Photo courtesy of David Barnett Gallery
Rene Magritte, Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values), (198/300), 2004, Color lithograph after 1952 original, 19.63 x 24.75 in
The Surrealists were a contentious group of artists, if they were a group at all, given their factionalism. Like the era’s socialists, quarreling Surrealists issued conflicting manifestos and vied for control of the message. In essence, all were concerned with putting the rational mind on pause and allowing images from the unconscious to surface on canvas or paper. Some saw Surrealism as an ally in the coming world revolution. Some left behind work as impenetrable as someone else’s bad dream.
And then, there was a Belgian gentleman named René Magritte (1898-1967). You know him even if you don’t know him because his images are pervasive. He was the painter in the long cloth coat and dark bowler hat who calmly opened windows into another reality. That sense of calm, as well as his sense of humor, has made him the most approachable of the great Surrealist painters.
According to David Barnett, “René Magritte: 44 Color Lithographs,” exhibited at the Downtown Milwaukee gallery that bears his name, is the first time an exhibition of the artist has been mounted in Milwaukee. The “44 Lithographs” (You can see all of them here.) were created years after the painter’s death and are stamped with the seal of the Magritte Succession, as his estate is called. Magritte had no children and, as Barnett explains, rights to his work eventually passed to his last studio assistant, Charly Herscovici, now president of the Magritte Foundation and Museum in Brussels. Herscovici authorized lithographs in limited editions (in numbered sets of 300 or less) based on the artist’s most famous paintings. They were printed by hand one color at a time. The “44 Lithographs” are culled from those editions.
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Whimsy is at play in many images. In Memory of a Journey (one of several pieces with that title), the Leaning Tower of Pisa is leaning into a giant feather reaching from the structure’s pinnacle to the ground below, envisioned as a desert as barren as any Salvador Dali backdrop. Stretching to infinity in the background is a blue sky with many puffy white clouds, but the sky seems to open several spots to patches of sky beyond our normal perception. Barnett’s assistant, Cameron Quade, suggests that many of Magritte’s works were collage-like in their suggestion of contrasting textures and colors. Instead of pasting disparate pieces together a la Picasso, Magritte may have achieved similar ends through paint alone.
Incongruity was always crucial in Surrealism, expressed in images meant to jolt viewers from their usual modes of seeing. But Magritte allowed no burning giraffes to race across his canvases. Instead, The Sixteenth of September is a calm nocturnal forest scene with nothing unsettling—except for the crescent moon lodged in branches of the foregrounded tree instead of the sky where it belongs.
Magritte’s images have inspired album covers by everyone from Jackson Brown to Jeff Beck and—more recently—the Nigerian rapper Jesse Jagz. His The False Mirror was the basis for the CBS network’s “eyeball” logo. The Beatles plucked the logo for their record label from The Son of Man, where the face of the bowler-hatted gentleman featured in many Magritte paintings (self-portraiture?) is obscured by a green apple.
“Magritte was so original yet so accessible. He painted images people can relate to,” Barnett says. Quade adds, “His work was adopted by popular culture and has been used in advertising and quoted in movies—almost in opposition to the Surrealist manifestos.”
Barnett is an artist as well as an art dealer, and some of his earlier work was inspired by Magritte. More recently, he’s been working on artworks with a message in his “Target Series.” Composed against the backdrop of the target-shooting certificate Barnett received at summer camp when he was 14, the painted works include Native American motifs and comment on U.S. wars against American Indians, as well as contemporary issues of gun violence. He hopes to have a “Target Series” exhibit up during the Democratic National Convention.
René Magritte: 44 Color Lithographs is on display through April 11 at David Barnett Gallery, 1024 E. State St.
Message from David Barnett
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