Renè Magritte (1899 Lessines / Belgio, 1966 Bruxelles) was one oft the leading characters of Surrealism, a movement founded by Andrè Breton who also was an avid collector of Magritte’s works. Original painting by Stefano Frassetto (6).

 

 

“Here is Popaul, my brother who is also a stupid as he doesn’t care of anyone, and Raymond who is even worst than him; this is my father and that woman - the housekeeper - is his lover, and this is a bastard son…“[2]

 

Magritte is nineteen when, with a friend comes for lunch to his father, addressing him with insolence : but was he the same Renè, but fourteen, when he wandered about the graveyard every afternoon, soon after his mother Regina’s suicide ? At November he would have enroled in the high school of Charleroi, but we have just a few news of those years about which Magritte didn’t like to speak about, as well as about his own works which he didn’t justify in public.

In 1916 he meets Georgette whom he’ll marry in 1921, after his military service and who will be his beloved partner for all the life : their home became the headquarters of Surrealist movement in Belgium and of those Saturdays dancing evenings in the masked parties now remain a few homely videos where Magritte is smiling, finally satisfied.[3]

 

In 1923, when already exposing his pictures, he is deeply impressioned by the “Love song“, painted in 1914 by Giorgio De Chirico whom Magritte saw at the MOMA in New York and that, only in 1938, he will comment in his “Ecrìts“ : “This exultant poem substituted the stereotyped effect of traditional painting. It’s a full break with the mental attitudes of artists who are prisoners of talent, of virtuosity and of all these little aesthetic specialties. It’s a new vision where the viewer finds his own loneliness and hears the silence oft he world.“

Of this innovation which doesn’t make him dependent on a specific ‘style‘ notwithstanding he is considered one the most representatives of Surrealism[4], the first picture by Magritte is “The window“ (1925) followed by : “The double secret“ (1927), “Impossible attempt“ (1928), “The unexpected answer“ (1933), just to say a few which pointed his own work.

 

However the complicated rules of Surrealists, which turned around a religious following the founder Brèton and which already caused schisms and divisions to the group, deterred Magritte and his wife who in 1929 came back in Belgium, for economical reasons too, from Paris where for some years they had lived.

 

In 1934 Brèton himself, maybe worried by the breaking with someone who was already successful, proposed to Magritte to prepare the cover for “Qu’est-ce que le Surrèalisme ?“ with a lecture made by Brèton. Magritte gave Brèton “Le viol“ (1934) with these words : “I hope that you like the project for this cover; I also believe it can be excellent from an advertising point of view.“

Ironic and distant as only the dreamlike can, even in the most ferocious complaint, in ‘Le viol‘ Magritte abruptly stops, falling into the part he hated of  a sadist. Through this grieved picture he gets, little by little, to rebuild an unsuspected responsibility of Règina and of her own suicide, of which since a so far 1912 Magritte absurdly held himself accused, around him the heavy and stubborn silence of those who didn’t wanted to come back, to speak, to untie that terrible act.

 

Magritte faces in this picture, which he will just once repeat and more clearly in 1945, a new topic for him, the defense of one‘s body : and, painfully, he will have to admit that Règina, just to maintain the naive candor of a ‘beautiful soul‘, chose to give up to defend herself and even, falling silent, to turn against herself the responsibilities of others.

 

The ‘non‘ innocence of Règina, and of every naive woman - but rigid at the same time - distances Magritte forever from the woman who had been his mother too.

To that topic, the defense of one‘s female body, Art devoted a lot of work : the Renaissance painter Giorgione relied, with a truly surreal ability, the defense of a woman to her male partner, in ‘The storm‘ (1502-1503) versus ‘The impossible attempt‘ (1928) by Magritte.

 

It’s the woman, according Magritte, who first of all gives up her own defense to offer instead, even if only virtually, a naive naked human who will be fatal to the right in flaunting her ‘beautiful‘ in-difference – i.e. ‘no-difference‘ - towards the other.

Magritte‘ criticism – individual, strong and socially acceptable to neurosis - becomes functional, from an absolutely new perspective – to giving up a relationship and a partnership with the other, when partnership only relies on a phallic functionality, abstract and imperative, and on a strenuous resistance to assume offenses.

 

A naive seduction, which in the following work of 1945 is emphasized by the softness of a femal body so superimposed on her unavailability of gazing, comes through – in Magritte‘s reconstruction -  the inexpressiveness of the object-which-imputes-nothing, just immediately consumable. It is also a topic - the ‘seducing unavailability‘ – which has in Art, even nowadays its audience of enthusiasts : think of the disturbing Muses of Pre-Raphaelites[5].

His ability, so frequent in Magritte to transform the grotesque of the ‘Whys‘ to which he couldn’t answer into a lightness of suspended that still makes possible to find solutions, is however completely, and comprehensibly, missing in ‘Le viol‘.

 

In this picture the vacuum has a specific place from which it does mark the viewer.

 

 

                                                  Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – January 9, 2020

 

 

 

[1] Renè Magritte (1898, Lessines (Belgio) – 1967, Bruxelles)

[2] “Renè Magritte. Catalogue raisonnè”, at care of D. Sylvester and S. Whitefield, 5voll.; “Magritte”, at care of D. Sylvester – Torino 1992; “R. Magritte. Ecrìts complets”, at care of A. Blavier – Parigi 1979.

[3] Videos offered during the exhibition at Lugano by MASI, September 16, 2018 – January 6, 2019 “La ligne de vie“, title of a rare lecture given by Magritte at the ‘Musèe Royal des Beaux-Arts d’Anverse’ (Belgio) tribute to the surrealists but so speaking of his own work.

[4] ‘Surrealism’ was born in France in ’20s as an avant-garde movement and inspired not only painting but also literature and cinema : however in Magritte there isn’t that ‘psychic automatism’ with which the surrealists pointed the unconsciousness.  

[5] Pre-Raphalites was a Confraternity of artists established in 1848 in Great Britain and there confined, with the aim to recreate the academic purity of the masterpieces made before Raffaello Sanzio.

(6) Stefano Frassetto is born in Turin in 1968. After his degree in Architecture at ‘Politecnico’ he begun as graphic novelist for local magazines. In the ‘90s he edited in France too, on ‘Le Réverbère’ and on ‘Libération’ : then he created ‘Ippo’ for ‘Il Giornalino’ and then the stripe ‘35MQ’ for the swiss magazine ‘20 Minuti’. In 2000 he came into ‘La Stampa’ as portraitist for cultural page and the insert ‘Tuttolibri’, then for the weekly ‘Origami’. Today he works also for the swiss magazine ‘Le Temps’.