Striking images of anonymity
Bryan Robertson
MAGRITTE by David Sylvester Thames & Hudson, £45, pp. 352 Forget the images for a moment; the supreme merit of David Sylvester's magis- terially selected and presented Magritte exhibition, still playing (until 2 August) to engrossed crowds at the Hayward Gallery and clear on every page of this appropri- ately splendid book, is the way in which Magritte comes through as a painter, as a great master of light and dark, low-keyed but rich colour, and edge — the telling contour. He was also a great designer of a kind of mice-en-scene, as if his paintings were stage-managed by a theatrical produc- er of genius. They rely heavily on the art of placement. In this sense, Magritte's paint- ings are plainly laid-out, designed rather than composed, for most of the imagery is frontal or splayed out laterally across the picture surface. In this kind of lay-out, Magritte is of course very modern but also relates back to early Flemish paintings, the Van Eycks, for example, or Memling, with whom he has much in common including a profound but undemonstrative humanity. Magritte is also peculiarly modern in the sense that some, though by no means all, of his imagery has an almost cinematic edge to it as if the situ- ation or predicament depicted might be a still from some fantastic film made by a director with the disquieting ruthlessness of a Bunuel. Until you really look at the images that is, and then their utter self- possession as paintings in terms of steely light, haunted shadow and darkly glowing colour is quite elaborately clear. The beau- tiful surfaces are thinly, evenly applied, silkily smooth, tactful, appropriate, only rarely overtly sensual as a display, usually entirely subordinate to the nature of the image. The English naively equate true feeling — let alone passion — with a thick- er, more ostentatiously worked impasto and tend to mistrust discrete surfaces as implied evidence of coldness, a lack of true feeling. The innate sensuality of Ingres or Mire is forgotten.
As for those images themselves, in their own right, Magritte's man with a bowler hat seen from the back — possibly stirred by memories of Chaplin — the men In bowler hats and overcoats raining down in deadpan precision from a cloudless sky, the apple occupying a room, the bewigged female torso that looks like an obscene face — these must be among the most famous images of the century. As I write, a new but already tired one has appeared in gigantic scale on hoardings in London: a bowler-hatted man with a fried egg cover- ing his face, advertising an airline.
It is a wonder that commercial appropri- ation hasn't devitalised the original Magritte images. In reality, commerce only seized upon a comparatively few ideas, restricted to a handful of tricks. The calmly tense dreams of this great poetic painter firmly resist any kind of takeover. One of the best paintings has a recumbent, bald, sleeping figure in the top half of the can- vas, which sets out, below the figure, a lighted candle, a bird in profile, a red apple, a blue silk bow, a bowler hat, and a hand mirror, face down, all embedded lightly in a firmly contoured slab of grey stone which, as Sylvester points out in his loving study of Magritte, is 'reminiscent of pre-dynastic Egyptian cosmetic palettes carved in slate'. And the objects form a `composition like that of a low relief on one of those palettes or indeed on the wall of an Egyptian tomb'. Sylvester's book, which is surely defini- tive and a pleasure to handle (although his publishers might recall with profit the typographer's maxim that excessive use of a hairline rule is the first sign of feeble mind- edness — many pages in this monograph look as if everything is dangling from strings), is full of absorbing insights into Magritte's relationship with art history and the sources of his inspiration, intuitively close to the creative process as well as Magritte's life. My trouble is that I find the events or the pattern of Magritte's life not very interest- ing and only barely useful to any under- standing of his work beyond the obvious interest in occasionally tracing the roots of iconography. Magritte's Belgian friends and colleagues, provincial surrealist poets and writers, are not particularly riveting; he had a love-hate affair with Paris, where he lived for a while and wasn't particularly successful; he loved his wife, painted her often and became excessively commercially minded in his last years, probably on her behalf.
Magritte's work plainly declined towards the end of his life. There were still a few good images, but many copies or 'versions' of earlier work appeared, some leaden sculptures and an inexplicable phase of luridly coloured pictorial schlock, exhibited in Paris, which might have been some sort of gesture of defiance or contempt for the earlier lukewarm Parisian critics. Magritte's greatest work was really done in the Twen- ties and Thirties. Stimulated at first by the mysteriously time-becalmed world of de Chirico, with its classically draped figures, deserted colonnades and empty buildings, Magritte concealed the heads of his male
and female personages with drapery 50 years before Christo wrapped bridges and buildings. Later, the poetic impulse froze. Some late canvases of stone- cast situations weirdly anticipate Glen Baxter.
Magritte lived a well-ordered bourgeois life and dressed like a bank clerk. But so did T S Eliot, Herbert Read, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Eluard and many other painters and writers, in disguise throughout the Thirties partly as a reaction to the bohemian hats and cloaks of an earlier epoch, but also because of the unamusing economic depression and mass unemploy- ment of the late Twenties and Thirties internationally, and the wars in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Spain, an era more suited to tactful anonymity than arty flamboyance. It is a measure of David Sylvester's cali- bre as an art historian that he provides all the facts and clues concerning Magritte as well as his own sensitive insights — but finally leaves the reader with the properly respectful and realistic feeling that the essential nature and intermittent energy of a great artist's imagination ultimately resist analysis.
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