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René Magritte: What is Seen Beneath the Unseen?

Rhian Tate

Survey of Design 141 Judy Snaydon

November 1, 2015

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The collection of memories, thoughts and experiences, the losses and the wins, the seemingly mundane and insubstantial occurrences of everyday life, everything is connected. Nothing is arbitrary. Everything adds up to provide meaning and context and shape us and our work into the very thing itself. Every experience we have, every contact we make with the external world are stored in our cells, our DNA— tying us to our past, grounding us to our present and feeding us towards our future. What makes up our reality is constructed by our minds and how we perceive the world is dictated by both our conscious and unconscious minds simultaneously working in unison. All of this constitutes the many layers that make us human and relate us to the world. Surrealism and more importantly René Magritte sought to rectify these interactions bringing into question the true nature of artifice and reality. Where do things connect? Why must we look beyond what we can see? In the wake of World War I, several art movements sprang forth to try and make sense or "not make sense" of its destruction and carnage. Today, they are collectively known as the Modernist era. Surrealism was one facet of this epoch, rooted in the philosophical framework of the Dada movement. It explored intuition, dreams, and the world of our unconscious minds inspired by Freud’s analyses, and sought to free the mind from the oppressive rationalism of a bourgeois society (Meggs 2012). Its founder was a poet by the name of André Breton who spawned the movement in 1924 with his Manifesto du Surrealism written at Les Deux Magots cafe in Paris (Capaldi n.d.). René Magritte was one of the pioneers and masters of surrealism and through his prolific and poetic works, he greatly influenced visual communications. Magritte was a graphic designer, illustrator, wallpaper designer and fine artist (Sooke 2011). He was a freelance graphic designer only as a means of survival—his true passion lied within the heart and philosophical underpinnings of fine art (Sooke 2011). He lived in Paris between 1927-1930 where he exchanged ideas with other great surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali (Umland 2013). With mounting political tensions driven by the force of Hitler, eventually culminating in 1939 with the advent of World War II, Magritte escaped into the revolutionary ideals of Surrealism. He did so, “because it [was] relentlessly hostile to all those bourgeois ideological values which [kept] the world in the appalling conditions,” it was during that time (Umland, D’Alessandro and Helfenstein 2013). His paintings leading up to the war capture his revolt against a deteriorating society, rife with injustice. He invites the viewer to “pay careful, critical attention to what is seen, both in each image and, when turned away from them, in the surrounding world. Rooted in the commonplace, it sought to act on perceptions in ways that rendered reality disturbing and strange, and that made, in Magritte’s own words, ‘everyday objects shriek aloud.’” Umland, D’Alessandro and Helfenstein 2013).   There is something about René Magritte. Or rather, there is something about his paintings. His work has injected itself into my world on several occasions since entering the IDEA program. I believe this has happened because his work and ideas are still prevalent today and continue to live on in the world of popular culture. Countless advertisements: from Volkswagen cars to French state railway; the Beatles logo for the Apple Corps. Ltd.; and the iconic man in the Bowler Hat has inspired everyone from fashion designers to the creators of The Simpsons (Naves 2013). He has also inspired a plethora of other great artists including John Baldessari and Andy Warhol (History of Graphic Design 2015). There is an innate quality about his paintings that draws me in like a magnet and propels me to look deeper into his images. Upon first inspection, I get the instinctual, guttural feeling that there are many layers. Within each layer there is profound meaning: trauma, pain, mystery, humour and joy behind all these visual representations.  

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Figure  1.  The  Lovers.  1928.  Oil  on  canvas,  21  3/8  x  28  7/8"  (54  x  73.4  cm)    Magritte’s life was complex and tumultuous: he lived through both world wars and his mother drowned herself in 1912 when he was only 13 years old (Rodger and Bakewell 2011). These experiences are very intentionally translated into his work. His critique of representation and the notion “things are not what they seem” were a constant and unrelenting theme throughout his body of work. It has been said that he was there the day they found his mother’s body in the Sambre river, her wet nightdress covering her face (The Economist 1992). This has been discounted as her body was found 17 days after she went missing, but I wonder if he made a myth out of an unbearable reality. His paintings The Son of Man and The Lovers are direct linkages to this trauma he experienced as a young and highly impressionable boy. The significance of them again ties back to the notion that there is always more than what the viewer sees. The cloth wrapped around the lovers’ faces perhaps suggests our inability to fully unveil the true nature of even out most intimate of companions (MoMA Learning n.d.).

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Figure 2. The Son of Man. 1946. Oil on Canvas, 116 cm × 89 cm (45.67 in × 35 in) The apple in front of the man’s face is, “something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides [something else], we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is concealed and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present” (Magritte 1965; Torczyner 1977). To me they represent examples of how our pasts merge with our present and how all things connect in some direct or indirect way. The nude female form, enshrouded faces, familiar objects obscuring faces are only a few of the indelible motifs woven throughout Magritte’s work that bring this notion to life.

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Figure 3. Time Transfixed. 1938. Oil on Canvas, 147 cm × 98.7 cm (57.87 in × 38.86 in) During the restoration process of the exhibition entitled The Mystery of the Ordinary curated by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, abandoned paintings were detected underneath Time Transfixed and The Portrait (Umland 2013). This struck me as a metaphor in line with Magritte’s fixation with representation and the façades of things and what is behind them. Whether Magritte intended to evoke this or it is pure coincidence the abstraction that, what you see on the surface image is not the only thing to be seen, remains.

Figure 4. The Portrait. 1935. Oil on Canvas, 73.3 cm × 50.2 cm (28⅞ in × 19⅞ in

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His painting Clairvoyance painted in 1936, is another clear depiction of this concept. Magritte sits looking at an egg whilst painting a bird on the canvas. This piece is about the unexpected connections between things, the limits of vision and the secret lives of objects. There is no visual connection between the shape of the egg on the table and the bird on the canvas. Magritte implores you to stare harder at the things around you. This is not so much about what these “things” show you but what they conceal and what lies within their hidden potential (Umland 2013).

Figure 5. Clairvoyance. 1936. Oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 25 9/16” (54 x 65cm) This concept of things not being what they appear to be reminds me of a toy I used to play with as a kid— a Matryoshka doll or Russian nesting dolls. They are beautifully painted wooden dolls and each one splits in half. Nested inside is another doll of smaller stature but identical form. The dolls get incrementally smaller as you break each one open. Eventually, you get to the smallest one, usually representing a baby doll no bigger than a grain of rice. At first glance all you see is one doll but hidden within each doll is another one--things are not what they seem.

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Figure 6. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. 1928-29. Oil on canvas, 63.5 cm × 93.98 cm (25 in × 37 in) Similar to the premise underpinning the IDEA program our ideas are the most important part of any great design or illustration. It is what propels art towards its fruition and engages the viewer on deeper and more profound level. Magritte was not the best painter; however, it was his cleverness, wit and ideas that make him such a legend. Magritte is direct and intentional with his work enrapturing the viewer to look deeper into the layers. He leaves the viewer to speculate and to wonder and project their own meaning of what lies beneath the first veneer. You are always looking at a picture of something you are never looking at the thing itself. This is exemplified by his painting The Treachery of Images. What you see on the surface is not necessarily what something means. Appearances are only part of the reality of any given situation or object. This notion is depicted in Familiar Objects. To quote Magritte himself, “Behind every object is hidden another object” (Umland 2013). The legacy and quiet profoundness left behind in Magritte’s work is the “persistent tension…between nature and artifice, truth and fiction, reality and surreality” (Umland 2013).

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Figure 7. Familiar Objects. 1928. Oil on canvas, 81 x 116 cm

I whole-heartedly relate to the surreal and René Magritte. I recognize that everything that has ever happened to me has led me to this point. Lead me to IDEA, to my creative life. Things connect in the present, beyond that is a mystery. This idiom is undeniably and directly captured in Magritte’s paintings. When asked once what his paintings meant, Magritte cleverly quipped: “[they do] not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable” (MoMA Learning n.d.). Lots of what we create is sourced from an unconscious place and comes from below the “first layer.” I am convinced, as was Magritte that it is unknowable. It is a mystery. Nevertheless, this does not negate me from trying to continue feverishly to probe for the answers. To continue to use art as a tool to provoke thought and get people to look beyond the superficial layers and most certainly to ask more questions.

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Work Cited

Capaldi, Peter. "Surrealism." Surrealism. Accessed November 2, 2015. http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/surrealism. Magritte, Rene, and Harry Torczyner. Magritte, Ideas and Images. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1977. "Magritte, René François Ghislain". 2011. In Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Liam Rodger and Joan Bakewell. London: Chambers Harrap. http://ezproxy.capilanou.ca/login?qurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.credoreference.com.ezproxy.capilanou.ca%2Fcontent%2Fentry%2Fchambbd%2Fmagritte_rene_francois_ghislain%2F0 Meggs, Philip B., and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs' History of Graphic Design. 4th ed. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley & Sons, 2006. "MoMA Learning." MoMA. Accessed October 31, 2015. http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/rene-magritte-the-lovers-le-perreux-sur-marne-1928. "René Magritte | History of Graphic Design." René Magritte | History of Graphic Design. Accessed October 31, 2015. http://www.historygraphicdesign.com/the-modernist-era/the-influence-of-modern-art/436-rene-magritte. "René Magritte: Odd, Odder, Oddest." The Economist. June 13, 1992. Accessed October 31, 2015. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.capilanou.ca/docview/224170042/fulltext?accountid=36786. Sooke, Alastair. "René Magritte: The Artist Who Turned the World on Its Head." The Telegraph. Accessed October 31, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8582472/Rene-Magritte-The-artist-who-turned-the-world-on-its-head.html. Umland, Anne. "MoMA | Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938." MoMA | Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938., 2013. Accessed November 2, 2015. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/magritte/#/featured/1. Umland, Anne, Stephanie D'Alessandro, and Josef Helfenstein. "Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary." Accessed October 31, 2015. http://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/publication_pdf/3187/MoMA_Magritte_PREVIEW.pdf?1379603168.