Volume 19–4 (Low Res).pdf

BY
STEVEN
HELLER
DEJA
ONCE
AGAIN:
AI
THE
MET
A
Walking into the rooms of New York
City's Metropolitan Museum of Art
filled with canvases by Rene Magritte,
the Belgian painter, was positively
surreal. All at once I was reminded of
the fact that virtually one of every
ten portfolios I've reviewed as an art
director over the past twenty years
includes work based on Magritte. An
equal ratio of illustrations published
in the United States and Europe is
either influenced by or pays homage
to Magritte's distinctive methods.
Being surrounded by these major
and minor works was eerie because
I was amidst the mother lode of original
images so commonly pilfered
and parodied by my generation. For
the average exhibition-goer, the
Met's extraordinary, definitive retrospective
of Magritte's life and work
must be an enjoyable experience, but
for me it raised nagging questions
concerning honesty and originality.
Rene Magritte was practically
unknown in the United States until
R
the mid-1960s when publisher Ian
Ballantine introduced a new, largeformat
softcover book known in the
industry as a trade paperback. This
book was as lavishly produced as any
hardcover coffee-table book but was
sold in greater quantity for half of the
price. One of Ballantine's first titles
was a collection of Magritte's now classic
paintings. At that time, only the
cognoscenti knew of the painter: photographer
Duane Michals shot portraits
of Magritte which appeared in
Esquire and Print magazines, and certain
of Magritte's paintings were often
reproduced in some other publications.
Indeed, while a 12-year-old art
student I myself gravitated toward
his few paintings then on permanent
exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art, although I had no idea who the
artist was. But in the mid '60s he was
still unknown to the masses, and the
widespread publication of Magritte's
work was truly a revelation for anyone
interested in making art.
Before Magritte, Salvador Dali was
considered the undisputed king of
surrealism. But as Magritte opened
symbolic windows and doors with
his canvases, he opened literal ones
for illustrators who were tired of traditional
realism. Paul Davis, who in
the '60s was a member of Pushpin
La Clairvoyance, 1936, oil on canvas, (21/2 X 25 '/2"), Private Collection, courtesy, Gallerie Isey Brachot, Brussels.
Studios, was the first one to show the
influence of Magritte. In fact, his surrealisms
were a synthesis of the Belgian
master's imagery with American
folk art and Davis' own penchant for
fantasy. Other illustrators followed
suit. Whether influenced by Davis or
Magritte or a combination of the two,
the dominant method of American
illustration quickly transformed from
narrative to conceptual, wherein the
surreal juxtaposition of forms to convey
an idea served to replace the literal
scene or vignette.
As with popular culture in general,
it might have been predicted that
even though Magritte was a dominant
influence in commercial art, he was
also a passing trend. And while some
of the Magritte school of illustrators
did evolve beyond that influence, the
trend became a convention. Certain
aspects of Magritte's visual language,
if not the actual images themselves,
were (and still are) ubiquitous in editorial
and advertising art. Attesting
to the widespread appropriation of
his emblematic imagery is Georges
Rogue's Ceci n'est pas un Magritte, a
book published in France (Flammarion,
1983), whose title is a pun on
one of Magritte's most famous paintings,
entitled "The Treachery of
Images" (1929), in which the artist
look' asp(
depicts an image of a pipe with the
caption, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe:'
suggesting that reality is not always
what it seems. Indeed the plethora
of Magritte "students" are not what
they seem either.
With so many imitations appearing
on the market, I grew tired of the
reasoning that if the work is so simple
to pilfer then perhaps it is merely
simplistic art. The exhibition at the
Met proves this assumption wrong.
Magritte was a master of communicating
complexity through simplicity.
Seeing the originals as they were
intended to be seen showed me that
no manner of parody or homage
could improve upon them. Magritte's
ironies cannot be made more profound
and less provocative. Although
he has given illustrators (and painters)
the generous gift of a distinctive
vocabulary, many have taken his originality
and made it cliche. FeW have
used it as he has: with intelligence,
humor and irony.
The Magritte exhibition is at the Menil Collection,
Houston, until February 21, and at the Art
Institute of Chicago, from March 16 through May
30. The exhibition catalogis available from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Steven Heller is a senior art director of The
New York Times. His most recent book is Borrowed
Design: The Use and Abuse of Historical
Form (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992).
HEADLINE: ITC BERKELEY MEDIUM; ITC ERAS MEDIUM TEXT/CREDIT: ITC BERKELEY BOOK, ITAUC 7
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