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Images and Words
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To sum up what we have
ascertained so far, the painted image is no common reproduction,
since it also depicts the person of the painter, his body,
acquired through his way of viewing and technique of painting
things, his eye and his hand. The painting does not deliver a
means of identification, like a passport photograph; its intention
is to draw attention, not to the external reality as such but
rather to the unfathomable mystery behind this reality. In
Magritte's output, the painted image is always the image of a
thought and, as such, the painter demands that it reflect its
inherent condition as an image. It is never a simple reproduction
of appearances, in the sense of a visual illusion, intended to
represent reality.
A painted pipe, as in the work
The Treachery of Images, cannot be smoked.
Accordingly, the painted pipe is no pipe, in the same way
as other pictures by Magritte contain no apple, no
woman, no wood and no hammer. The work reveals the
inner distance to that which is visible, that space in which the
art of painting can develop. One feels something like the
impotence, the limitations, of painting, since its basic structure
and fundamental nature mean that it is separated from reality,
from its model. At the same time, however, this separation is the
characteristic of a power that is surreal, magical, quite other in
nature, namely the ability to betray reality, to allow a rock to
hover in mid-air, or to depict an apple that fills the entire
space of a room (The Listening-Room). It is the
power to render visible the distance separating the picture from
its model. Painting works in conjunction with the visible,
functioning within the visible, never outside of it.
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The
Human Condition
1935
Reality and reproduction mingle in Magritte' picture.
The work on the easel continues the view of sea and beach almost
seamlessly.
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La condicion humana
1933
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Euclidean Walks
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The Pipe
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Words also belong
to the realm of what is visible, however, an aspect which in no
way escaped Magritte's poetic astuteness. Only an abstract
relationship exists between the "idea" of a horse and the creature
known to everyone, for example. Expressed more precisely, this
idea has of itself nothing of a horselike quality. Like images,
words also play with the difference between their linguistic
nature and the things to which it is intended that they should
refer. The written words "the Seine", for example, take us in our
thoughts to Paris; this is no real process, however, but merely an
abstract one. We can thus speak in this case of a certain
impotence of words compared with objects. At the same time,
however, we discover in them an enormous power, a striking ability
to be deceitful. Words are capable of such mendacious claims as "I
am on the moon". Magritte's attention was lastingly occupied with
and fascinated by this poetic capacity of language. On the canvas,
painted words - not as descriptions but as parts of the picture -
can release their powers of differentiation, as may be seen in
Dangerous Liaisons, not only in the mirror but also in
the body and its fragmentation through the portrayal within the
picture. We can compare here The Two Mysteries, or
The Interpretation of Dreams. An indefinable,
mysterious space exists between the words and the objects - as
between the images and their objects. When Magritte paints words
or whole sentences, he is combining the differentiating power of
that which can be read with the differentiating power of that
which can be seen. In showing the respective freedom available to
each of these two, in playing with the freedom offered by the two
freedoms, so to speak, Magritte - like Borges - is undermining the
common foundation through which they can mutually identify and
communicate with each other. He is allowing a difference to
develop between the differences, a separation between words
and pictures, instead of leading us to believe that the surreal
nature of the pictures and the words is identical with their real
nature. Identities become unstable under the subversive touch of
Magritte's genius; they are rendered fragile, begin to dissolve.
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The
Two Mysteries
1966
The representation of a pipe is no pipe - an apparently succinct
and banal conclusion which nevertheless
conceals all the more the mundane mystery to which Magritte refers
again and again:
neither the word nor the picture of the object can assure us that the
object really exists.
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The
Pipe
1926
This is the only picture in which Magritte experimented with the
application of paint.
Instead of using a thin coat, he applied the green paint so thickly
that it stands out three-dimensionally from the canvas.
Despite the relief-like tangible nature which this gives the pipeform,
however, it is still no pipe.
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The Mask of
Lightning
1967
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The
Interpretation of Dreams (The Acacia, The Moon, The Snow, The Ceiling,
The Storm, The Desert)
1930
Magritte's combination of objects and labels could be understood as
an infiltration of the existing order,
one which can and should prompt quite unexpected associations.
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El museo de una noche
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The
Empty Mask
1928
"The words which serve to characterize two different objects do not of
themselves reveal
what it is that distinguishes one of the objects from the other."
Rene Magritte
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La clave de los suenos
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El hombre del periodico
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The course of development followed
by his work proves that Magritte remained true to his principle,
precisely depicting this distance between that which can be seen and
that which can be read. It was never his intention to conceal the
difference. Such a kind of common sense can plunge pure realists and
humourless souls into confusion; however, it captivates those prepared
to be drawn into poetry and intellectual involvement. The
Explanation is simple. What Magritte is producing with the aid
of a carrot and a bottle takes place merely within a surreal picture;
it seeks to conjure up not the identity of two realities but the very
impossibility of their synthesis. The same is true of another work:
Magritte could have portrayed The Art of Conversation in
his picture by means of an ugly balloon containing the characters'
conversation, as in a comic magazine. Yet he has done without this,
and so we are left in the dark as to what they are saying. The shape
resulting from the appearance of the blocks of stone, however, piled
up on top of and within each other, is such as to allow letters to
emerge from the confused and unreadable jumble, forming the word "Reve"
(dream). In other words, Magritte is not concerned with constructing
through images and words an apparatus intended to capture reality and
put a vice-like hold upon it through the alliance of two complementary
systems. Rather, he makes use of the inner distance to the words and
the outer distance to the images to cause a mystery to appear, a
wide-awake, perceptive dream, that untouched, mysterious difference,
original thought.
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The
Explanation
1954
A painted bottle and a carrot are united to form a new, surreal
signifier.
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The
Art of Conversation
1950
"... within a landscape from the beginning of the world or
from the battle of the giants against the gods,
two tiny figures are speaking with each other - an inaudible
conversation, mere murmuring,
instantly swallowed up by the silence of the stones, the silence of
the wall,
the mighty blocks of which tower over the two mute chatterers..."
Michel Foucault
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La perspectiva amorosa
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La perspectiva amorosa
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La cuerda sensible
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Personal Values
1951
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La facultad imaginativa
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La escala del fuego
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In so doing, Magritte is negating
the traditional manner of depiction, and the observer finds himself
wondering how anyone could ever have considered the picture of a pipe
to be the pipe itself. Those people who hold that there is a
correspondence between words or images and the objects themselves are
doubtless those same people who believe nowadays in the veracity of
the information provided by television and uncritically allow
themselves to be impressed by a totalitarian propaganda disseminated
under the cloak of freedom of information. When the Italian state
sought to use the picture The Flavour of Tears for its
perfidious anti-smoking campaign, Georgette Magritte refused, pointing
out that her husband "had not painted the picture with the intention
of hindering people from smoking". The seductive effect of his works,
in which dream, thought, bodily desires and aspirations are so often
united, has presented market-orientated plagiarists with an
inexhaustible "treasure trove" into which they have dipped with
neither restraint nor scruple in order that they might better further
the sales of some product or other. Pictures by the painter of the
metaphysical and the surreal have so often been copied and exploited
for primitive, exclusively commercial purposes that one sometimes has
the direct impression that he took modern reality as the model for his
work. Magritte's poetic world seems to have anticipated the world of
today, in which journalists are confused with men of letters and
foolish daubers with painters.
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The
Flavour of Tears
1948
"The sight of a felled tree simultaneously causes pleasure and gives
rise to sadness." Rene Magritte
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The Oasis
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The Philosophical
Lamp
1936
This combination of snake-like candle of cognition and
Magritte-resembling head, the latter seemingly smoking itself in
the pipe, has the effect of an ironic replica of the light which
one is said to see when engaged in deep thought.
"Consideration
of a manic, absent-minded philosopher can prompt thoughts of a
self-contained intellectual world, in the same way that the smoker
here is the prisoner of his pipe."
Rene Magritte
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The
Philosophical Lamp
illuminates two absurd sights, the first a closed circle of smoke
with mouth, pipe, and nose constituting a single entity, the
second formed by the candle, the wax of which, while soft and
already melted at its lower end, is increasingly firm towards the
burning wick, towards the light. The subversive humour with which
Magritte destroys what one might suppose to be the most reliable
certainties finds unusually clear expression in this picture.
After the fashion of Dada, in the spirit of the Marx brothers or
even in the spirit of true philosophy, he had no time for the
presentation of objects or ideas in such a manner as to suggest
they were inaccessible to any form of analysis, above thought, and
entrenched behind Utopias and principles. His intention was merely
to undermine the foundation of things, to question quite seriously
that which is serious itself, as simply as possible, without any
great fuss, harmlessly and almost anonymously. He overloaded the
visible manifestation of the object to such an extent that it
became more than obvious, thereby enabling its very own innermost
mystery, its deceptive charms and seducing powers, to develop out
of its own self. In using images and words in his function as a
painter, he was bringing the appalling banality of things to
light, turning the most common and everyday situations with which
people are confronted into their opposite - and this in every
moment, so to speak.
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The Familiar Objects |
Everything which is good is also simple - a viewpoint that also
holds true for Magritte's art. He possessed the talent to slip
between objects and their depiction, but also between pictures and
words, between the threedimensional form of the figures and the
graphic appearance of the letters. It is here that Magritte subtly
and maliciously misleads the observer, making use of the freedom
that painting offers to allow the very lack of relationship
between what can be seen and what can be read, between seeing and
reading, constantly to prevail. Furthermore, he turns this
negation of a relationship inside out, rendering it a positive
force, subversive poetics, one in the position to unsettle the
imaginary itself. Most people, upon thinking of a mermaid, imagine
a figure with a woman's upper body and the tail of a fish below.
If this conception is turned on its head, if someone paints a
fish-woman instead of a woman-fish, one might think this no great
step, since we are anyway moving here in the realm of the unreal,
in the sphere of the imagination. And yet the observer is quite
clearly confronted in Collective Invention -
in contrast to that which is called collective imagination - with
an unreal situation, one which strikes and confuses in a different
way to customary unreality or pure fantasy. Magritte is no
visionary, no dreamer; he is an inventor, a thinker. He does not
seek to lead us into some other, distant world. Rather, he would
shed light upon the incoherence that is common to our habitual
ways of thinking, be they imaginary and unconscious, as in the
case of the mermaid, or more conscious and more symbolic, as with
The Interpretation of Dreams, a work which separates
images and words very clearly, thereby confronting the observer's
intellect with the arbitrary nature of our signs and codes. His
relentlessness has a frightening element to it: according to
Magritte himself, the act of painting Pleasure was
accompanied by a not altogether harmless tendency towards mental
cruelty. It is quite possible that this aspect disturbs. Is the
painter not preferring an artificial, abstract universe to life as
he has experienced it? A world in which life is invented, is
inorganic, is populated by new, strange creatures: the body of a
leaf-bird, being devoured by a caterpillar (The Flavour of
Tears), or a young girl biting with bared teeth into a
living bird, surrounded by other birds, apparently further
candidates awaiting the same fate - if not impatiently, then at
least with a certain fearlessness and stupid curiosity? The cruel
art of painting can reveal the full mysterious force of objects,
describe the lightness of a dream with the aid of mighty boulders
(The Art of Conversation), or concentrate the
history of centuries in the depiction of two chairs, one of them
of gigantic proportions and in existence since time immemorial,
the other modern in style and minute in size... (The Legend
of the Centuries).
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Collective Invention
1934
A back-to-front mermaid lying stranded upon the seashore - not with
the tail of a fish and a woman's upper body,
as we normally encounter her in fairytales and myths, but with the
head of a fish and a human lower body.
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Pleasure
1927
Magritte has intensified his pictorial pleasure from confusion to
shocking depiction:
here we are confronted with a girl in a white lace collar who,
enjoying a sheltered upbringing,
is holding a bird in her hands, into which she is apparently quite
composedly biting, as the blood runs down.
The idea behind the picture is not so much the cruel element in
children as the desire for what is unbelievable.
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The
Legend of the Centuries
1948
Homage to the lack of moderation displayed by Victor Hugo, who
wrote his work with the intention of rivalling the Bible,
wishing to record the history of Paradise Lost up to the twentieth
century and beyond...
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La ira de los dioses
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The Man of the Sea
1926
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The shadow and his
shadows, 1932
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Far from being concerned with
establishing a hierarchical relationship between model and
reproduction, a relationship in which the one should be equivalent to
the other, Magritte is instead playing a game of differences, not only
those between sequences of writing and images, but also quite
fundamentally the difference in the realm of the visible, pulling out
all the stops and setting in motion the proliferating endlessness of
every trick and every illusion. Two chairs suffice to establish a
series; a small difference suffices to stage the whole infinite game
of the differences between the differences. This game takes over the
entire area of the picture, so as to reduce it to what it is, namely
an abstract reality, "something in the mind", according to Duchamp,
"nothing but visible thought", as Magritte would say. Both artists
share the view that the painted work cannot be separated from thought,
that there not only is a knowledge existing in the gesture of the
painter but that this knowledge goes beyond the technical level of the
work, actively penetrating the innermost layers of the aesthetic. The
painter's knowledge is not merely simple technical ability, but is
also an intellectual ability: in other words, it contains a moment of
reflection.
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Le siecle des lumieres
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Magritte, with Vincy and Duchamp,
believed that every image has a sense, a meaning; thus, a work cannot
be reduced to the mere arrangement of materials. The material basis
creates an immaterial effect which, while it cannot be reduced to the
techniques employed, cannot be separated from them either. This effect
cannot come about outside of or without the techniques. The meaning of
the work, its aesthetic effect, bears the trait of the "as if; that
is, its meaning emerges through its effect upon the body and intellect
of the observer. For his part, however, the observer is compelled, if
he is to experience the effect, to grasp the difference between the
technical level, which is the basis of the work, and the aesthetic
level. Even if thought - a matter of words and concepts - is of its
very nature invisible, the fact remains that, within the context of
painting, the invisible - meaning - falls in upon itself in that
moment in which the visible disappears. The art of painting expresses
the invisible by means of the visible, thoughts by means of images.
People have often abstractly theorized about this form of
articulation. Magritte's genius doubtless lies in the fact that he
concretely reflected it, made it the subject of his pictures
themselves. If he is to imagine the difference between what is visible
and what is thought in his painting, the painter must render these
thoughts visible, must render them so that they can be perceived by
the eye. It is for this reason that Magritte introduced words into his
pictures, uniting that which can be seen and that which can be read on
one and the same surface.
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The Ignorant Fairy
1950
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La memoria
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La memoria
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The Art of living
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A Little of the Bandits' Soul |
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Landscape
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The Reckless Sleeper
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