Art: Mystery Maker

Object by object and figure by figure, the paintings and drawings now on show in Manhattan’s Albert Landry Galleries are sharp and clear and natural, but taken as a whole they make sights that no one ever saw. One painting shows a huge rose filling an entire room. In another, loaves of French bread float by the window. In still another, a huge boulder, crowned by a castle, hovers over the sea: This sort of thing could be mere gimmickry, but in the hands of Belgium’s Rene Magritte it rarely fails. “For me,” he says, “art is the means of evoking mystery.” His quiet mysteries are among the most durable and haunting in modern art.

A Magritte painting begins simply enough. The artist thinks of an object—a stone, for example, or a piano. Magritte then asks himself: “How can I paint a stone in such a way as to make it worth being shown?” He may make 100 to 200 sketches of the stone, but from the very first he may have the feeling that the stone should be attached to or become something else. In the case of the piano, he may instantly think of hands; the hands in turn suggest a ring and the ring a marriage. In the end the painting turns out to be a huge ring with a piano floating through it—and the whole thing is called The Happy Hand.

In the Landry show, the big rose is called The Tomb of the Fighters, but Magritte’s titles always come after the picture is done. “When there is a rose, and one is sensitive to it, one makes it as big as I did so that the rose appears to fill the room,” he explains. The title, which Magritte took from a book, slowly comes to seem appropriate: like the rose, the fighters are something “grandiose,” filling the tomb with their struggles.

At 63 (“I’m getting older; I get toothaches and headaches, and there’s nothing I can do about it”), Magritte lives in a comfortable unbohemian house near Brussels, quietly damning a good deal of what other artists are doing. He has little use for the “brutalists” like Jean Dubuffet. “I find many things beautiful, such as old walls with spots on them,” he says. “But if you tell me a wall with its spots is a painting, I say you’re wrong.” Nor does he think much of action painting: “It’s action, not painting.” His own work is part fairy tale, part ghost story. It can provoke a smile, but its real achievement is that it can also be so disturbing—like a high-frequency sound one can feel but cannot hear. At one moment, the viewer feels he is in a familiar room surrounded by familiar things. The next moment he realizes that he does not recognize anything at all. “The mystery is the supreme thing,” Magritte explains. “It’s reassuring to know there’s a mystery—to know there is more than what one knows.”