Good news from Wallonia ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
The imaginative identity behind the work of the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte, so exact, so consistent, has always brought to mind, in relation to his fellow surrealists, the notion of an imperturbable hermit-scholar quietly proceeding with the compilation of a methodical chronicle of ideas while a crowd of .agitators outside his cave carry on with demonstrations, fund-raising benefits and other histrionic galas for less clearly defined pur- poses. The work of Magritte is the most level in tone, private in diction, and enclosed in resonance of all the surrealists. Since the scale of, his paintings was invariably modest, the 'MAGRITTE-DAVID SYLVESTER-ARTS COUNCIL' show, as indicated on the catalogue's title page, is appropriately contained in a series of small rooms at the Tate Gallery.
.The way in which the paintings are loaded, despite their moderate size, is quite engrossing, since their density springs mostly from ideas about art and life, recorded in clearly recog- nisable visual terms, from which so much that might have been helpful or relevant has been eliminated. Magritte ignored, for instance, the calligraphy of psychic automatism and the abstractly hierarchical, astrological forms which inspired Mira from the example of Klee. He was unseduced by the sweet ferocity of Ernst's insights into the violence of natural selection, the erosion of time, Jungian night- mares of archetypal encounter, or the radiant calm, tinged by mortality, so inseparable from Ernst's parallel concept of the cycles of nature.
Magritte's art is coldly and relentlessly post- Freudian. He often allowed it to be extended by poetic fantasy in terms of what might hap- pen in a room, be observed from a window, or take place in conventional landscapes. But he was quite unmoved by the more operatic ver- sion of Freudian motive and predicament, rendered by Dali in the painting techniques of Leonardo or Vermeer undermined by Meis- sonier. Magritte contented himself with the symptoms, Dali conjured up the illness. The distinction is important. Magritte had also a fine propriety as a technician, as an instrument; Dali is a showman more often than not.
Aware of the innovations of Miro, Ernst and Dali and much else, Magritte's determining im- pulse towards paradox was so deeply bitten into his entire personality that he could 'best express himself as an artist from the curious vantage point of a revolutionary conservative, scrutinising art itself. He was concerned all his life with the basic traditional principles of pictorial device and construction, and with the constant subject-matter of European art as a whole. Two of his best paintings show an easel in a window. The view beyond is not blacked out by the canvas on this easel, it passes across- the canvas as if it were glass: Magritte's illu- sion is unbroken but ours is wrecked. With such concrete ideas to record, the technical dis- coveries and pursuits of his day ire only mar- ginally reflected in Magritte's work from the late 'twenties, when he first showed maturity, until his death in 1967.
There was, however, in his painting, almost from the beginning, a strong affinity with the early metaphysical vision of Chirico. But, while continuing the intent, rapt tradition of Flemish art, with its flair for describing large issues within the dimensions of a prosaic domesticity, Magritte rejected the romantically • Italianate, urban dream world of Chirico, its deserted streets and squares, its ruined statuary and classical allusions to antiquity or the Renaissance. He redefined the alarming im- balance between time and place, and the rele- vance of paradoxical detail to the whole, by bringing Chirico's dream world indoors, into the conventional furnishings, perspectives and appointments of a bourgeois apartment, and he brought it into the present. That, finally, is the secret of Magritte's magic. We are not in the metaphysical deserts or the lunar land- scapes of Tanguy any more than we are ex- posed to the special conditions of Miro, Ernst or Dali. To look at a painting by Magritte is as reassuring and familiar as to watch a film set in the present, even if the spirit of Burmel is behind the camera.
The constant factor between Magritte and Chirico is the way in which both artists en- joined stillness for their reverie on art and life, and established a characteristic time of day for its disclosure. With Chirico it is the blazing and motionless noon of Mediterranean high summer, a zenith, or the more weighted pause of late afternoon, a descent. Magritte's passion for paradox was far more constrained by scepticism: unlike Chirico, he mistrusted the weather. He cut out any undertone of melan- choly or regret from his stated times: they have the dead level flatness of a northern late morning. Occasionally, he sets the scene at an equally blank or purged moment just before sunset, or immediately after when the light is suddenly drained of colour, before dusk equi- vocates. If the paintings are free of memory, for nothing surely could have preceded these events, they are commensurately charged with imminent drama: above all, the spectator is locked in the present. What is happening now, and what might happen because of it, are what concerns Magritte.
He also observes silence, at all times. This aspect of his art may well commend itself to an English public, together with its sobriety. Examining his paintings is not unlike settling into a familiar enough railway carriage whose occupants are plainly not going to be a con- versational burden. It is only when the journey has begun that the transmutation job opposite reveals itself, as a pair of shoes merge organic- ally into bare feet. Or the sun floods in at one window as pitch-black midnight proclaims itself through the other. Magritte might well
have echoed Rilke's exclamation: 'Were you not amazed by the circumspection of human gesture?' but, as a revolutionary conservative, he packed into some works an uncircumspect menace, openly at ease with violence, that attempts more than poetic disquiet but per- haps achieves less.
The impersonal handling of paint, the scrupulous depiction of objects, and the non- committal restraint over any tactile intrusion between you and the intensity of the image, are cinematically anonymous. But, if intensity is there, the integrity of each and every object is continually threatened by Magritte's refusal to communicate anything about the physical nature of skin, or trees, or wood, or sky, other than an idea of its compact identity. You get the same 'no comment' laconicism from pave- ment artists or inspired amateurs. This dig at art obviously amused Magritte, who could switch from painting trees in the art cliché manner of all time to a silkily restrained painting of a room, with a smoking train en- gine hurtling out of the chimney piece, which is as refined in 'painterly' terms as those chilly, seventeenth century Dutch cathedral interiors.
There is in Magritte a kind of subdued anarchy, still subordinate to inherited concepts of art and the final demands of bourgeois life, that makes him peculiarly relevant for a generation of artists intent upon the analysis of illusionism, content, format, and the propo- sitions of an endlessly protracted international debate on didactic themes. In this situation, congested, paralysingly conformist, and starved of a pretext for legitimate representation after the death of pop art, Magritte will loom large. As a minor artist, his conformity has an under- lying rasp to it and always a nicely intelligent edge.
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