Fig. 1 René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced), 1937.Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
Fig. 1 René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced), 1937.Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
| LESSONS IN LOOKING | MORE RETHINKING MAGRITTE – THE UNCANNINESS OF THE Z-AXIS By Craig McDaniel *** The Montréal Review, January 2026 |
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‘Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.’ – Maurice Denis 1 Even during the revolutionary development of Modernism, the most effective paintings continued to emphasize a traditional formula: the fusion of form and content. In the period of the 1920s to the 1960s, especially startling interconnections of psychological meaning and mimesis (imitation of the real world) came from the brush of the great twentieth-century Belgian Surrealist, René Magritte. It’s easy to condense the functionality of his approach – his paintings explore representation, mystery, and the mystery of representation. But what else remains to be said about Magritte’s art? Surprisingly, in the wake of Maurice Denis’s influential, 1914 proclamation – ‘Remember that a picture…is essentially a flat surface covered with colors…’ – what gets overlooked are the specific experiments with formal elements that Magritte conducted. Denis’s concise formula (the assemblage of colors creates the picture) leaves out key intermediary steps. Colors create shapes and textures; colors create spatial relationships; colors create a composition. In the case of Magritte’s studio practice, the manipulation of perspective produces a special type of spatial ambiguity. (Readers of my earlier essays in The Montreal Review may recall my analysis of pictorial concoctions. Magritte’s art features his own startling versions.) Fluctuations of depth on the picture plane create juxtapositions; in Magritte’s imagery, the juxtapositions are controlled, not left to chance as in the famed pairing of ‘a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’ that the Paris-based arm of the Surrealist movement adopted as its leitmotif. Magritte’s imagery never takes shape by chance. His images unfold according to plan. That plan being to reveal fresh perspectives of the human condition, accomplishing the task in a manner that is distinctive. Unmistakably Magritte. What else is left out of commentary on Magritte’s art? How inimitable and unmistakable his painting style is. See how palpable the pair of figures appear in La reproduction interdite (Not to be reproduced), illustrated at the start of this essay. They aren’t distorted or flattened, not dreamlike nor nightmarish. To contemporary viewers, Magritte’s style might appear illustrational, not quite ‘real’ – why is this? Because, in the third decade of the 21st century, we expect a fully ‘realistic’ image to offer the hyper-detailed accuracy of the photographic (this expectation results from our culture being bombarded 24/7 with digital camera-captured views). A patient look at the painted image, however, should convince you (I hope) of the ample visual rewards: Magritte’s colors shimmer! In Not to be Reproduced, the subtle selection of browns, grays, gold, and cream-colored skin – plus a teal green book cover – combine so the arrangement sings in a coherent key. Pitch-perfect tones of the freshest arrangement of hue and shade. Not to be reproduced exhibits other key hallmarks of Magritte’s mastery. Extraneous details and foreshortening are banished. Primary dimensions align parallel to the picture plane. Every surface exists in an atmosphere suffused with a consistent, glowing illumination. The painting’s subject – a man looking at himself in a mirror – stands before us with clarity. Not photographically real. Heaven no! more real than real. Magically surreal. Some biographical nuggets: It isn’t that Magritte didn’t appreciate the value of photographs. He was ahead of the curve (like Picasso and Salvador Dali), in recognizing how photographs could be invaluable in creating a ‘curated’ vision of the artist for the public. Photographic portraits invariably show Magritte as the picture of calm, dressed as a gentleman, wearing his trademark bowler hat – such a visual presentation of equipoise (buttressed by the public’s acceptance of the verifiable evidence the camera provides) stood in contrast, and dramatic tension to two alternative realities. First, the dandy standing in the photo (Magritte) seems in contrast to the strange mysteriousness of his views of reality, offered in his art. And, secondly, life itself, his life, contained some serious disorder, some dramatic ups and downs. His long-standing relationship to his wife Georgette was frayed by his fondness for ‘women of the night’, and her affair with one of Magritte’s closest friends and collaborators strained their marriage at the darkly spiraling-down period in the opening years of World War II. During the conflicts (military and marital), Magritte fled, alone, to France, for several months, at the start of the Nazi occupation of Belgium. What else? Exhaustion, depression. Critical rebuke. Estrangement from André Breton, the patriarchal leader of the Parisian surrealists. Later, years of financial difficulties meant making artistic forgeries (of paintings by Picasso, Juan Gris, even Titian!) to pay the bills. Through it all, a cadre of loyal supporters championed Magritte’s brilliance, suggesting ideas for future images, coining apt, poetic titles for his artworks. Reconciliation with Georgette.2 And, ultimately, growing fame as a painter who provided the world a unique, fresh understanding of our human condition. Secrets behind mirrors and windows René Magritte (1897–1968). In the decades since his death, his recognizable pictures remain widely popular. Many viewers today find his paintings puzzling in the best sense of the word (puzzles that probe the universe). Other viewers (sometimes those very same viewers) worry that his art doesn’t experiment with formal matters with as much panache as other prominent early 20th century avant-garde artists’ art (e.g., Picasso, Matisse, or Max Ernst). Astute viewers might shake their heads wondering why his art explores the relationship of words and images, as well as metaphysical concepts of space and time, with fervor, while his images of women remain fraught with the frisson of objectification. But for me, what is most valuable is recognizing how Magritte’s art functions rhetorically and poetically. To accomplish this – the rhetorical/poetic aim – Magritte relies on painting’s superpower: a painting invents its own truth. The conviction of truth makes it so. Consider, again, Magritte’s Not to be reproduced [Fig. 1]. Here, in a commissioned portrait of an English collector, Edward James, Magritte depicts the reverse view of a man’s head and upper torso. We ‘read’ the image as a man standing before a mirror. A mirror reproduces visual forms that pass in front of it. Yes? But the mirror in the artwork offers an alternative, compelling truth. The painted mirror accomplishes what no actual mirror can – it transforms the man’s reflection around 180 degrees so that the back of his head faces front, thereby mirroring exactly how he appears, to us, in the ‘real’ world, on our side of the reflective glass, on our side of the painting. Not to be missed: the pale green book’s reflection operates in a traditional format, so the book is in front of the figure on our side of the mirror, while the book is behind the figure inside the mirror. When you look at the painting closely, its compositional simplicity reveals a complex nested set of relationships. Furthermore, the artwork disarms us, deftly, by registering into the viewing equation our individual relationship to the imagery. Looking at the painting, a viewer’s perspective is in alignment with the painted portrait. The viewer’s back (my back when I look at not to be reproduced) is turned, away from the real world (outside the painting). As a viewer, I too enter the heightened mental landscape of a painting containing a mirror containing a reflection. Oh, what a perplexing, enchanted domain. Another example: In a painting of a window (Evening Falls) [Fig. 2], Magritte demonstrates yet another visual (scopic) paradox – here, a layer of glass contains, physically, the scene one sees through the window. The painting collapses traditional perspective – in the broken window far becomes near, and, through this depiction, Magritte shatters customary notions of what transparency means and how windows function. The image doesn’t depict a new reality, but it serves to depict reality anew. The outdoor scene seen from the room remains; but what one would see in the window – if the window, à la Humpty Dumpty, were put back together – has fallen to the floor in jagged shards. Meanwhile, the outside landscape remains in place, placid, unchanging, exactly as before.
Fig. 2 René Magritte, Le soir qui tombe (Evening Falls), 1964. Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm. Menil Collection, Houston
There are, to be sure, multiple levels of meaning at work in Evening Falls – including a consideration of representation, and the representation of representation, and the relationship of visual imagery to verbal naming. And, not to be overlooked, the imagery’s reimagining of a veritable mainstay of tradition, the painted landscape. Magritte’s painting’s title (as is true of virtually all his picture’s names) does not illustrate, nor merely describe the image; the image does not illustrate the title; they collaborate; they reverberate; the poignancy of both underscores a prevalent theme throughout Magritte’s body of work – the loneliness, the emotional chasms of separation, the human condition. Writing, in 1938, about de Chirico’s art, Magritte touches on his own aesthetic aims, to compose ‘a new vision, in which the viewer rediscovers his isolation and hears the silence of the world.’3 In Evening Falls, the silence is tangible; the painting freezes the breakage of glass; the sun will neither rise nor set. The countryside in the background duplicates (and is duplicated by) the partially shattered scene in the glass in the foreground. A painting of a window opening onto a landscape: a view of a view of a view. The human condition: Understanding is illusory, and yet the illusion itself is all there ever is. Our capacity for representation is all that’s real. Is Magritte’s painting utterly strange? When, or where, in everyday existence, might we encounter such an unexpected collapsed view? – when might the window contain the landscape; when transparency is not a clear passing through the glass to deeper space, but deep space, instead, has collapsed and fused with the window’s surface? As I worked on this essay, an adolescent, red-shouldered hawk visited, often, our backyard in Indianapolis. His parents raised him in a nest a hundred feet higher in a nearby pine. Now he is on his own, and our birdbath (just his size and shape when he takes a ‘roosting’ position) served as a welcome cooling retreat from summer heat. When Jean and I watch the hawk through a window in our kitchen, the hawk customarily will not recognize us as forms behind the glass; looking directly in our direction, he only sees the window (all colors drift across its singular surface). Only a dozen feet away – and possessing the astounding eyesight of a raptor – he does not perceive its transparency; he normally does not look through the glass. It is only if we shift positions suddenly that our actions cast a corresponding change in the colors and shadows that he then sees us as a puzzling fusion, as part of the window that isn’t window, and he recognizes something amiss, some riddle that disturbs his universe. This is the dynamic that Magritte builds in his paradoxical painting. The conviction of truth makes things so. Biographical nugget: In spite of life’s turmoil (or because of life’s turmoil), Magritte produced over 1,200 paintings and hundreds of drawings. That’s a new painting every two weeks, on average, for forty years. What is Surrealism? What is Surrealism? What is surreal? Art historians credit the publication, in 1924, of French poet André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism as the ignition that sparked the movement, a movement that focused on giving artistic form to interiorized mental states.Breton’s approach to Surrealism is defined as much by how it takes shape as by what shape it takes. Specifically, Breton championed automatism. Especially, automatic writing. Letting words flow in a stream of unchecked consciousness. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, served as a heady influence: through free association, a mind produces a rush of imagery: the Sur-real! [Sur = beyond] The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms summarizes the movement: ‘[Surrealism] seeks to break down the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, exploring the resources and revolutionary energies of dreams, hallucinations, and sexual desire.’4 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Magritte would have been considered a somewhat minor, though gifted, peripheral player. Now, as Surrealism enters its second century, Magritte is one of the irreplaceable giants (Salvador Dali and Max Ernst his only true European rivals) among all the Surrealists in visual art. His achievement expanded the movement, placing an increased emphasis on philosophy, on representation as a concept (including quoting others’ images), and on seamless craftsmanship. (Magritte’s polished technique contrasts decisively with automatism, a strategy that generated, especially in poetry, lightning-quick images composed and completed presumably without the editing of critical consciousness). As Siegfried Gohr asserts, ‘[Magritte’s] word pictures mounted a definite resistance to the fantasy and activation of the unconscious as a source of imagery pursued by the group around Breton.’5 Magritte’s influence endures. By painting a smoking pipe with a caption (that translates as this is not a pipe) a painting can disclaim (even while it proves) the crucial linkage between reality and representation (if you’re curious, check out online Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images). Magritte pursued a pathway that hinted at changes underway, in a shift towards Postmodernism and semiotics (the study of systems of signs). Language is dynamic, changing as culture changes; today the adjective “surreal” is in wide public use, applied to disparate events that contain all manner of bizarre conditions and actions. Indeed, the so-called ‘real world’ of the twenty-first century is so chock full of the unexpected, of the juxtaposition of diverse images (hello social media, AI, and the evening news) that with the constant shuffling of the deck of ideas (including conspiracy theories!) from a wide cultural spectrum, it’s not much of a stretch to claim that being surreal is now the new normal: There were about fifty people in the room at the Secretary of War Suite, a surprisingly small number, Lavingia thought, if this was all of DOGE. [DOGE – Department of Government Efficiency, Trump administration, circa 2025] When Musk walked in, he asked attendees to share their recent victories, and pontificated about how broken the government was…‘It was this very surreal [emphasis added] scene,’ Lavingia said. He tried to engage Musk in a conversation about a project, but “everyone looked at me like I was weird. . . .’6 The Menaced Assassin Consider, as another distinctive example of Magritte’s art, The Menaced Assassin, 1927. [Fig. 3] In contrast to the more pared-down imagery in the previous pair of paintings we’ve examined, The Menaced Assassin is packed with subject matter, subject matter that hints at a narrative, that something is brewing, trouble and danger are in the air. Right of center, a rather ordinary-looking man in a dark suit postures. He leans in, he listens closely, looks curiously at the large ‘sound horn’ of a record player. He rests one hand on the small table, keeps the other tucked inside a pocket. Head cocked, his pose signifies he’s a man with all the time in the world (or, alternatively, he wants to give the impression of nonchalance). Nearby, just outside the central figure’s line of vision, twin figures lurk. One carries a war club, the other steadies a net large enough to subdue a struggling fugitive. Each wears a bowler hat. They wait, still as statues – they wait for their chance to strike, to subdue, if necessary, even to maim the man who muses staring into the gramophone. While, here, Magritte’s subject matter darkens, the style, at least to my contemporary eyes, looks wry, with a touch of wit underlying the melodramatic pantomime.
Fig. 3 René Magritte, The Menaced Assassin, 1927. Oil on canvas, 152 x 195 cm. Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
In Surrealist Painting, Simon Wilson identifies the central figure in The Menaced Assassin as Fantomas, the ‘eponymous master-criminal hero’ of a pulp fiction series that became popular in France in the 1910s.7 The specific source for the artist’s image, with two figures flanking a doorway, is from a 1913 film based on the series.8 What is so attractive to the Surrealists about Fantomas? Art historian Suzi Gablik describes the allure of each episode’s topsy-turvy turmoil: ‘[Fantomas] . . . was a diabolical criminal who constantly brewed misfortune and never got caught. . . The Surrealists admired Fantomas because he could outwit the forces of the law . . . he always escaped. . . substituting some imbecile who would take his place on the guillotine.’9 (The plot thickens: in his 2020 biography of Magritte, Alex Danchev hypothesizes that the man waiting at the gramophone might even be the ‘imbecile’ who Fantomas has duped into taking the blame for his evil deed.10) Championing Fantomas, the Surrealists were not alone in turning an outlaw into an anti-hero positioned at the center of a story. (e.g., Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.) So, to dig deeper: why did the Surrealists marvel at an anti-hero? One reason: because, in the aftermath of World War One, the world reeled from what rational thinking, power politics, and political rationales had wrought. Over six feet wide, The Menaced Assassin is one of Magritte’s largest canvases. As Maurice Denis emphasized: compositional factors operate on the level of painting as painting, its mechanics. In the case of Magritte’s monumental painting, the composition coheres with intense purpose, capturing in its arrangement of colors, the objects and figural elements those colors denote; additionally, and with mesmerizing effect, the colors construct the arc of an implied plot. Which is?? Well, that’s the heart of the painting’s charm (“charm” as in to cast a spell) – the plot is hard to pin down with certainty. Consider the arrangement of the figures – their symmetry, their patterning. Then, the kicker – the female in the center of The Menaced Assassin. By the way he poses her, Magritte insinuates parallels between her form and a sleeping Venus. A specialist would delight in recognizing that Paul Delvaux, a French surrealist contemporaneous with Magritte, completed his paintings Sleeping Venus (1944) and The Night Train (1947) with reclining figures each in a pose, from the waist down, that mirrors the pose of Magritte’s reclining figure: The shift of the left leg off the furniture, causing a slight parting of the thighs, provides the jolt of an electric current. An electric current? Feminist theory would posit that the pairing of sex and violence in Magritte’s The Menaced Assassin anchors male and female power relationships in a binary system that is as old as the hills and young as the latest mass media spectacle. But it’s not altogether clear if the male figure in the painting’s center really controls the reins, or if the sexual allure of the victim exerts a more powerful pull. In avant-garde drama and films of the 20th century, the person making the creative production is the central subject; in fact, this is a leitmotif of modernism. As in cinema/theatre, so in painting: the creator’s vision becomes the ur-perspective that structures the mode in which meaning and medium bond. Notice how strongly Magritte’s paintings resemble stage sets with proscenium arches. Biographical nugget: Magritte’s mother died, from suicide, when he was fourteen. Her body was recovered in a river, her head shrouded by her nightgown. It may surprise some viewers (it surprised me!) to learn that Magritte, being anti-Freudian, insisted his images are not symbolic; the objects are what they are. If we hypothesize symbolic content, our interpretation runs counter to the artist’s intent. However, bear in mind: no artist (none, zero) always knows best at what levels their art resonates. Maybe the menacing figure on the left carries a war club and the sign of a phallus. Maybe the decapitated nude with her shrouded neck symbolizes the painter’s mother? And, if we follow this line of thinking, then do we identify the figure at the gramophone as Magritte (the eponymous ‘menaced assassin’ of the painting’s title)? The artist did harbor deep-down-dark memories of this primal episode; art historian Siegried Gohr writes, ‘Magritte’s silence on this event [his Mom’s suicide by drowning] was eloquent. He once related how, as a boy, he had sensed that he had become the centre [sic] of people’s attention as the son of someone who had committed suicide.’11 Happy to be the focus (and maybe guilty feeling so). Can such hyper-self-awareness, and the recollection of the drama of his childhood, play out in – or be shut out from – his paintings?
Fig. 4 René Magritte, The Menaced Assassin, DETAIL.
Although Magritte disavowed any Freudian implications to the objects and figures in his art, our taking the artist strictly at his word is an unnecessary stricture. We are (and must be) free to inspect and imagine compelling alternative interpretations as we see fit. What works for the artist works for the viewer: conviction makes things so. (Fair warning: an idiosyncratic interpretation may convince an audience of only one.) Of the shapeliness of the gramophone in the detail illustrated above – see how it resembles the curving shape of the painter’s representation of the nude’s pudendum flowing visually into the negative space between the thighs. This thought triggers the possible recognition that the man (Magritte?) stands staring into the abyss of the birth canal. While the nude woman and the three men in the foreground dominate others’ interpretations of The Menaced Assassin, I want to turn attention to the curious trio of men who peer through the balcony in the background. (Their expressions denote curiosity from within; their pose stirs our curiosity by their unusual placement in the picture’s stylized space, which resembles a melodrama’s stage-set. Their relationship to the female nude insinuates multiple provocative possibilities – including Susanna and the elders.) A close examination makes room for registering that the trio of males, whose heads are sliced off at the neck (!) by the balcony’s balustrade, look uniformly to the picture’s right. They signal something or someone remains out of sight beyond the gramophone. To bolster this discussion, however, we need to turn to a freshly-minted concept and terminology: the pictorial concoction.
Fig. 5 René Magritte, The Menaced Assassin, DETAIL.
The Uncanniness of the Z-Axis If colors on a flat surface are to succeed in becoming a battle horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort – as Maurice Denis remarked – then the ‘certain order’ in which they are assembled provides the recipe. If the picture mimics subject matter as it appears in the ‘real world’ – i.e., mimesis – one key is how to represent volumes that occupy three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. How can the picture represent volumes in depth? Or, to state the challenge in terms of Cartesian coordinates: How can the picture represent the arrangement of the subject matter’s location(s) on the X, Y, and Z-axis?
Fig. 6
By fiddling with the Z-axis (using the verb ‘fiddling’ I don’t mean to trivialize; the word is meant to connote the playful, exuberant experimentation that is, truly, at the heart of the creative process) artists have produced countless images in which depth reveals a flexible capacity. Indeed, while the relationship of positions on the X and Y axis remain relatively stable and fixed in a composition (throughout the history of art), positions on the Z-axis (undergoing a push and pull that remains dynamic) foster a range of change. This essay opened with examples from Magritte’s bold output of paintings. In Carte Blanche (Fig. 7), the artist has, arguably, trumped all his previous efforts to provoke an uncanny effect by reordering near and far in strips. The anxiety of the overthrow of traditional space is juxtaposed with the calming equipoise of the horse and her prim lady rider. The result is a pictorial concoction extraordinaire, not limited to one element but extending across the entire composition.
Fig. 7 René Magritte, Carte Blanche (or The Blank Signature), 1965. Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. National Gallery of Art.
What is a pictorial concoction?12 A pictorial concoction is a juxtaposition created by the collapse of forms separated by depth onto the picture plane; this produces a fresh perception, made possible by the plasticity of formal elements in service of representation, and this process produces a new conception. Forms, separated by distance, appear to fuse together on the plane of the image. The resulting visual event carries a charge – a charge of new energy which, typically, may contain fresh traces of the aesthetic, psychological, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and/or paradoxical meaning. Examples abound. Magritte would have seen examples in the art of the Italian Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978) whose work became especially influential for the Surrealists in Paris under the leadership of Breton. In de Chirico’s paintings of 1910 – 1918, known as his metaphysical paintings, disjointed and extremely elongated perspective produces illusions of immense spaces coupled with feelings of anxiety and loneliness. Inserted into the imagery periodically are elements that collapse near and far, thereby creating a strange juxtaposition on the surface of the artwork. In The Arrival (Fig. 8), notice how the black trail of smoke – presumably issuing from a passing train that is hidden by the distant city wall, now seems, within the painting, to conjoin with the sculpted figure of a man who dominates the piazza in the foreground. This pictorial concoction evokes an air of the enigmatic, in which objects appear to be linked in networks of invisible mythologies of purpose. The thematic weight that de Chirico anticipated by his incorporation of the pictorial concoction can be measured by the increased prominence of the train smoke in the finished painting in comparison to an earlier sketch [see Fig. 9].
Fig. 8 Giorgio de Chirico. The Arrival (La meditazione del pomeriggio), 1912-1913. The Barnes Foundation.
Fig. 9 De Chirico, sketch, The Arrival of Autumn, 1912.
The process in which space is manipulated, perceptually and conceptually, through a pictorial concoction doesn’t exhaust Magritte’s experimentation with depth. For example, in Golconda (1953), [Fig. 10] the artist reinvigorates the tradition of linear perspective: as the viewer scans the landscape/airscape of the picture, striving to ‘make sense’ of the vast army of bowler-hatted figures who appear in front of, above, and behind a nondescript row of houses, something subtle and unsettling takes place. Looking at any one of the hatted figures (do they rise? Do they fall? Are they hovering in place?) leads us, inevitably, to link that figure with another and another. Our view gauges the diminishing relative sizes of nearby figures – a comparison that produces the illusion that the figures are receding in depth. This leads to a startling illusion – that linear perspective operates along multiple, shifting pathways, receding at various angles into space, into sky. The result is a disorienting coupling of the frozen stasis of the painted image and spatial instability. Cartesian coordinates have, literally, flown out the window.
Fig. 10. René Magritte, Golconda, 1953. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. The Menil Foundation, Houston.
FINALE: Magritte vs. Breton Their relationship was rocky. Breton was no pushover – he strove to demarcate and then maintain the boundaries of Surrealism with strict zeal. (Which, as art critic Jackson Arn observes, is more than a little contradictory for a movement that claims to be revolutionary.) The zenith of the original movement can be identified with art of the 1920s and 1930s; its absolute bullseye was Paris, late 1920s. While Magritte lived most of his life in Brussels, removed from the central action, he lived in Paris, 1927-1930, where he became involved with Breton and his pathfinding development of the new direction. Both men admired a few significant forerunners. The eerie paintings of Italian piazzas, with disjointed perspectives and elongated shadows, by Giorgio de Chirico (circa 1910 – 1924), and Max Ernst’s first collage novel, Les Malheurs des immortels (1922), contain such glimmers, the telltale melding of the conscious with the subconscious, rational with the irrational. Magritte, reportedly, cried when he first saw a reproduction of a de Chirico painting. The emphasis on a poetic subject was a revelation – a revolution in sensibility. The falling out: a few factors seem paramount. Breton could never fully embrace any creative strategy other than automatism as the route to a surrealist artwork. For Breton, Tenet One was the phrase: ‘as beautiful as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’. This unusual simile belongs to Les Chants de Maldoror, an 1869 novel by Comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Uruguayan/French author Isidore-Lucien Ducasse). The chance pairing of objects will transform the ordinary, will produce what Breton called ‘convulsive’ beauty. Magritte, in contrast, staked his career on the thoughtful execution of carefully planned images. His paintings never happened by chance. Where Breton and Magritte would agree: the power of Breton’s daydream. Breton writes, ‘One evening... before I fell asleep, I perceived. . . the faint visual image of a man walking cut half-way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. ... what I saw was the simple reconstruction in space of a man leaning out a window. But this window shifted with the man, I realized that I was dealing with an image of a fairly rare sort, and all I could think of was to incorporate it into my material for poetic construction.’13 The ‘image of a man walking cut half-way up by a window’ produces a special combination, a holistic whole of uncommon power. Window + truncated torso. Magritte triples the effect in The Menaced Assassin: A trio of men are cut in half by the window; their heads are cut off, decapitated by the balcony’s railing. In his magisterial paintings, Magritte captures the essence of each thing: chair-ness of a chair, the curtain-ness of a curtain. Focusing on the magic of subject matter as the essential raison d’être for his painting (that being a central idea Magritte discovered in de Chirico’s revelatory art), Magritte freed himself from concerns about experimenting with style. He leaned into an approach to painting that pares the depiction to visual conviction. Wallace Stevens’ specialist John Serio explains the poet’s art, and I think his statement applies with equal force to Magritte: “he fulfills his goal of making his imagination ours.”14 [my emphasis] Yes: Magritte’s illustrational style floats on such understatement – the idea is so clear and simple, so beautiful in its concision that, we may think, yes, of course, why didn’t we think of that!! The conviction makes it so. ‘Remember that a picture . . . is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.’ The luminosity of various blues in The Domain of Arnheim [Fig. 11], contributes powerfully towards the coherence of those three focal points – the moon, hawk’s head, and nest – that, by their alignment, produce a ‘soft’ pictorial concoction (one which the collapse of pictorial depth is softened, and never total). By Magritte’s choice of colors, the magic begins.
Fig. 11. René Magritte, The Domain of Arnheim, 1962. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
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