Two Paintings by Magritte

The Empire of Light, II, 1950
oil on canvas

I had seen another version of The Empire of Light two years ago, at the superb Menil Collection in Houston. It is full of mystery and of poetry. Like all Magritte's works, it accumulates oddities on purpose: sky in full day, city in full night, and some other, less obvious at first sight. And the greatest mystery here is that these oddities create a fine balance of the composition.

As for The Menaced Assassin, I knew it only from art books. A masterpiece of the Absurd: it is elegant, it is minimal, it is odd, it is crazy, it is perfect.

The Menaced Assassin, 1927
oil on canvas

Here's what the MoMA catalog says about The Menaced Assassin:

A woman's naked body, blood trickling from her mouth, lies on a couch. The well–dressed man who is presumably her killer—the assassin of the painting's title—stands ready to leave, his coat and hat on a chair and his bag adjoining, but he is delayed by the sound of music: languidly relaxed, he listens to a gramophone. Meanwhile two men (agents of the law?), oddly alike, wait in the foyer to ambush him, armed with club and net. And behind him three more men, triplets to the others' twins, watch from over the balcony, witnesses outside the action's frame—like reflections of the painting's viewers, peering in from the other direction.

Magritte's Belgian brand of Surrealism deals in clear visions with unclear meanings. Unlike the fantastic dreamscapes of Paris Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, his settings are strangely normal, and his protagonists are bourgeois gentlemen in ties and bowler hats. Yet he specialized in permanent irresolution, in mysteries without a key. The Menaced Assassin must be rooted in detective novels and movies, which fascinated Magritte, but its studied frozen quality, the impassivity of its actors, puts it in another dimension from the dime thriller.

Disturbingly, the gaze of the three men at the back meets the viewers' own. The murderer himself is menaced; the viewers themselves are viewed.

(MoMA)

(René Magritte)