RENE MAGRITTE &
treachery of images
Ceren Burçak DAĞ
040100531
Rene Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, a French-speaking region of Belgium, on 21 Nov. 1898.
He formed the nucleus of Belgian Surrealist movement with E.L.T. Mesens and Paul
Nouge
Self Portraits…
… from Early Purism Period, 1923
… from his Mature Period whose style is
Surrealism, 1952
Magritte loved classical music…
The Flood, 1928 The Rights of the Human, 1947
1925
“We used to lift up the iron gates and go down into the underground vaults. Regaining the light
again… I found, in the middle of some broken stone columns and heaped-up leaves, a painter
who had come from the capital, and who seemed to me to be performing magic.”
…suicide of his mother
Heart of the Matter, 1928
The Lovers, 1928
Magritte had to earn a living out of his painting. That’s why Magritte did lots of advertisement posters to make money.
Style: ART DECO, Adv. for Norine
use of dislocation like the removal of an object from its belonged place or context and its
introduction into an unknown environment
Clear Ideas, 1958
Happy Hand, 1953
Black Magic, 1934
Anatomical Transpositions
The Rape, 1935 Philosophy in the Boudoir, 1947
…he paints his wife as a model for the nude portraits
Attempting the Impossible, 1928
…his early period, 1919-1925
• the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels
• Victor Servranckx whose ideas were influential for Magritte
• the reproductions of a Futurist painting with poet Pierre Bourgeois
Umberto Boccioni, a Futurist artist
…an impressionist effect before Purism
The Portrait of Pierre Bourgeois, 1920
…vivid color contrasts, a figurative Cubism and nude models
The Woman, in early years The Bathers, 1921
…mostly influenced by Metzinger and Leger in this early Cubist&Purist Period
Three Women of Leger, 1921
Country Village of Metzinger, 1916
Servranckx & Purism
a return to clear, ordered forms turn to classical values of objectivity and harmony, combined with a 20th century belief in collectivism and anonymity - L’Esprit Nouveau (organ of Purism) - l’object type: standardized, mass-produced object which we use every day, ideal of Le Corbusier.
Le Corbusier’s Floating Pipe
On the final page of his book Towards an Architecture, published in Paris in 1923, a cardinal document of Purism
Elevated objects that we see in Magritte’s mature paintings were encountered in Leger’s Purist paintings, as well.
Familiar Objects of Magritte, 1928
…presenting the man as standardized and anonymous-looking
The Threatened Assassin, 1927
…baluster figure in his paintings
Nocturne, 1925
The Art of the
Conversation1951
Cicero 1947
…can be an effect from Leger
The Baluster of Leger, 1925
…or Uccello’s The Profanation of the Host narrative painting
Surrealist Period (1926 – 1930)
While Purist movement is rationalist and anti-individualist, on the contrary Surrealism is romantic with a taste for eccentric and one-off.
De Chirico
The Song of Love, De Chirico
…plaster hand
Dawn of Cayanne, 1926 Difficult Crossing, 1926
…the antique marble head, in Memory, 1948
…ball, in Secret Life, 1928
balusters of Magritte vs. manikins of De Chirico
Surrealist painting: Secret Player
Listening Room, 1952
Two Mysteries, 1966
The Treachery of Images, 1926 & 1948
…formalism
- we restate the formalism described in interpretation [1],
Two Pipes, Michel Foucault
- A carefully drawn pipe and underneath it (handwritten in a steady, painstaking, artificial script, a script from the convent, like that found heading the notebooks of schoolboys, or on a blackboard after an object lesson), this note: «This is not a pipe»
- (for the other version) The same pipe, same statement, same handwriting. But instead of being….
…there are no symbols in the paintings
- The simplicity of the paintings, no troubles to see and recognize the objects in them, but there are ambiguities in understanding the meaning of the paintings. «Which image represented as a pipe is not a pipe?»
- Interpretation [I] tries to understand the painting clearer with substituting the objects into some narratives. It tries to find the origin of the sentence written down «this is not a pipe».
The Unraveled Calligram, Michel Foucault
« Nothing is easier to recognize than a pipe, drawn thus; nothing is easier to say than the name of the pipe.»
Foucault mentions it as «an old custom not without a basis, because the entire function of so scholarly, so academic a drawing is to elicit recognition, to allow the object it represents to appear without hesitation.»
A CALLIGRAM
Calligram never speaks and represents at the same
moment…
… «this is not a pipe» is a calligram. Different from an ordinary calligram, word «this» combines two phases of the calligram. So, they point to each other by using word «this».
“This” (this ensemble constituted by a written pipe and a drawn text) “is not” (is incompatible with) “a pipe” (this mixed element springing at once from discourse and the image, whose ambiguous being the verbal and visual play of the calligram wants to evoke.)
Foucault even takes this calligram out of the text…
• He points out that when we defocus on text and look at the text and the image on the canvas together, we begin to see them together and connect the text to the image which is indeed not a pipe.
• «Negations multiply themselves»
references
• Richard Calvocoressi, «Magritte», Phaidon, 1994
• Michel Foucault, «This is not a Pipe»
• Suzi Gablik, «Magritte»
• Marcel Paquet, «Thoughts Rendered Visible»
• Wikipaintings.org