René Magritte, Les Amants (The Lovers), 1928; Oil on canvas, 21 3/8 x 28 7/8″ (54 x 73.4 cm); The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Richard S. Zeisler
The most damning criticism of Surrealist art is also the most ironic given its source: the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. After meeting Salvador Dalí, Freud stated that he found the Spaniard’s conscious mind of greater interest than his unconscious mind. Freudian theory was, if not the sine qua non of Surrealism, then an inescapable touchstone. His comment, then, was a veritable dismissal of Dalí’s attempts at tapping into “the mystery without which the world would not exist.” Dalí isn’t the whole of Surrealist art, of course, and shouldn’t be the gauge by which the genre is measured. But his example did come to mind while I was viewing “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938,” an overview of paintings and works-on-paper by the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898–1967). Both artists pursued a brand of Surrealism that rendered the bizarre plausible. There would be no plumbing the depths of the psyche through painterly means à la Miró and André Masson. Instead, dutiful attention would be paid to the concrete and recognizable, however unlikely, icky, or weird.
René Magritte, L’assassin menacé (The Menaced Assassin), 1927; Oil on canvas, 59 1/4″ x 6′ 4 7/8″ (150.4 x 195.2 cm); The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kay Sage Tanguy Fund
Magritte, like Dalí, achieved a fame that continues to extend