational mind and dredge up material directly from the unconscious. The Surrealist war cry could have been the directive launched decades later by Talking Heads: Stop making sense. Magritte, who knew his Freud but plotted out his pictures meticulously and had no interest in automatic anything, would have said, Don’t bother. The universe of words and images is already so full of booby traps and false certainties, you couldn’t make sense if you tried.

So maybe it’s time to think of Magritte also as one of the first conceptual artists. His paintings were meant to give form to intellectual conundrums. Each of them has its source first in an idea. In that respect, he had more in common with Marcel Duchamp, whose works were philosophical statements, than with Dalí or Max Ernst. This is obvious in his most didactic canvases, like The Interpretation of Dreams, from 1935, which bluntly instructs us in the arbitrariness of language by uncoupling words from the things they represent–except in the one instance, the valise, when it doesn’t.

What Magritte did share with the Surrealists was a sense of revolutionary mission, the idea that art could set people free. He once called his paintings “material tokens of the freedom of thought”–a lovely phrase. In On the Threshold of Liberty, from 1937, a cannon takes aim at images representing some of the conventional sign systems that beguile us every day–sex, the sky, nature–as well as a few, like horses’ bells and doily-cut paper patterns, that were among Magritte’s odd recurrent motifs. What will happen when the cannon fires? Then again, what will happen if it doesn’t?

Is it too much to think of Magritte’s art as a kind of cautionary note for the Internet age? With its warnings about the treachery of images and the ways language itself is a disinformation campaign, it’s a collective metaphor about the limits of knowledge and the pitfalls of communication. It’s aimed at us, bent over our phones and keyboards, eagerly retrieving “information,” all the while punked, all of us, almost all the time.