The Essential Rene Magritte by Todd Alden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking, 'What does it mean?' they express a wish that everything be understandable."
René Magritte

I find it a little unfair that Salvador Dalí is a household name while René Magritte is not. Magritte's contributions to popular culture are at least as important as Dalí's. Dalí's The Persistence of Memory with its melting clocks is matched in its awe-inspiring power by Magritte's Time Transfixed with its "steaming locomotive emerging from a fire place" in a living room. Dalí's Swans Reflecting Elephants is not in any way more groundbreaking than Magritte's The Son of Man where a "floating green apple conceals the face of a bowler-hatted man." Not to mention Magritte's The Treason of Images -- the image of a pipe with the caption Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe") -- whose shock value exceeds even the most outlandish of Dalí's creations. While Dalí is certainly more popular, most likely due to his persistent self-promotion, Magritte, through his art, achieved more to jolt the viewers out of their comfort zone of having everything understandable and understood.

Todd Alden's The Essential René Magritte (1999) is a nice short introduction to life and works of the Belgian painter. To me, the greatest value of this little book are the images. 47 most famous paintings of Magritte are reproduced in this volume; I have seen a few of them for the first time, even though Magritte is by far my absolutely favorite painter. Other than enjoying the art, the reader will learn about the major events of the painter's life and will follow the trajectory of his artistic evolution from the Dada movement, Cubism, and Futurism of the early 20th century to becoming one of the "grandfathers of Pop," the movement that began in the 1960s.

Yet another valuable component of the book are quotes by Magritte. Let me include one more, in addition to the epigraph:

"Surrealist thought is revolutionary because it is relentlessly hostile to all those bourgeois ideological values that keep the world in the appalling condition it is in today."

I take the word "bourgeois" to mean "the traditional, established, respected, practical, and ordinary."

Despite quoting Magritte's statement that ridicules the "wish that everything be understandable," the author tries to help the reader understand the main characteristics of Magritte's art. The reader will find several lists of techniques used by Magritte to "deceive the eye" (for instance, "isolating objects out of context," "juxtaposing elements that don't generally go together," or "changing the scale of objects and their usual relationship to their contexts") or strategies to take the viewer out of the ordinary (like "fossilization," "animism," "doubling," etc.)

Reading this book made me think about why I like Magritte's art so much. Maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons is that the artist was always mischievously intent on making the viewers doubt what they see, helping them get rid of the childish delusion that the truth can be seen.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.


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