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SF MOMA’S Great Magritte
If this painting looks familiar to us, it is because Magritte’s work has so strongly influenced not only other artists but also a great many people who did want to do publicity and promotion, advertising, design and films, during much of the last century. Every Magritte painting leaves the viewer with a sense of mystery, of not quite nderstanding its complexity, even though most of the objects in the paintings are easily recognized and depicted with such exquisite realism that we are reminded of still lifes by the Dutch and Flemish old masters. San Francisco¹s wonderful Museum of Modern Art is giving us the chance this spring and summer to delight in a carefully chosen, beautifully displayed and manageably-sized sampling of Magritte, which will be seen nowhere else in the country. The exhibition of 63 works has been assembled by means of loans from the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen and from private collectors, many of whom have said they will miss their Magrittes more than any other paintings they have. The fourth-floor gallery walls have been repainted to match Magritte’s skies. Often those skies are filled with puffy white clouds as in "The Spring Tide," one of his paintings in a frame within a painting, or in both paintings called "The Dominion of Light," where the sky is in bright daylight but the dusk is eerily deep in the trees and the streetlights and windows are lit though no one is there. Magritte painted many versions of this scene: these are two of the most suggestive. A centerpiece of this show is "Personal Values," painted in 1952 and purchased by SF MOMA as its first Magritte in 1998 for $7.1 million. Here his white clouds in a brilliant blue sky become the back wall of a bedroom where a huge tortoise-shell comb stands upright on the bed, a gigantic shaving brush lies on top of the mirrored wardrobe, and an outsized green wineglass rests on the carpet. It is possible to stand in front of a Magritte painting and keep asking yourself questions -- why is that huge boulder not rolling down from its precarious mountain perch on the sharp cliff edge? How did an even larger boulder get inside that small room or was the room built around the massive stone? Are those baguettes or what floating in the "The Golden Legend" sky?--- and the maddeningly unanswerable question raised by his early painting of a smoker¹s pipe bearing the carefully scripted legend "Cecin’est pas une pipe," this is not a pipe. Magritte is much more fun than De Chirico, who had considerable influence on him, or Picasso, Braque, or even Dali. Just because Magritte’s objects are so real and recognizeable it always takes one off guard to find them in the most unlikely settings and combinations, as in "Golconda" where a man in a gray overcoat and derby hat is seen over and over in small, medium and large sizes high in a gray sky and raining down over roofs and gray facades. Magritte will be with us all summer until September 5. This is sure to be one of SFMOMA’s most popular shows and one to be enjoyed by the whole family, so it’s good that there is time for more then one visit. And there are always other fascinating works on display there. The handsomely illustrated and informative Magritte catalogue makes a great souvenir or gift. It’s on sale at the SFMOMA shop on the ground floor, one of this country’s best museum shops, along with many other books, gifts, cards and useful things. SFMOMA and its nice cafe are at 151 Third Street, just below Mission, near several bus lines and the Muni metro. It is open Mondays, when other museums are not, closed Weds. Hours are 11-6, Thursdays until 9 pm. First Tuesday of every month is free to all. Information 425/357-4000 or www.sfmoma.org. Source: Nina Beckwith |
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The
painting of a man in a gray overcoat and derby hat whose face is almost
entirely hidden by a big green apple is one of the best-known works
of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, 1898-1967. It is also the closest
he was willing to come to answer a request for a self portrait. That
tells us how little this marvelous artist cared for publicity and self-promotion,
even though he was delighted to sell his work widely.