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The objectivity of collage -- taking an image from outside and putting it, whole and entire, in the fictional space of the painting -- appealed to Magritte, because he liked standardized images; it was their encounter and rearrangement that created the magic, more than the things themselves. "Our secret desire," he remarked, "is for a change in the order of things, and it is appeased by the vision of a new order . . . The fate of an object in which we had no interest suddenly begins to disturb us." Turned balusters, game pieces, the little round horse bells known as grelots, cut-out paper doilies, wood paneling, views through a window, fire, a birdcage, a rifle, a tuba, a pipe, loaves of bread, a naked woman: there wasn't much in Magritte's repertoire of images that couldn't have been seen by an ordinary Belgian clerk in the course of an ordinary day.
But assembled they are another thing -- just as Ernst's drawings made of rubbings from the floorboards of his seaside hotel became another thing. Here is the silent ugly cannon in the room of screens, each bearing a familiar image; in a second it will fire of its own accord, blowing the screens to shreds; we stand, as the title says, On the Threshold of Liberty. Some of Magritte's images have taken on, with time, a truly prophetic aura. One of these is Eternity (1935). Three pedestals in a museum, with a red rope stretched in front of them. On the left one, a medieval head of Christ. On the right, a head of Dante. In the center, a block of butter. A jab at the contented Belgian stomach, 60 years ago; but today you can't help thinking of the lumps of fat by Joseph Beuys that are enshrined in the world's museums, as though Magritte had been conducting satire in advance.
He painted in a perfectly deadpan style, neutral rather than "primitive" -- serviceable, in a word. It came partly from posters and partly from kitsch art. "This detached way of representing things," he remarked, "seems to me to suggest a universal style, in which the quirks and little preferences of an individual play no role." It is meat-and-potatoes figuration, with no pretensions; if there were any pretensions in this world, where flotillas of loaves sail by in the evening sky like flying saucers and an innocent eye opens in the middle of a slice of ham on your plate, they would greatly reduce its credibility.
But the epigrammatic force can be irresistible, especially where Magritte reflects on sexual violence, alienation or loneliness: the couple trying to kiss through layers of cloth in The Lovers (1928), or The Titanic Days (1928), his image of attempted rape, in which the bodies of the terrified woman and the attacking man are fused together as in a grim photographic overlap. Often his color is extremely beautiful, though the viewer, intent on the visual conundrums, may not at first notice how powerful and tender it can be. But as his friend Louis Scutenaire wrote, "Magritte is a great painter. Magritte is not a painter." He had no interest in what the French called la belle matiere, and when he did essay it -- as in a series of pseudo-pastoral kitsch- classical paintings in the manner of Renoir, done during World War II -- he subverted it; these hot, sluglike nudes are of a brutal vulgarity exceeded only by late Picabia, who may in fact have influenced them.