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August 7 – November 27, 2005

The Fondation Beyeler is showing a large retrospective of the work of René Magritte, one of the most intriguing artists of the modern era. This is the first large-scale Magritte exhibition to be held in Switzerland for many years. It was organized in collaboration with the Kunstforum Wien, the Fondation Magritte, and Steingrim Laursen, former director of the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen. The exhibition presents a selection of about 95 works from all periods of Magritte’s career – many of his now-legendary images, but also paintings from private collections that have rarely been on public view before.

OEUVRE

 
La Lectrice soumise. Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm. Courtesy Ivor Braka Ltd., London © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

The Subjugated Reader, 1928

René Magritte was born in 1898 in Lessines, Belgium. He came of a petit bourgeois milieu, behind whose outward respectability he concealed his true personality throughout his life. Correct attire, bowler hat, a small, humble flat with studio in the living room – a jealously guarded facade behind which the existence of skeletons in the closet might be suspected. It is of such dark lurkings that Magritte’s painted fantasies tell. Precociously gifted, the boy left his parents at an early age for Brussels, where he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, with interruptions, from 1916 to 1921. Influenced by Surrealism and inspired especially by Giorgio de Chirico, Magritte began in the middle of the 1920s to develop a personal visual language and his trademark motifs.

 
Le Jockey perdu. Pasted paper, gouache, watercolour, pencil on paper, 38,7 x 55,4 cm. Private Collection. © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

The Lost Jockey, 1926

One of Magritte’s earliest Surrealist pictures was “Le Jockey perdu” (The Lost Jockey), 1926. In 1927 and 1928, Magritte lived with his wife Georgette, whom he had wed in 1922, on the outskirts of Paris, and maintained contacts with the French Surrealists. Impulses received in France appear not only to have bolstered Magritte’s self-confidence as an artist. Shortly before, during and after his Paris days, which would remain his sole relatively long sojurn abroad until his death in 1967, he explored motifs of the most diverse kind, some of which he would continue to vary throughout his career.

 
Le Sens de la nuit. Oil on canvas, 138,4 x 105,4 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston, Inv.70 -34 DJ. © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

The Meaning of Night, 1927

One of these perennial motifs, men in bowler hats, appeared in Magritte’s paintings as early as 1927, in “Le Sens de la nuit” (The Meaning of Night).

 
L’Empire des lumières. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm, Private Collection © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

The Dominion of Light, 1954

What is especially impressive about Magritte is his virtuosity in dealing with mundane motifs, which he frequently altered in a shocking way. This not only calls our visual habits into question, but reflects an investigation into the function of the painted image that represented a breakthrough for the art of our times. The strangeness of the series of paintings collectively entitled “L’Empire de lumières” (The Dominion of Light) may not be apparent on first glance. Yet we gradually realize that the nocturnal street scenes, illuminated by street lamps and with lights in the house windows, are overarched by a bright blue noonday sky.

 
Le Mois des vendanges. Oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm, Private Collection © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

The Month of the Grape-harvest, 1959

The eerie contrast between an empty room and a crowd of almost identical men wearing Magritte’s famous bowler and gazing through an open window into the room in “Le Mois de vendages” (The Month of the Grape-harvest) slowly dawns on us. This process of gradual recognition to which the artist veritably compells his viewers, leading to an unavoidable immersion in the image, is perhaps the most fascinating thing about Magritte’s art.

 
La Trahison des images. Oil on canvas, 64.6 x 94.1 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Acquired with funds from the Mr. und Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection. © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

The Treachery of Images, 1928/29

Shortly before his death, Magritte said this about the painting “La Trahison des images” (The Treachery of Images): "Ah, the famous pipe ... I've been criticised enough for it! And yet ... can it be stuffed with tobacco, my pipe? No it can't, it's just a representation. So if I hat written ‘This is a pipe’ below the picture, I would have been lying!" With this disarmingly simple visual and verbal formula Magritte not only demonstrated that every painted image is an abstraction, but qualified the reality of images per se. Neither can a thing exist as an image without taking on form, nor can form exist as an image without being a thing. The “Treachery of images” consists in the fact that images continually pretend to show something real although they are “merely” a depiction or representation of something.

 
Les Jours gigantesques. Oil on canvas, 116 x 81cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

The Titanic Days, 1928

Oppressive depictions of violence and latent sexuality are a further trademark of Magritte’s. In “Les Jours gigantesques” (The Titanic Days), only the woman is visible full-figure. The man has taken partial possession of her, and she resists desperately. The more his figure obscures hers, the more he robs her of her existence, despite the fact that his existence depends on his taking possession of her body. Physical violence has seldom been depicted so penetratingly, nightmarishly, with no hope of escape.

 
La Clef des songes. Oil on canvas, 81 x 60 cm. Private Collection. © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

The Interpretation of Dreams, 1930

Although he always denied being influenced by modern psychoanalysis, Magritte’s series “La Clef des songes” (The Interpretation of Dreams) seems to reflect one of its essential discoveries. Images of objects are associated with designations that appear entirely irrelevant to them. In dreams or in the unconscious mind, an object defined by a certain word can mean something entirely different, something designated by a different word.

 
La Gravitation universelle. Oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm, Private Collection © 2005 ProLitteris, Zürich

Universal Gravitation, 1943

Magritte was not an artist who took an outspoken stance on political affairs. Nevertheless, his renowned picture of a hunter being swallowed up by a wall, “La Gravitation universelle” (Universal Gravitation), 1943, seems to partake of the mood that reigned during the calamitous times prior to and after 1945. Here, too, Magritte showed himself to be an artist who was capable of making a clear, direct statement in perfectly “smooth” painting, but a statement whose deeper meaning only became apparent in a process of gradual understanding – a revelation of what Magritte called “the mystery”.

Catalogue «René Magritte – The Key to Dreams»

René Magritte described his Surrealist paintings in Terms of "dreams' that are intended not to make you sleep, but to wake you up." To define the artist's dream-like Images as imaginary worlds would be too simplistic. René Magritte: The Key to Dreams documents a comprehensive retrospective of the art of the enigmatic Belgian Surrealist that was previously on view in Vienna at the BA-CA Kunstforum.

The catalogue is published by Ludion, Ghent. It contains essays by Steingrim Laursen, Siegfried Gohr and Michel Draguet, and a comprehensive plate section with notes on the works by Evelyn Benesch and Ulf Küster. The volume comprises 204 pages with 125 full-color illustrations,.

Catalogue