The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will
present the international exhibition Magritte
through September 5, 2000.
The SFMOMA presentation features approximately
sixty-five works that examine the painter's
signature style, beloved for its irony and
unsettling psychological edge, against a more
contemporary sensibility. Magritte considers the
artist's work from a new angle, highlighting his
investigation of painting as representation and the
relationship between language and images, words and
objects, rather than his links to Surrealism. The
exhibition examines this popular and profoundly
influential artist as a forerunner and source of
inspiration for Pop and Conceptual art and considers
his impact on 20th-century art.
A highlight of the exhibition is the pairing of two
rarely shown paintings, La Chambre d'écout
(The Listening Room), 1952, and L'Anniversaire (The
Anniversary), 1959. Each of the similar paintings
depicts a room with a window off to the left and an
enormous object within: an apple and a rock,
respectively. As Magritte once wrote, "I don't
paint visions. To the best of my ability, by
painterly means, I describe objects -- and the
mutual relationships of objects -- in such a way
that none of our habitual concepts or feelings is
necessarily linked with them."
René Magritte (1898-1967) was born in Lessines,
Belgium, where he first made paintings and took art
lessons at the age of thirteen. It was around this
time, in 1912, that Magritte's mother committed
suicide, horrific event in the young artist's life.
In 1916 he left high school to attend the Académie
des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. With many other cultural
institutions closed during the hostilities of the
First World War, the Académie had become a haven
for intellectuals; as a result, Magritte was able to
associate with many of the city's artists, writers
and musicians.
Magritte moved to Paris in 1927, when many
avant-garde artists were gathering there, and he
came to know André Breton, Max Ernst, Joan Miró
and Hans Arp. This proved an artistically liberating
time for Magritte, and he experienced what has been
described as an artistic epiphany upon seeing
Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting The
Song of Love, 1914. "This triumphant poetry
supplanted the stereotyped effect of traditional
painting," wrote Magritte. "It represented
a complete break with the mental habits peculiar to
artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity and
all the little aesthetic specialties. It was a new
vision through which the spectator might recognize
his own isolation and hear the silence of the
world." Inspired to combine objects from the
real world in compositions that seemed credible, if
not necessarily logical, the artist began to
juxtapose incongruous objects, presenting amusing,
if sometimes oddly disturbing, scenarios from his
imagination. The artist enjoyed overturning
conventions. In what may be Magritte's best-known
painting and a highlight of this exhibition, The
Treachery of Images, 1929, the artist depicts a
pipe next to the caption Ceci n'est pas une pipe
("This is not a pipe").
In a room adjacent to the exhibition galleries, the
SFMOMA Education Department will present a reading
and study area featuring new materials developed by
the department's interactive multimedia team.
Learn more about this exhibit from
SFMOMA's official
site
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