Ceci n'est pas Magritte
What does it mean when an extraordinary series of paintings currently on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt by René Magritte, which look so uncannily fresh and new, were actually produced in a five week period in 1948, in a style that the artist invented purely to confound and annoy the Parisian public? Magritte’s période vache is an anachronism, an exercise in perversity in which was the celebrated artist’s response to the opportunity for a solo show in a city that he’d left in 1931 and with which he’d had a fractious relationship ever since.
These 17 oil paintings and 20 gouaches combine to form a kind of anti-Magritte, an incoherent rattlebag of styles and techniques that through their joyful freedom actually embrace what he so emphatically resisted in the neutral, anonymous painting style for which he is still best known. I am in fact reminded of Rodney Graham’s recent foray into the history of Modernist painting, ‘Wet on Wet – My Late Early Styles’ (2007) – a similarly mischievous digression into dilettantism, and the unapologetically transgressive pleasures that go with it. Tellingly, however, following the exhibition of these works Magritte wrote to his friend Louis Scutenaire that it was primarily his ‘abhorrence of sincerity’ that prevented him taking ‘further steps along this path’.
On reflection, these works are an important (first?) step on a journey through painting that was joined just over two decades later by artists such as Jörg Immendorff and Georg Baselitz in Europe, or Philip Guston in the USA, and then subsequently by artists such Martin Kippenberger, Maria Lassnig, George Condo, Sean Landers and even Paul McCarthy. These figures all like to play in the same mucky sandpit of grotesque figuration, dark comedy and bawdy sexuality. It is pleasing to think of Magritte clearing the space for such an important and fruitful discourse in a brisk two-month career cul-de-sac to which he’d never return. I almost want to say that what is remarkable here is that he achieved this by making paintings that ‘didn’t really mean it’. Remembering however his comment to Scutenaire, what makes the series really extraordinary in the wily artist’s oeuvre is that he meant it too much.
What does it mean when an extraordinary series of paintings currently on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt by René Magritte, which look so uncannily fresh and new, were actually produced in a five week period in 1948, in a style that the artist invented purely to confound and annoy the Parisian public? Magritte’s période vache is an anachronism, an exercise in perversity in which was the celebrated artist’s response to the opportunity for a solo show in a city that he’d left in 1931 and with which he’d had a fractious relationship ever since.
These 17 oil paintings and 20 gouaches combine to form a kind of anti-Magritte, an incoherent rattlebag of styles and techniques that through their joyful freedom actually embrace what he so emphatically resisted in the neutral, anonymous painting style for which he is still best known. I am in fact reminded of Rodney Graham’s recent foray into the history of Modernist painting, ‘Wet on Wet – My Late Early Styles’ (2007) – a similarly mischievous digression into dilettantism, and the unapologetically transgressive pleasures that go with it. Tellingly, however, following the exhibition of these works Magritte wrote to his friend Louis Scutenaire that it was primarily his ‘abhorrence of sincerity’ that prevented him taking ‘further steps along this path’.
On reflection, these works are an important (first?) step on a journey through painting that was joined just over two decades later by artists such as Jörg Immendorff and Georg Baselitz in Europe, or Philip Guston in the USA, and then subsequently by artists such Martin Kippenberger, Maria Lassnig, George Condo, Sean Landers and even Paul McCarthy. These figures all like to play in the same mucky sandpit of grotesque figuration, dark comedy and bawdy sexuality. It is pleasing to think of Magritte clearing the space for such an important and fruitful discourse in a brisk two-month career cul-de-sac to which he’d never return. I almost want to say that what is remarkable here is that he achieved this by making paintings that ‘didn’t really mean it’. Remembering however his comment to Scutenaire, what makes the series really extraordinary in the wily artist’s oeuvre is that he meant it too much.
