11/23/2023 0 Comments Rene magritte reflection painting![]() In Magritte’s native Belgium, the Musée Magritte opened in 2009 with a collection of roughly 200 works, and last year a comprehensive Magritte biography was published, written by Alex Danchev and completed by Sarah Whitfield. A 2006 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art demonstrated his influence on contemporary art, and in 2011 a group exhibition at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, titled “La Carte D’Après Nature” after one of his pieces, used him as a starting point for works that render quotidian things in unsettling ways. Magritte’s work has always held our attention and continues to intrigue. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and behaving just like everybody else.” “His object to bring into disrepute the whole apparatus of bourgeois reality. “He is a secret agent,” said critic George Melly. “I am not eager to singularize myself,” he explained. Instead, our attention is held by the strangeness of what’s depicted.Īnd just like his painting technique, Magritte made himself unnoticeable by settling in a Brussels suburb as a bourgeois gentleman not unlike the bowler-hatted men that frequently star in his canvases. What we do see in his work is a deliberate lack of painterliness his canvases are flatly realistic, deflecting our interest in their execution. “We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.” “Everything we see hides another thing,” said Magritte in an interview toward the end of his life. A bright daytime sky might blaze above a street at dusk, a country landscape may actually be a canvas, and the blue of an eye could just be a reflection of an azure sky. Making viewers and artists scratch their heads since his 20th-century heyday, Magritte’s enigmatic images portray everyday things in uncanny ways. Through his art, Magritte contended that appearances are deceptive. The Belgian Surrealist famously insisted, for instance, in his painting The Treachery of Images (1928–1929) that the pipe it depicts was not actually a pipe, inscribing Ceci n’est pas une pipe in cursive letters below it. Perhaps only the eye knows if art is a reflection of life or truly just a false mirror.In the meticulously rendered paintings of René Magritte, nothing’s really as it seems. Magritte claimed that “regardless of its realism a painting’s imagery should not be confused with objects of the real world.” The near photorealistic eye filled with a cloud swept sky demonstrates his Surrealist intentions and his deep desire to bombard the viewer with contradictions.Thus, Magritte’s all-seeing eye watches its success as befuddled viewers meander in the gallery trying to answer the questions raised in his work. Hung uncommonly high at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the unblinking stare of that single eye appears omniscient, an all-seeing judge, observing its audience coldly from above. Man Ray, who owned the piece from 1933-36, memorably claimed that The False Mirror was a painting that “sees as much as it itself is seen.” This impression is furthered by how the piece is usually shown. Thus, a painted cautionary tale to not trust our own eyes, let alone the eye staring back down at us. ![]() ![]() The harsh lines around the lashless lids create a vivid visual distinction between the deadened reality of the stretched skin and the softness of that dreamlike blue sky. The eyelids seem stretched in a mix of wonder and fear, an emotion that is mimicked by the audience. The lively, nearly luminescent iris is starkly juxtaposed with the black, vacant pupil. ![]() Even the artistic construction of the eye assaults the viewer’s anatomical understanding. By using the eye as art object and subject, Magritte undermines the basic assumptions of seeing. ![]() Rene Magritte even titled the work - with help from his friend Paul Nouge, a Belgian Surrealist writer - to juxtapose the mechanical reflection of the mirror with the selective and subjective reflection of the human eye.Ĭlearly, Magritte intended this piece to disturb the viewer by blurring the lines between the viewer and the viewed. The Mona Lisamay follow you covertly with her eyes but the single, vacant side-eye of The False Mirror is just plain unsettling.Īs viewers gaze into the eye - an abstract window to the sky - the eye simultaneously looks back at them, both seeing and being seen. ![]()
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