Spoofing Magritte

source: Arnold Zwiky's Blog
(a blog mostly about language)
no copyright infringement intended

(René Magritte)

René Magritte, Not To Be Reproduced

René Magritte, La Reproduction Interdite
oil on canvas, 1937
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
(Matteson Art)
no copyright infringement intended

(René Magritte)

René Magritte

René Magritte, Song of Love
(http://ghise.altervista.org/Magritte/slides/Magritte%20-%20Song%20Of%20Love.html)
no copyright infringement intended

• Mystery of Magritte
• More Magritte
• Magritte once more
• Toujours Magritte
• Rothko Chapel and the Menil Collection
• La Condition Humaine
• Not To Be Reproduced
• The Journey of René Magritte from Giorgio de Chirico to Odilon Redon
• Magritte in replica to Corot
• Two Paintings by Magritte
• Rob Gonsalves about René Magritte
• Jos de Mey, Ceci n'est pas un Magritte
• Ceci n'est pas une blague
• Magritte, inspired by Joseph Conrad
• Yasujirō Shimazu: Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke(1935)
• Spoofing Magritte

(Contemporary Art)

Yasujirō Shimazu: Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke(1935)

Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke (1935)
still from the movie
(MoviesPictures.org)
no copyright infringement intended

The above image brings in mind immediately Magritte, and his Lovers. Love in paradox, with the purity of a kōan. Road towards essence requests giving up the obvious and looking beyond. Like the painting of Magritte, this movie is purely symbolic.

I was looking on the Internet to find more movies by Shimazu, after discovering, in Our Neighbor Miss Yae, his unpaired perfection in framing each scene. The first I came upon was this film from 1935, Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke. To my surprise it was not a shōshimingeki story - a tale of the urban lower middle class in the 1930's Tokyo - as I would have expected. It was a period film, with the action taking place in Osaka in 1883, the fifteenth year of Meiji era. A blind girl of porcelain beauty, Okoto, a boy, Sasuke, serving her with total commitment.

Two worlds in parallel: their lack of mutual comprehension is total. The world of the mundane: flesh and blood governed by desire, joy and anger, generosity and villainy. The world of the essence, of the conceptual: you enter there by renouncing at all that kept you linked to the mundane, even your senses.

Everything in this movie is remarkable. Beside the gorgeous images, the splendid minimalism, the total restraint in the play of the actors impersonating Okoto and Sasuke (the two characters sublimated into the conceptual world), the tension in which the action is evolving, giving you the insupportable feel of inexorability, all this making an astonishing modern artwork. Difficult to watch, as end comes near. Like old age, it's not for sissies.

Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke (1935)
(video by NoCoverNoMinimum)

(Yasujirō Shimazu)

(René Magritte)

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)

Magritte, inspired by Joseph Conrad

- René Magritte: Almayer's Folly -

Kaspar Almayer is a Dutch merchant taken under the wing of the wealthy Captain Lingard. Desirious of one day inheriting Captain Lingard's wealth the young Almayer agrees to marry his adopted Malay child and run Lingard's trading post in Sambir in the jungles of Borneo. The marriage is loveless, Captain Lingard loses much of his fortune searching for a hidden treasure, and Almayer's ventures continually fail-most notably an expansive trading house that no one comes to trade in, which is why it is soon called Almayer's Folly. However a child named Nina is begotten from Almayer and his wife. The rest of the novel concerns Almayer's conflicting desires. His love for his daughter and trying to keep her from the Malayian influence of her mother and Almayer's desire for money and self-redemption take center stage. A Malay prince called Dain enters Sambir. Though Almayer tries to use the prince to help him find the treasure long sought after by Lingard, instead Dain is betrothed to Nina and leaves Sambir with his daughter and his aid but not his blessing. The loss of Nina and potential wealth stuns Almayer and he spends the rest of his days in the empty trading house he built as his sanity slips away (the first novel of Joseph Conrad, Almayer's Folly: a story of an Eastern river - as was summarized in Wikipedia).

And Magritte made an etching of Almayer's Folly. I saw it at Galerie Lareuse in Georgetown. The galerie was closed by the time I passed by; the etching was on display on the window, together with another of Magritte's: The Music Lesson - pretty weird, isn't it? while actually making perfect sense form the logical point of view :).






(Galerie Lareuse)


(René Magritte)

Magritte in replica to Corot

Corot painted his Monsieur Pivot on Horseback, sometime between 1850 and 1855. The painting is now at the London National Gallery. It is Corot's only equestrian portrait.
There is a subtle tension, between the rider and the forest. Who is the observer? Who is watching whom? Is it this Monsieur Pivot observing the surrounding forest? Or is it the forest that's watching the solitaire rider?
Magritte came with his Carte Blanche to push further the question raised by the painting of Corot. The tension here is between reality and illusion - the question that is put by all works of Magritte.



The Carte Blanche was made in 1939. It is now at the Washington National Gallery of Art.
























(René Magritte)

(Corot)

The Journey of René Magritte from Giorgio de Chirico to Odilon Redon

The journey of René Magritte started from the universe of Giorgio de Chirico. There is no wonder, as the Metaphysical Interiors of de Chirico contain within themselves so many directions the twentieth century art would take, from surrealism to pop.

Look at Magritte's La Traversée Difficile (the left image), painted in 1926, and then look at de Chirico's Metaphysical Interior (the top image), done in 1916.

The hero of Magritte, his ambiguous bilboquet, is placed as an observer into the metaphysical world of de Chirico: world of ambiguous objects that could be anything, even gates to other worlds. A universe of universes, perhaps our own, as we are living surrounded by objects that can be just theatrical masks, or windows towards the infinite, or maybe both.
There is another version of La Traversée Difficile, made in 1963 (the bottom image). I saw it on the monograph of Suzi Gablik (where I discovered also the painting of de Chirico). I looked for both of them on the web, without having success. I found all kind of Difficult Crossings and Metaphysical Interiors, but the versions from 1963 and 1916. Eventually I asked a colleague to scan them both from the book of Suzy Gablik - so I was able to insert them here.
The version from 1963 is far from the one made in 1929. The bilboquet became an anthropomorphic spectator, dressed in a black suit, wearing a white shirt and a tie - the way the typical character of Magritte was dressed - his head remained the one of the bilboquet, only the eye became ominous. And the universe was reduced to the essentials. The objects -gates to other worlds - opened and all worlds joined together.


The version of 1963 had no more to do with Giorgio de Chirico. It was rather a replica to Vision, the charcoal drawing of Odilon Redon. The works of Redon were compared to the poetry of Baudelaire. A lone wolf, like Puvis de Chavannes, his contemporary, he created with his lithographs a dream world situated beyond the visible. Redon's Vision is looking at you the way saints from Byzantine icons are looking.

And Magritte made the whole journey back in time, from Giorgio de Chirico to Odilon Redon.

(René Magritte)

René Magritte - La Condition Humaine

(René Magritte)

Rothko Chapel and the Menil Collection

Houston, Texas: the Rothko Chapel, and in front of it the Broken Obelisk created by Barnett Newman to honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King.



I saw the works of Rothko and Newman at the Washington National Gallery of Art - and there is a small Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection.
Hopefully I will have the possibility to see the Rothko Chapel during my brief staying in Houston.
And here three paintings from the Menil Collection, nearby the chapel. Picasso, a Still Life with Skull, then an astoundingly beautiful Magritte, La Clef de Verre, and a delicate Black Leaf on Green Background, painted by Matisse.
I leave you with them, I will be back at the end of next week.








(René Magritte)

Ceci n'est pas une blague

Be aware of the copperhead (and appreciate my replica to Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe)

Living in the woods of Fairfax County among deers, foxes, frogs.

Read more in the Fairfax Chronicle

(René Magritte)

Jos de Mey, Ceci n'est pas un Magritte

Lucrarea lui Magritte, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, a provocat si provoaca mereu replici. Jos de Mey a raspuns cu Ceci n'est pas un Magritte. Iata si alte replici:

• Ceci n'est pas Mimi
• Ceci n'est pas une tulipe
• Ceci n'est pas une Palomine
• Ceci n'est pas un dessin

si tot asa, ba chiar si Ceci n'est pas un blog (momentan dezactivat, din pacate)
Ceci n'est pas une tulipe e superba:



Believing before all else that indicators that exist as coherent, suitable and systematic signs exist truly and originally means the death of interpretation. On the contrary, the life of interpretation depends on believing only interpretation exists

Michel Faucault

(chiar asa, nu Foucault)

(René Magritte)

Rob Gonsalves about René Magritte

My first introduction to the work of Magritte helped to crystallize for me the direction that my work was to take. His work The Human Condition has a magical effect while being at the same time a straightforwardly realistic image. I had wanted to affirm that magical and wondrous experiences are not confined to the realm of dreams or subconscious, but rather be derived from our experience and conscious interpretation of the physical world. Magritte's magic realism helped me to see how I could achieve this.

Rob Gonsalves

(René Magritte)

Toujours Magritte

The Menaced Assassin, MoMA

The Palace of Curtains, MoMA

The Portrait, MoMA

The Thought which sees, MoMA

Le Ciel Meurtrier, Washington

(René Magritte)

Magritte once more

Voice of Space, Guggenheim

Empire of Light, Guggenheim

The Eternally Oblivious, Met

Memory of a Voyage, MoMA

The false Mirror, MoMA

The Lovers, MoMA

(René Magritte)

More Magritte

Tabloul este la Galeria Nationala de Arta din Washington si cred ca spune foarte mult despre ce ii aseamana si ce ii deosebeste pe Rene Magritte si Rob Gonsalves.

In fata ferestrei este asezat un sevalet, pe care se afla un tablou, care infatiseaza niscaiva natura - iar draperiile au rostul lor, sa sublinieze ca acolo se afla o pictura.

Insa este o pictura care isi cere dreptul ei la viata, natura evadeaza pe fereastra afara, iar pervazul are si el rostul lui, sa sublinieze ca natura este adevarata.

Titlul sporeste enigma, "La condition humaine". Pentru ca totul este o enigma aici. Care este in fond diferenta dintre viata si poveste, pare sa ne sugereze Magritte?

Viata cu povesti. Un bun prieten al meu, Marius Dobrin, are un blog, Viata cu povesti se numeste - l-a cam lasat de izbeliste de la o vreme, ocupat fiind cu alte proiecte, dar poate se va intoarce sa ne spuna cum aluneca povestea in viata si cum viata aluneca in poveste.

Viata cu povesti. Viata alunecand in poveste, povestea alunecand in viata. Rene Magritte le trateaza pe amandoua cu un pic de detasare, cu o iota de scepticism, cu oarece ironie, poate cu oleaca de cinism, dar numai oleaca. Este viata o poveste, sau povestea a devenit viata? Magritte ne pune doar intrebarea, poate ca nu cunoaste raspunsul, sau poate ca il stie si crede ca e mai bine sa nu ni-l spuna. De ce? Poate ca e un raspuns trist, cine stie?

Poate raspunsul nici nu exista, poate ca viata e doar o poveste. 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable, a spus odata Magritte

Sau poate ca socoate el ca e mai bine pentru noi sa il gasim singuri. Poate ca nu e un singur raspuns. Poate ca fiecare din noi are raspunsul lui.

Poate ca asta si este Conditia umana, fiecare din noi cautam si gasim alt raspuns.

Rob Gonsalves, ca si Chris Van Allsburg, ei cred insa ca raspunsul il putem afla doar daca incercam sa ne jucam alaturi de copiii nostri - si atunci povestile devin neaparat adevarate.




(René Magritte)

Mystery of Magritte

Rene Magritte, unul din maestrii de la care a pornit Rob Gonsalves. Obiecte obismuite, asezate intr-un contex neobisnuit, care le descopera noi sensuri.
























My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable. (René Magritte)




(René Magritte)