Pipes, skies, the female body, chess pawns, bowler hats. These are just some examples of repetitive motifs found in the paintings of Belgian Surrealist, Rene Magritte. One can see these motifs and more at the current MoMA exhibit, “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938.” The selected paintings, which portray “ordinary” objects in peculiar ways, are among the higher echelon of his oeuvre, evidenced by the mass scholarship and commercialization of a number of these works. Who hasn’t seen that famous painting with a pipe, accompanied by the French words, translated as, “This is not a pipe”? Better known as The Treachery of Images (1929), this famous painting (now on view) is accessible to all – whether by being familiar with the work itself or by grasping its effect on art and philosophy. If this is not a pipe, then what is it? How can one represent a pipe? Essentially, what is representation? In other words, Magritte’s motifs have an effect on us all, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Pipes, skies, the female body, chess pawns, bowler hats. These are just some examples of repetitive motifs found in the paintings of Belgian Surrealist, Rene Magritte. One can see these motifs and more at the current MoMA exhibit, “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938.” The selected paintings, which portray “ordinary” objects in peculiar ways, are among the higher echelon of his oeuvre, evidenced by the mass scholarship and commercialization of a number of these works. Who hasn’t seen that famous painting with a pipe, accompanied by the French words, translated as, “This is not a pipe”? Better known as The Treachery of Images (1929), this famous painting (now on view) is accessible to all – whether by being familiar with the work itself or by grasping its effect on art and philosophy. If this is not a pipe, then what is it? How can one represent a pipe? Essentially, what is representation? In other words, Magritte’s motifs have an effect on us all, whether we are conscious of it or not.Upon arriving at the exhibit, I was told by a staff member that there would be a short wait before proceeding in. Nearly seven minutes later, I was looking at Magritte’s early Untitled drawings. However, it was his paintings, some small, others life-size, which impressed me. Encompassing the first central wall was The Menaced Assassin (1927). This painting always seemed odd to me, and seeing it in person heightened its inscrutability. The juxtaposition of a supine and bloodied nude woman in the middle ground with a bourgeois man (the assassin?) beside her is immediately striking. The addition of the two identical bourgeois men in bowler hats, standing in the foreground, and the mere heads of three men peering in from the background is baffling. What is the viewer to make of this collection of figures and their relationships to one another?
Also on view is Not to be Reproduced (1937), a painting which depicts a man standing before a mirror, but while the book on the ledge is correctly reflected, the back of the man’s head is seen, and thus reflected incorrectly. In portraying this, Magritte continues to toy with the viewer’s perceptions; yet again, how does the viewer synthesize the contradictory aspects of the painting? Furthermore, how is the viewer to make sense of The Rape (1934), a painting of a female face, where, in place of eyes are breasts, instead of a nose, a belly button, and replacing a mouth, a vagina? Substituting parts or objects for normally conceived ones is a running theme in the exhibited artworks. The viewer comes to realize this, in addition to many more puns concerning the notion of representation.
Walking through the exhibit–viewing the paintings and watching the various patrons and their reactions–facilitated the formation of the larger question at hand: what is the relationship between one Magritte painting and the next–between, for example, The Menaced Assassin and the painting adjacent to it? This is precisely where motifs come in. To understand Magritte’s paintings, is to contemplate them as a collective whole, where motifs function as the bridge between artworks.
The exhibit is successful in allowing the viewer to recognize the repeating motifs from one work to the next. Even with a cursory walk through the gallery, one can develop an immediate sense of Magritte’s style and the puns he uses. This is not to say that one can easily interpret a Magritte painting; however, through a collective discernment of the motifs and obscure juxtapositions, one begins to question the notion of representation and art, in general.
Similarly, while observing the museum-goers reactions, I noted a universality inherent in Magritte’s works. Different viewers, whether conversing in English, French, or Spanish, time and again chuckled at one painting, snickered at the next, and found themselves repulsed by another. Patrons of all ages were present, from college-age students like myself, to older men and women, to classes of first graders on field trips. A myriad of ages, genders, races, and ethnicities can be found in a Magritte exhibit like the current one. These viewers find themselves confounded by his art and asking more questions than obtaining answers.
While the average viewer will not emerge from the exhibit completely enlightened by the artworks, he/she will certainly attain an understanding of Magritte’s approach to representation. In doing so, the patron becomes introspective of how art functions in his/her daily life. The universality of the repetitive motifs makes it incumbent upon the viewer to ask, albeit not always answer, how the works collectively question perception, the subconscious, and ultimately engage with “The Mystery of the Ordinary.”