fri 29/03/2024

Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, Tate Liverpool | reviews, news & interviews

Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, Tate Liverpool

Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, Tate Liverpool

The Belgian Surrealist was a master of the visual paradox. This exhibition shows why

Dalí may have the edge on Magritte for instant recognition and popularity, but how easily the Belgian beats the Spaniard as the more interesting Surrealist. Armed with his small repertoire of images – the nude, the shrouded head, the bowler hat, the apple and the pipe, to name a few – and painted in that precise, pictogram way of his, Magritte is an artist who holds back more than he gives away. Next to his restrained, meticulously tidy offerings, Dalí appears decidedly overcooked.

The_Human_ConditionIn paintings such as The Treachery of Images (Cesi n’est pas une pipe), 1929, in which a representation of a pipe is accompanied by the statement “This is not a pipe”, and The Human Condition, 1933 (pictured right), in which a canvas depicting a painted landscape in front of a “real” landscape seamlessly continues the image, Magritte offers a feast of verbal/visual paradoxes and visual conundrums. And as if continually amused by his own puzzles, Magritte offers ripostes to his own work. A small painting of a portion of cheese under a real glass dome on a real plinth is this time given a title corresponding with the image: This is a Piece of Cheese. Which it is, and which it is not.

But Magritte wasn’t just a clever riddler, or conceptual game-player, for if he was his work would be no more visually seductive than Duchamp’s. And it is. And not only is it more seductive, but, I’d suggest, it’s far more enduringly interesting too: he didn’t have a profound impact on the course of art history, but the work itself is far more layered.

Magritte_LoversMagritte delights in the richness of images. He may once have said, “I don’t create paintings, I create reproductions in oil,” but how should we take such a statement? Not as a simply self-effacing one, that’s for sure, for here is an artist who clearly enjoyed verbal game-playing in conversation, too, for what else is a figurative artist but one who reproduces the world in oils? Magritte, the bowler-hatted artist may look like one of his anonymous bowler-hatted Belgian clerks, but, just like them, he is not a clerk. And he was and he was not a reproducer in oils.

As for that flat, textbook style of his that critics often describe as “limited”, or worse, I will say that Magritte’s “unpainterly” paintings are far more impressive in the flesh than as reproductions – for their scale, for their gloss, for their sheer sense of orderly compositional flair, for Magritte was supremely gifted at arranging things squarely and imposingly on the canvas.

Tate Liverpool’s survey is equally impressive, with a presentation enjoyably theatrical: walls are painted in rich colours – charcoal grey, inky blue, deep plum – and the carpet is thick underfoot. Turning into every room there is a sense of hushed anticipation, though in the end one may perhaps come away feeling that there are just a few too many bowler-hatted clerks and pastiche covers of famous paintings by other artists in which figures are replaced by coffins. But still, here is a chance to rediscover a far more fascinating artist than the odd reproduction allows.

The_Dominion_of_Light_1953Particularly seductive are the neat geometries and beguiling mysteries of his night/day paintings, in which blue, cloudy skies look down on empty streets shrouded in darkness (pictured right: The Dominion of Light, 1953); and, even more, the wittily suggestive Time Transfixed, 1938 (main picture), with its phallic train emitting steam as it exits the sterile fireplace. Then there is the uneasy sadness of his shrouded-head paintings, such as The Lovers, 1928 (pictured above left). Much has been written about the suicide of Magritte’s mother – the artist, aged just 13, apparently saw his mother’s body dragged from the river in which she drowned herself, her petticoat covering her face – but not much of this is made here, which is indeed perverse. This psychic trauma surely pervades this exhibition (the title, taken from Freud, and in turn from one of Magritte's paintings, might be misleading), but The Lovers can just as easily be read as a representation of not just sexual frustration, but solipsism. Locked in an eternally sterile kiss, these lovers can neither touch, nor see, nor feel, nor ultimately know each other.

Rather more perversely, I even enjoyed Magritte's slapstick Vache paintings (though not his wartime vomit-coloured "Renoir period" which proceeded them). The Vache paintings were conceived, in the late Forties, as a kind of insult to the Parisian avant-garde, a gesture of defiance at his marginalisation outside the art capital. But it’s delightful to see resonances with much later artists, such as the Chapman brothers or Martin Kippenberger.

Not all of Magritte’s work was a success, but what an interesting insight this survey provides. Catch the train from Euston - this is a gem of an exhibition.

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