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Like the indelible dreams that the movement’s artists displayed on canvas, Surrealism refuses to die. Launched nearly a century ago, with its techniques long absorbed by mainstream media and advertising, it has sprung back to life in several Bay Area exhibitions in recent years.
Now one of its masters, who detoured from the Surrealist avant-garde to create his own unique style, gets a wide-ranging show at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. “Rene Magritte: The Fifth Season” includes 70 works from a variety of sources but focuses mostly on the last 25 years of the Belgian-born painter’s career.
What’s more, one of the museum’s permanent collection galleries is featuring artists such as Salvador Dali in a compact “Transatlantic Surrealism” series. Also on view are paintings by artists who were active in San Francisco during Surrealism’s heyday.
“Rene Magritte: The Fifth Season” is curated by SFMOMA’s Caitlin Haskell, and it benefits from a relationship with the Magritte Museum in Brussels, Belgium. The exhibit runs through Oct. 28.
This isn’t a career retrospective; many of Magritte’s most famous works painted in his 20s aren’t included. But iconic images fill the museum galleries. Here are the faceless men wearing bowler hats (a kind of self-portrait of the artist), the apples and roses that expand to fill rooms, the darkened streetscapes under sunlit skies, the floating rocks.
One recent afternoon, crowds of visitors were intently studying the images, which were already familiar from posters and album covers. The show is expected to be popular, even with a $33 top ticket price, $35 on weekends.
But if Magritte’s fans and other curious museumgoers expect definitive answers to Magritte’s mysteries for the price of admission, they may be disappointed. Or even more intrigued.
“Eternally perplexing” is the way an art historian described one of Magritte’s signature works; 51 years after his death, we may be no closer to an answer.
That would be fine with Magritte, whose most famous paintings include one of a pipe with a text in French that translates to “This Is not a pipe.” Of course it’s not—it’s a painting of a pipe. (There’s a pen-and-ink version of that work in the SFMOMA show.)
“People who look for symbolic meanings,” he said, “fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. The images must be seen such as they are.”
Yes, the images are almost all recognizable, everyday objects, which sets Magritte apart from other Surrealist painters. Their subconscious twists and turns can remain locked away from us. Magritte’s Belgian brand of Surrealism deals in “clear visions with unclear meanings,” as one curator put it.
In San Francisco, that is strikingly evident in “Personal Values,” a 1957 painting from SFMOMA’s own collection. Magritte clearly depicts a bedroom with a bed, a comb, shaving brush, a tumbler, a cloud-filled sky in the modest-size canvas. But the comb is longer than the bed, the tumbler fills the center of the room, the sky makes up the walls.
Seeing 70 of Magritte’s paintings “in the flesh” rather than in reproductions allows for more intense detective work.
“The Human Condition” (1933) is endlessly fascinating. In it, a painting of a mundane landscape is propped on an easel in front of a window that reveals the exact same scene. Except for a clip at the top of the canvas and one edge of it visibly tacked to its wooden stretcher board, it’s difficult to tell where “reality” ends and “illusion” begins. Of course, both reality and illusion are painted.
“The Dominion of Light” is the collective title for more than 20 Magritte paintings that feature a night-time street scene with a glowing daytime sky above. Seven are mounted in this exhibit in a semicircle for lab-like study. (Look for the silhouette of an oversize bowler hat on the horizon, as if Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant were transplanted to Belgium.)
If museum visitors think they’ve found a key to these placid but disorienting streetscapes, curator Haskell’s wall text raises more questions. “Do these pictures capture two fragments of a single day?” she asks. “Or one instant in a world where land and sky are chronically disjointed?”
A 1955 gouache-on-paper version of Magritte’s “Golconda,” often called “It’s raining men,” takes on several different aspects on closer inspection. Is the gridwork of men in dark overcoats and bowler hats falling down like raindrops? Floating up like helium balloons? Just hovering in mid-air? There’s no sense of motion, and the sky is mostly blue—with no sense of a rainstorm, even of men in bowlers.
Back to Magritte’s indelible image of a green apple filling a room, “hypertrophy,” the curator calls it. There are more versions to study in this exhibit: an apple in a room with an opening in one wall (for someone to escape?), a rock filling a room, a rose.
The subject seems to be familiar, the contrast obvious. But what if Magritte were playing with scale, the way artist Joseph Cornell did with his boxes and Lewis Carroll with his stories? What if Magritte’s apples were normal size and the rooms built in miniature around them?
Surrealism is back, and with Magritte’s pristine style and still-puzzling images, it’s curiouser and curiouser.
‘RENE MAGRITTE: THE FIFTH SEASON’
When: Through Oct. 28. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday-Tuesday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday.
Where: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., S.F.
Tickets: $27-$33 weekdays, $29-35 weekends; free for visitors 18 and younger. 415-357-4000, sfmoma.org.
