Bonjour, tout le monde!
On our class visit to the Museum of Modern Art, I was very interested in the René Magritte exhibition, titled, “The Mystery of the Ordinary” and features his works from 1926-1938. Magritte was one of the famous Surrealism painters whose work pointed out the inconsistencies in language and visual representation, characterizing the surrealist movement. The art of the time period that the exhibition focuses on featured violent interpretations and innovative ways of thinking about reality and society.
“An object encounters its image, an object encounters its name.”–René Magritte
The idea that Magritte puts forth in this quote is evident in many of his paintings. One work that captured my attention was titled, “La Clef des songes,” (The Interpretation of Dreams). In the painting, images are paired with words that appear to have no correlation to the image, all except the panel in the lower right hand corner. There, Magritte painted a suitcase and below it, he writes, “the valise,” which is both a French and English word for suitcase. The other panels are all paired with non-sensical words that do not accurately describe the object above them. This interesting juxtaposition of language and image is one of Magritte’s signature ideas: words are constructed by society to describe objects, but the objects do not describe the names. We can name the object “the horse” to be “the door,” and the object would still be the same. (Also interesting to note: this painting is the same one that appears on the cover of the text, “Way of Seeing” by John Berger that we read for class.)
“An object is not so possessed of its name that one cannot find for it another which suits it better.”–René Magritte
Another work that attracted me is one that points out the distinction between painting and sculpture. Entitled, “L’évidence éternelle” (The Eternally Obvious), it depicts five parts of a woman’s body in separate canvases. The message behind the work was that this series of five paintings were blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, since it calls to our attention the use of the 3rd dimension outside each individual canvas. Seeing this work brought to my mind our trip to the Rox Gallery to see the exhibit, Delusions, where one of the photographs featured two nudes with lampshades over their heads (Regretfully, I don’t have a picture). In that work, the artist was bringing up the idea of the nude being an object if the face is covered, since it eliminates any special or distinctive properties. Magritte’s “L’évidence éternelle” reminds me of it because in four of the five canvases, the person is unrecognizable, but if seen as a whole, the five canvases form one picture of a unique person.
–Joanna Huang
