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MAGRITTE A Life by Alex Danchev and Sarah Whitfield
Even people who don't know the name René Magritte might recognize the man in his bowler hat, the lonely wanderer in the black coat, haunted in many of his paintings. Sometimes he turned his back to us when he appeared, or there was a green apple floating in front of him, hiding more than he exposed.
Magritte does not intend to use this painting as a self-portrait, although it does resemble the artist physically, a sober existence, wearing a suit and slippers while painting and avoiding bohemian adventures. As we learned in Alex Danchev’s first full biography, Magritte: A Life, the Belgian Surrealist didn’t like Traveling and having little patience with the French Surrealists gathered in Paris cafes, they loudly declared that they wanted to reshape art into a lawless realm modeled on dreams and subconsciousness. For most of his adult life, Magritte lived on the outskirts of Brussels, living quietly with his wife Georgette and their dogs. Friends recalled that he never had a suitable studio. He placed the easel in the corner of the dining room, and there was no paint stain on the floor.
In other words, he is the incarnation of Flaubert's famous motto that artists should live methodically and keep their wildness for their work. His art is extremely subversive, based on his belief that everyday life is shrouded in mystery. The steam locomotive protrudes from the marble fireplace into the spotless living room; the street lights on the dark boulevard under the bright blue sky at noon; the painting of the wooden pipe with the words "This is not a pipe", probably because it is a one A painting that can’t be smoked or filled with tobacco-he created a visual mystery that feels almost as clear and understandable as our personal memory.
His painting style is deliberately general. In this century of advocating abstraction as new and radical, Magritte prefers a clear and ultra-clear image brand without revealing traces of his personal brushwork. The idea that an artist should have his own "touch" makes him feel both magnificent and ridiculous. He paid the price for his sentimentality. Some critics believe that he is essentially an illustrator and that he failed to gain the prestige conferred by the more experimental and improvisational characters of Surrealism, such as Joan Miro or Alberto Giacometti.
As Danchev reported in his biography, Magritte rarely had financial worries and was frugal until the last ten years of his life. It would be great if we knew more! Danchev, a British historian and author of a popular biography of Paul Cezanne, died suddenly in 2016 at the age of 60 before finishing his latest book. Sarah Whitfield, a British art historian and co-author of the Magritte Catalog, provided the final chapter. Overall, this book is easy to understand, factually reliable, and has 439 pages, without the exaggeration of many recent biographies.
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Magritte's vision is almost inseparable from a tragedy that happened in his childhood. Born in the small town of Lessings in 1898, he is the eldest son of a tailor. He grew up in a middle-class family and began painting at a young age. One winter night in 1912, when he and his two younger brothers were sleeping, their mother walked out of the bedroom and walked to the banks of the Sambre River and drowned. Eighteen days passed before her body was retrieved from the river.
Legend has it that when she was found, her face was covered by wet pajamas, and her torso was exposed. This creepy detail was later cited as the source of a large number of masked heads in Magritte’s works, such as his heavily copied "Lovers II" (1928), a symbol of romantic frustration. It depicts a cinematic close-up of a man and a woman kissing, their lips never touch, and their heads are wrapped in white cloth.
Magritte refused to talk about his mother's death, even privately, and believed that psychology was a pseudoscience. Danchev didn't talk much about this topic, only saying that "the moment his mother was fished out of the whirlpool, it is very unlikely that he was present." Even so, it is fair to say that his mother's death and the years before Depression must be related to the fear that prevails in his works.
Danchev took a firmer stand when describing Magritte's career. For a while, he made a living from commercial art, drawing designs for wallpaper. He painted on the side in an abstract, nominally cubist style. In 1923, when he saw a copy of Giorgio de Chirico's masterpiece "Song of Love" (1914), he suddenly woke up. Composed of various poetic mismatched objects (a faintly visible plaster head of a Greek god, a rubber glove nailed to the wall, a green ball), it reminds Magritte of the possibility of a new representative painting Sex, where fragmentation and isolation rule.
In September 1927, Magritte moved to Paris and met the French surrealist group. Under their influence, he created his most original works, including what he called "calligraphy and painting", such as pipes that are not pipes. (Surprisingly, a breath of Parisian air once did it.) However, Magritte was still an embarrassing interloper among the Surrealists. The authoritarian poet André Breton, the leader of the movement, bought some of Magritte's works as his own collection, but mocked him for speaking French and having a Walloon accent. Brittany hardly mentions him in his extensive writings.
Danchev recounted a quarrel that occurred during a small gathering in Brittany in 1929. Brittany flaunted his contempt for Catholicism and asked Georgette Magritte why he was wearing a cross. He suggested that she remove it. She and Magritte left the party in a rage, and soon left Paris completely.
“It can be said that Magritte’s art biography ended when he left Paris in 1930,” the critic Suzi Gablik wrote in her eloquent artist monograph, which was about him. The first English book (1970). Gablik is a New Yorker born and raised. She lived in Magritte’s attic for eight months while studying her book since 1959, suggesting his fascination with the new generation of Americans.
Marcel Duchamp must have something to do with Magritte’s new reputation in the United States. Duchamp, an influential Dadaist who claimed to be a former Frenchman and former painter, lived in Greenwich Village at the time, admiring Magritte's philosophical inclinations and pointing collectors in his direction. Magritte was also admired by many young artists who explored the sadness of ordinary objects, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, all of whom acquired horses in the early 1960s. The work of Gritt.
In 1965, after holding a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Magritte flew to New York to participate in the opening ceremony. Accompanying him is his wife and their pet dog Loulou, a furry Pomeranian. During his stay, he was introduced to important artists and critics, but Magritte did not speak English and seemed not interested in the people he met. He liked the New York avant-garde in the 1960s as much as he liked the French avant-garde in the 1920s.
Only two years later, he died of pancreatic cancer in 1967 at the age of 68. In the following decades, his reputation has grown exponentially, and his image has been religiously absorbed into high culture and popular culture. He may be the only artist who has attracted both the failure of language and the postmodernist obsessed with illusion rock music. There is no doubt that he himself will pretend to be indifferent to the news, but the rest of us must at least be slightly impressed by Paul McCartney’s quotation of a painting of Magritte’s Green Apple as the source of the Beatles’ Apple company name.