FUTURES

Early on, young René designated his half of the room,
which he shared with his brother Raymond, as his first half-studio.
Here, he dreamed and sketched, occasionally discarding a failed
idea and shoving it into Raymond’s half of the room. He loved to
paint with his watercolors, which sat in round tubs like many-colored
eyes in a metal box with a lid that could be opened and closed,
waiting patiently for his most original ideas. The next phase of René’s
plan to make the world of art his own was to extend his field of
operation across the entire apartment of the Magritte family. At first,
no one seemed to mind. Monsieur&Madame Magritte did not yet
know of the destructive power that can lie within revolutionary art.
Yet one afternoon, it finally happened. Dressed in his blue painting
overalls with the silver buttons, René sat on his parents’ Biedermeierstyle
couch and painted a picture of a young artist who would one
day be known throughout the world, but who was currently still
sitting on his parents’ Biedermeier couch, painting a picture that
made the present scene look like a future memory. Although René
was not aware of it, by the time he had completed this picture, the
first phase of his young artistic life had just come to an end. Experts
tend to call it his Biedermeier period, which has already led to a
great many misunderstandings. Because when René got up from
the couch in order to scrutinize the color relationships by the light of
the window, the fine Biedermeier fabric was covered with patches
of blue and silver paint. At first, the young painter was convinced
that his organs had absorbed the paint pigments, for he thought that
he must have wet his trousers in a moment of creative distraction.
It took quite some time for him to realize what had actually
happened. When Madame&Monsieur Magritte saw the catastrophic
impact that an un-bridled phantasy can have on the cherished
interior furnishings of a middle class family apartment, they forbade
him all artistic activity. In the heat of the moment, the young artist
had attempted to blame their dog Remy for the mishap, but he was
a bad liar. Why would it be more plausible for a dog to have blue
and silver excretions than for a painter to have them, whether or not
he was a future virtuoso?
When René revolted against the painting ban, Madame&
Monsieur Magritte accordingly banned him from the apartment.
It was not René their son whom they had expelled, but René the
artist, who would one day be known as Magritte.
Using this restriction to his advantage, René decided that
he would from now on paint after nature, as one said in those days.
He had always dreamed of nature and had looked longingly out of
the window at the people and their objects below. Even when he was
looking inside himself, he still perceived what was going on outside,
while alternative versions of the world took shape on the canvas
of his imagination. He decided to set up his new studio on one of the
strips of grass in the center of the housing development.
Before Monsieur&Madame Magritte would allow their son
to paint outdoors, however, René had to sound convincing enough
that he was capable of using the toilet without assistance. The
Magrittes considered this kind of self-sufficiency a basic precondition
for developing one’s talents without supervision. As soon as
René had gained control over his excretory organs, he installed
41