Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte is Belgian artist who was involved in the Surrealist movement after meeting Breton in Paris around 1927. Many of his works show normal, everyday objects, however, they are given new meanings because of the unusual way he organizes them. He paints real objects, yet it is not meant to be a representation of that object in reality, but rather, paint on a canvas. For example, Magritte paints a pipe and titles it”Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, which translates as “This is not a pipe”. The painting itself is not a physical pipe, but nothing more than a painting of one. Paintings are not meant to be representative of reality and in many cases it is purposeful to call attention to the fact that it is paint. An apple on the canvas is a painting of an apple and Magritte points out that we can never catch the item itself, no matter how accurately it is depicted.

http://jamespriestpomo12.blogspot.com/2012/01/rene-magritte-ceci-nest-pas-une-pipe.html

Magritte does not exemplify the automatism of Surrealism and his early interest in abstraction shaped his Surrealist paintings. He described the period following World War II as ‘surrealism in the sunlight’. Magritte said “the art of putting colors side by side in such a way that their real aspect is effaced, so that familiar objects—the sky, people, trees, mountains, furniture, the stars, solid structures, graffiti—become united in a single poetically disciplined image. The poetry of this image dispenses with any symbolic significance, old or new.”

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Several of Magritte’s most famous paintings include a man in a top hat, in which his face is never visible. It is either covered by an apple, a bird, or turned away. He also did a work of two lovers, both with their faces covered by a white cloth. This theme of no personal identity is illustrated in many of his works. Every one of his paintings illustrates the the Surrealist ideas put forth in Breton’s manifesto because they each represent a dream like state. There is quality that they surpass reality and we can see into the mind of Magritte.

Module 6 – Rene Magritte (Surrealism)

http://girlwithjavacurls.typepad.com/somewhere_in_the_middle/2010/02/a-day-with-magritte-my-face-mask.html

Rothman, Roger. “A Mysterious Modernism: René Magritte And Abstraction.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 76.4 (2007): 224-239.Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 27 Nov. 2012.

“Biography.” Musee Margritte Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Nov. 2012. <http://www.musee-magritte-museum.be/Portail/Site/Typo3.asp?lang=FR>.

-Dana Rich

Surrealism: The Split in the Movement 1929

The Surrealist movement took place under the First Manifesto by Breton for most of the 1920s. A division occurred in 1929 between Breton and Bataille, “where a single month saw the publication of both Breton’s ‘Second Manifesto’ of Surrealism in La Revolution Surrealiste and Bataille’s ‘Le “Jeu lugubre”’ in Documents. Breton criticized Bataille for his ‘vulgar materialism’, which went against what he described surrealism as being actual functioning thought in the first manifesto. Breton saw a clear connection between both the ideas on dreams by Freud and the Communist ideals of Marx. Breton did not agree with Bataille on the basis of Marxism. Bataille’s approach to surrealism did not have Marx in the equation. Breton goes on to write the second manifesto, in which he condemns men like Bataille whom he believes threatened the ideals of surrealism and his own authority. Breton writes, “ What we are witnessing is an obnoxious return to old anti-dialectal materialism, which this time is trying to force its way gratuitously through Freud”. In addition to Bataille, Breton shuns several other artists that were apart of surrealism from the start and the first manifesto. Bataille was interested in a type of materialism in which he argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilizes all foundations. His interest goes on to include bassasse, or baseness. This is a mechanism that caused decay or the process through which form is undone. Some of Bataille’s ideologies come from a place of cruelty and belief in sacrifice. He admired Manet for ‘destroying’ the subject of painting. Breton and Bataille both had different ideas as to the direction they would like to see surrealism go, despite sharing similar notions of Freud’s unconscious mind and dream state. It seems as though both men were threatened by one another and Breton was not willing to give up his title as creator of the Surrealist movement. Breton writes in the Second Manifesto, “It is to be noted that M. Bataille misuses adjectives with a passion: befouled, senile, rank, sordid, lewd, doddering, and that these words, far from serving him to disparage an unbearable state of affairs, are those through which his delight is most lyrically expressed”. The clearest way to analyze the split is one between poetry and action, Breton on the poetry side and Bataille on the action side. Breton created Surrealism as a movement based on ‘pure psychic automatism’ and automatic writing, in addition to exploration, through poetry and prose, the psychic dimension of the human mind. The split resulted in a second manifesto by Breton and can mark the point in which the surrealist movement becomes much more vast and spread out. The result is a lot more artists trying new things because it is less of an exclusive club.

Full text: Briony Fer, David Batchelor and Paul Wood. “Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism Art between the Wars.” Breton and Bataille Division: 1929. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. http://courses.ucsd.edu/nbryson/Vis128csp10/BrionyFerPart2.pdf

-Dana Rich