A centennial retrospective on Rene Magritte shows that the Surrealist's works, despite their familiarity, are still surprisingly provocative

By JULIE K.L. DAM /BRUSSELS

s the creator of some of the most recognizable images in 20th century art, the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte (1898-1967) is often reduced to the parts of his incongruous conceits, as if they were punchlines: the sky rains men in bowler hats, a giant apple sits in the living room, a castle perched on a rock looms over a rough sea. For an artist whose work hinges on the element of surprise, does such familiarity ultimately ruin the effect? An impressively sweeping centenary retrospective organized by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels gives a Magrittean answer: yes and no. Featuring over 350 paintings, both well-known and obscure, the exhibit, which runs until June 28, proves that even if some of the images no longer astonish, the scope and range of his work will.

Born in Lessines, Magritte began taking art classes at age 12. When he was 13, his mother committed suicide by jumping into the Sambre River. Her body was only discovered two weeks later, with her nightgown covering her head. Though Magritte hated attempts to interpret his paintings--"If [people] prefer trying to walk through walls rather than using the door, what do you expect me to do about it?" he once said--his art clearly reflects the tragedy. The Lovers (1928) features a couple kissing while separated by the white shrouds covering their heads. The Musings of a Solitary Walker (1926) depicts a ghostly white body floating behind a bowler-hatted man who stands beside a river.

A series of nudes that are presented together in the exhibit show the changes in Magritte's style in the early 1920s. He experimented with Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism and Cubism, but didn't find his niche until he came across the work of Giorgio de Chirico. By painting objects with all their visible details, but placing them in unexpected situations, he felt he could "challenge the world." Magritte became the Surrealist Magritte in 1925, when he produced his first paintings featuring what would become recurring motifs: stage drapes that obscure or reveal, paintings within paintings, stormy seas, the wooden bilboquet, fire.

But amid the galleries full of the now familiar juxtapositions--1,000 paintings composed of 100 images, as the accompanying text points out--are groups of radically different paintings that record the two periods of stylistic change in Magritte's mature oeuvre. Around 1943, he took on an Impressionistic style and lighter palette, as if to combat the dark reality of World War II. For the next four years of this "sunlit" period, Magritte's paintings took on an added layer of Surrealism. The mysterious images remain, but are incongruously light and bright.

Again in 1948 Magritte veered from his trademark style, if only temporarily. At the age of 50, after being excommunicated by the French Surrealist establishment for his Impressionist digression, he had been finally asked to present a one-man show in Paris. So for this exhibition, he slyly created a collection of garishly-colored, vulgar caricatures of his works that also lampooned the Expressionist style then in fashion. One, entitled The Ellipsis, features a green humanoid form with a gun-barrel nose and cartoon-character bug-eyes, topped by a bowler hat with a third eye on it. Magritte called the style vache--mad cow no doubt--and he reiterated the joke by naming the catalogue preface Putting One's Foot in It.

The Brussels exhibition is bracketed by two quotations from Magritte. At the entrance is the inscription, "My paintings are meant to be material signs of freedom of thought." Exiting exhibit-goers are left with this idea: "It does not matter to me what my painting will be worth in 100 years. It might even only be of historical value. What is important is that in 100 years people find what I found, but 'differently.'"

And there's the rub. Magritte's works, by dint of their popularity, and yes, worth, have made him--and Surrealism--more accessible to the masses. As he wished, the art continues to speak to people, often in ways very different from how it spoke to him. But some critics and old Surrealists have remarked unkindly about what they consider to be the commercial co-opting of Magritte's art: not only have his images been used in advertising to sell all sorts of products, but the museum shop is also filled with decorative ties, watches and ashtrays. A famous bakery nearby is selling Magritte cakes decorated with small masked apples. Painter Jacques Lacomblez, for one, refused to take part in related events planned for the centenary celebration, which he termed a "moral diversion of a movement which is subversive and anti-official."

But would Magritte have really objected? As the exhibit clearly demonstrates, he understood the necessity of making money from his art, as anathematic as that was to fellow Surrealists. Early in his career, he worked as a wallpaper designer and as an illustrator of fashion advertisements and musical score covers, examples of which are displayed in the exhibition. (Even the stylized fashion illustrations have telltale elements of Magritte's iconography.) Only after 1945 was he able to support himself--with the help of his wife, who worked part-time as a shop assistant--solely by selling his art. And even then, he was known to create copies or variations of works that had more than one interested buyer. Says Charly Herscovici, who owns Magritte's copyrights: "[Merchandising] is a means of spreading Magritte's work to the public, which is what Magritte himself wanted." While that may be a bit of an overstatement--Magritte often expressed his disdain of the commercial art he was paid to do--he is partly responsible for the ubiquity of his style.

Louis Scutenaire, a fellow member of the Belgian Surrealist group, once said of his friend, "Magritte is a great painter, Magritte is not a painter." That statement, like Magritte's series of drawings of pipes labeled This is not a pipe and This continues not to be a pipe, encapsulates the appeal of Magritte and his art. He takes us to the subjective, incongruous realm of maybe, where even the obvious can be surprising.