Rene Magritte dedicated his life to painting the impossible. This fall, in what promises to be a blockbuster exhibit of subversive and delightful absurdities, his work comes to the Museum of Modern Art. It will be the first solo show by the late Belgian surrealist in more than 20 years.
“There’s now an entire generation of people here who haven’t seen a Magritte show,” says curator Anne Umland, who calls him “one of the most extraordinary image makers of the modern period.”
“Magritte: the Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” opening Sept. 28, brings together some 80 works from the artist’s early breakthrough period, a time, Umland says, “when Magritte became Magritte.”
Magritte’s polite brand of realism sets him apart from more sensational surrealists, like Salvador Dali, who plumbed the unconscious with bizarre images of rotting flesh and swarming insects. Magritte preferred ordinary props: trees, chairs, apples, men with bowler hats.
It was the way he combined them that made for strangeness.
“That was his specialty,” Umland says. “A very clear form of imagery with unclear, inexplicable meanings.”
Some of his paintings challenge the relationship between reality and representation. “The Treachery of Images” looks like a simple illustration of a tobacco pipe, except its caption reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”).
“He’s cautioning you to remember that pictures of things are different than the things themselves,” Umland says. “It’s a message that is particularly apt today, when people are being bombarded by images like never before.”
Ironically, some contemporary images are derived from Magritte’s creations. The iconic CBS eye logo, for example, originally had blue sky and clouds in the iris, just like Magritte’s 1928 painting, “The False Mirror.” And the green apple that appears in his later pictures inspired the logo for The Beatles’ Apple Records, which in turn was said to inspire the one for Apple computers.
“The thing about Magritte is that he is popular and serious at the same time,” Umland says. “He had a very bold, legible style that lent itself to commercial design. The job of a show like this is to reclaim Magritte from this ubiquitous appropriation so that people can see him afresh.”
Speaking of fresh looks, The Whitney Museum has a similar idea with “Robert Indiana: Beyond Love”
opening Sept. 26.
Pop artist Indiana has been living in the shadow of his own signature image, the ubiquitous LOVE icon, for almost 50 years.
The design, in which the letters LO appear over the letters VE with the O playfully tilted, made its debut on a 1965 Christmas card. It swiftly became an emblem of ’60s idealism and has since appeared on stamps, banners, prints, rings and numerous public sculptures, including one on Sixth Avenue at 55th Street.
His later work retains the idea but expands the vocabulary with sculptures and signs dedicated to other universal human needs and concerns, such as “HOPE,” “HUG” and “EAT DIE.” Serious pop-art fans may recall Indiana as the star of Andy Warhol’s 1963 film, “Eat,” one of those movies that pressed the outer limits of human boredom. In it, Indiana spends 45 minutes eating a big mushroom until, at the very end, a cat appears.
Cats were a favorite subject of the enigmatic Polish-French artist, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, best known as Balthus. Had he stuck to felines, he wouldn’t have become such a controversial figure. But Balthus, who died in 2001 at 92, also painted pubescent girls in erotic and voyeuristic poses, and these pictures have consistently raised eyebrows.
In the Metropolitan Museum’s playfully titled show “Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations,”
opening Sept. 25, the dreamy, somnambulant girls will be there, all right, but so will Balthus’ great classical style.
The show, beginning with his early work from the 1930s, reminds us how hard it was to be a straight figurative artist in Europe back then. You could be a surrealist like Magritte. Or a German expressionist. But if, like Balthus, you wanted to emulate the old masters and paint people in rooms, if you were fascinated with light, beautiful faces and the roundness of forms, you needed to be different. Balthus’ eroticized girls, hovering on the threshold of puberty, made people pay attention.
Cats appear in these pictures as uncannily self-aware, and in two pictures the artist assumes a feline persona. In one, he’s a happy cat confronting a plateful of fish. A sparkling, almost granular light gives all these pictures an aura of magic.
Art Spiegelman raised the graphic novel to the level of art with his two-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning work, “Maus,” about his father’s survival in the Holocaust. On Nov. 8, the Jewish Museum will give him his first US museum exhibit: “Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix: A Retrospective.”
The show will span his five-decade career from his early days in the underground “comix” scene and on through his New Yorker covers and his 2004 autobiographical account of the toppling of the Twin Towers, through more than 300 preparatory sketches, preliminary and final drawings, plus prints and documentary material. Like Magritte and Balthus before him, Spiegelman can still open windows — not onto mere scenery and ordinary likenesses, but into the human imagination.