Art: The Psychic Roots of the Surreal

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Equal Reality. Thus every detail of the moldings, mullions and floorboards in The Invisible World, 1954, is rendered with scrupulous, not to say stolid exactitude: it is a real room looking on a real sea in (one imagines) some provincial resort on the Belgian coast. But what is that boulder doing there with every pore and crack of its surface emulated in Magritte's slow, gray pigment to remind us of its equal reality? It is intolerable: no metaphor provides an exit, no rational explanation will do, while the very technique of Magritte's drawing and painting keeps denying the presence of fantasy.

A dealer visiting Magritte at his unremarkable suburban house in Brussels was met by the surrealist in his normal business-suit attire. At tea in the parlor, the visitor dropped something, bent down to pick it up, and experienced an agonizing kick in the backside. When he spun round, he saw Magritte imperturbably stirring his cup as though nothing whatever had happened. As in life, so in art.