The Psychic Roots of the Surreal

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The romantic fascination with the image of woman as sphinx, Medusa, castrator or remote, implacable goddess —the belle dame sans merci in her numerous fictive avatars—also figures in symbolist painting, especially in the world of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), another member of Péladan's circle. Art or The Caresses conjoins a mysteriously smiling sphinx (looking not unlike a satisfied Rossetti redhead in a leopard coat that has grown onto her skin) with a puzzled-looking boy who has presumably come to answer her riddle. It is painted with a high, pale elegance that altogether removes it from the common run of romantic-symbolist cliche.

The main debt Belgian surrealism owed to the 19th century was, however, one of mood. Whether the artist was Degouve de Nuncques painting a strange, silent forest and a Magritte-like nocturnal house, or Khnopff giving a foretaste of the deserted townscapes of surrealism with his drawing of a city abandoned to the sea, or Leon Spilliaert producing a haunted self-portrait, the images constantly predict the sense of solitude and disquiet in which surrealism reveled.

There was also generally in the surrealists a theatrical state of mind, which in the case of Paul Delvaux became virtually a stock in trade. Originally an expressionist, Delvaux was a latecomer to surrealism, converted by an exhibition of works by Chirico, Magritte and Dali that he saw in Brussels in 1934 when he was 37. And though he is one of the more durable surrealist artists, his imagery—as the selection of his work here indicates—constantly hovers on the edge of cliche. The Delvaux "look" is unmistakable: an empty street of neoclassical façades, a 19th century railway station or a grove of columns, all lit by gas lamps or the moon. The inhabitants are nudes (generally blonde Walloon girls with an air of mild bovine derangement) who wander about, sleep, vaguely study themselves in hand mirrors, and are met by bourgeois gentlemen in dark suits and bowlers. Sometimes, as in The Encounter, the businessman has Delvaux's own face. Though Delvaux has turned out countless variations of somnambulists in empty piazzas, only a few of his works —like the enormous Spitzner Museum, 1943—echo in the mind for long.

Not so with René Magritte. The 34 Magrittes on display here (some of which, like The Human Condition, 1935, with its painted landscape on an easel in front of a window and continuous with the "real" painted landscape seen beyond, have virtually become surrealist icons) remain unpredictable despite their familiarity. That is because Magritte was such a virtuoso of the insoluble, the contradictory, the locked. Unlike Delvaux (or for that matter Dali, Masson or Ernst), Magritte had absolutely no interest in what seemed romantic, chancy, theatrically mysterious or exotic. He called his paintings "material tokens of the freedom of thought," and materiality is of their essence.