Don't Believe the Pipe: The Rise of René Magritte

A new show at the Museum of Modern Art tracks the Belgian surrealist's uneasy reality

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Anne Umland, the moma curator who co-organized this show, is right to emphasize the importance of the Surrealist movement to Magritte. Certainly, none of the other isms of his time suited him, though fin de siècle Symbolism, which had cast its spell over Belgian art, left its mark. You sense it in the otherworldliness of The Lovers, his 1928 painting of two figures, heads enshrouded in fabric, locked in an embrace but unknowable to each other. Yet by the 1920s, Symbolism was a spent force. And once he put Cubism behind him, Magritte took little interest in distorted space and form, much less Italian futurism's noisy faith in speed and force or the shock corridors of German Expressionism. Surrealism offered him a base sympathetic to his forays into the irrational and insoluble.

All the same, Magritte didn't always share the Surrealists' central concerns. In particular, the unconscious was a key notion for them. It's impossible to imagine Dalí's work of the late 1920s and the '30s without Freud's ideas about the expression of unconscious desire in dreams. The founding fathers of Surrealism, including André Breton and the poet Paul éluard, were devoted to techniques of free association, like automatic writing and drawing, that were intended to bypass the rational mind and dredge up material directly from the unconscious. The Surrealist war cry could have been the directive launched decades later by Talking Heads: Stop making sense. Magritte, who knew his Freud but plotted out his pictures meticulously and had no interest in automatic anything, would have said, Don't bother. The universe of words and images is already so full of booby traps and false certainties, you couldn't make sense if you tried.

So maybe it's time to think of Magritte also as one of the first conceptual artists. His paintings were meant to give form to intellectual conundrums. Each of them has its source first in an idea. In that respect, he had more in common with Marcel Duchamp, whose works were philosophical statements, than with Dalí or Max Ernst. This is obvious in his most didactic canvases, like The Interpretation of Dreams, from 1935, which bluntly instructs us in the arbitrariness of language by uncoupling words from the things they represent--except in the one instance, the valise, when it doesn't.

What Magritte did share with the Surrealists was a sense of revolutionary mission, the idea that art could set people free. He once called his paintings "material tokens of the freedom of thought"--a lovely phrase. In On the Threshold of Liberty, from 1937, a cannon takes aim at images representing some of the conventional sign systems that beguile us every day--sex, the sky, nature--as well as a few, like horses' bells and doily-cut paper patterns, that were among Magritte's odd recurrent motifs. What will happen when the cannon fires? Then again, what will happen if it doesn't?

Is it too much to think of Magritte's art as a kind of cautionary note for the Internet age? With its warnings about the treachery of images and the ways language itself is a disinformation campaign, it's a collective metaphor about the limits of knowledge and the pitfalls of communication. It's aimed at us, bent over our phones and keyboards, eagerly retrieving "information," all the while punked, all of us, almost all the time.

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