Aside from the suicide of his mother, who drowned herself in the River Sambre when Magritte was 13 years old, and about which he never spoke (although several unsettling paintings from the mid-1920s appear to visualise her floating corpse), the most dramatic episode in his life was the three years he spent hustling in Paris, from 1927, when surrealism was at its height.Įven this ended in retreat, after André Breton, the movement’s authoritarian leader, demanded, before a gathering at his apartment, that Georgette remove a crucifix she was wearing around her neck. Moreover, despite moaning to friends of the boredom he often suffered – especially after the war when, chained to his easel, he churned out “variantes” of his greatest hits, often for American collectors, to pay for luxuries including a full-length fur coat for Georgette after decades of scraping pennies – Magritte did little to shatter the tedium. Nothing wrong with that, except, as material for a biographer, it hardly yields the sort of drainpipe-scaling, skirt-chasing escapades with which, say, William Feaver could regale readers in his recent The Lives of Lucian Freud. For almost a quarter of a century, he lived in the same nondescript townhouse at 135 rue Esseghem, “a dull street in a drab neighbourhood”, as Danchev describes it, in the Brussels suburb of Jette.Īlthough there were rumours he visited prostitutes, he was unfailingly uxorious towards his childhood sweetheart, Georgette, who often modelled for him as he painted in a corner of the dining room while wearing a tie and slippers. Controlling, unclubbable and a slave to “meticulous” (his word) routine, Magritte spent a lifetime in masquerade, as one of the faceless members of the bowler-hatted bourgeoisie he so often painted. Rather, the challenge for any would-be biographer is how to transform the humdrum, stultifying monotony of Magritte’s existence into a scintillating read. And, perhaps most perplexing of all, an image of a sleek, sinuous wooden pipe hovers above a teasing caption: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Quite so: it’s a painting – or, as Magritte’s compatriot and rival, the artist Paul Delvaux, put it: “C’est un gag.” Lovers kiss, their faces hidden beneath shrouds. A lamp illuminates a twilit street, but, above, the sky is bright with noontime clarity. A puffing locomotive erupts mysteriously from beneath a mantelpiece. As Alex Danchev points out in the third sentence of his generously illustrated new Life, these are “now inescapable”. Why would anyone choose to write a biography of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967)? The issue isn’t the power of his images.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |