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René Magritte
La Chambre d'écoute (The Listening Room)
1952
Copyright © 2000 Charly Herscovici c/o A.R.S., New York
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Though he was a prodigiously talented draftsman, René Magritte was
in essence a cerebral painter; his canvases served as vehicles for the translation
of abstract ideas into visual form. He obsessively replicated his previous
paintings, ever attempting to resolve the expression of a particular idea
through the introduction of subtle compositional changes. Such ideas were
plentiful, and Magritte was consequently an extraordinarily prolific painter,
creating more than a thousand canvases over the course of his fifty-year
career. This exhibition presents a distilled overview of Magritte's paintings,
with emphasis on recurring themes in his work, including voyeurism, language,
metamorphosis, enchantment, disjunction of images, and the fracturing of
perception.
Magritte was born in 1898, in Lessines, Belgium, a region whose dreary landscape
and leaden sky may well have influenced his flat, moody style. He began
to paint at the age of twelve, and studied art at the Academie des Beaux-Arts
in Brussels from 1916 to 1918. In 1926, while earning a living designing
advertisements and posters, Magritte joined several friends in the formation
of a Belgian Surrealist group. Unlike the French Surrealists he came to
know during his stay in Paris from 1927 to 1930, Magritte and his cohorts
scorned the appropriation of Freudian theories in art and literature. He
disdained the explorations of the unconscious mind that were in vogue throughout
Europe in this era, aiming instead to expand conscious understanding of
reality by presenting utterly improbable tableaux. The fantastic compositions
that resulted were made more palatable -- and, paradoxically, even more
absurd -- by Magritte's strict adherence to the conventions of representational
painting. |
