Magritte: This Is Still Not a Pipe review – brilliance and trash from the surrealist who sent up Freud
René Magritte is the most inexplicable of artists. It’s much harder to get a handle on him than such supposedly difficult modern greats as Cézanne or Picasso. After all, cubism is a perfectly rational attempt to capture the complexity of reality. But Magritte? He confronts you with wilful mysteries. This show sets choice examples of his magic against modern art and is full of quirky, unexpected treasures that give your wonder at Magritte little twists in new and perverse directions.
A painting of puffy white clouds held me across the gallery and still floats ineffably in my mind. It’s a shock because it is so painterly and subtle. If you think Magritte fashioned his surrealist images in a deliberately flat, even banal style, think again. This simple painting of clouds in the blue is full of supple shadow and ethereal light, a brilliantly observed view of nature in the vein of Gainsborough, Constable or Hockney.
Except it’s not. Innocent as these clouds look, real as they look, they are no such thing. These are not clouds. This is not the sky. And the painting’s sunniness is totally undermined by its title: The Curse. Magritte made it in 1931 at the height of surrealism, the revolutionary art movement that took from the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud the insight that nothing is innocent and no image is simply what it seems.
Everything can be a symbol and probably a dirty one. A pipe. Or a nose. Magritte’s 1936 self-portrait The Philosopher’s Lamp combines both in an absurd meta-Freudian image as his nose becomes a fleshy tube curving down into the bowl of his pipe while a candle twists in a waxy, snaking motion around the stiff single leg of the table. Freud would surely diagnose a fear of impotence but the painting makes that so obvious, it’s a joke. Magritte is satirising psychoanalysis and surrealism itself for being too logical in their reading of symbols.
The surrealist movement was started in Paris after the first world war by poets and artists traumatised by its mass slaughter and seeking imaginative renewal by escaping into dreams and erotic reveries. Magritte became the movement’s greatest Belgian representative, but he pushed at its limits, taking it to a far less easily decoded level.
That philosophical shift is here in The Interpretation of Dreams, a modern masterpiece lent by its owner the great (and philosophical) American artist Jasper Johns. The English title used here connects it directly with Freud’s most famous book although its actual title in French, La Clef des Songes, translates as The Key of Dreams. Either way, this 1935 painting suggests that dreams and reality are equally bizarre and neither can be explained by the oedipal complex. Four objects are displayed against a neutral background in separate sections. A horse’s head is captioned “the door”; a clock face is labelled “the wind”; under a white jug it says “the bird”. Yet in the bottom right corner, a suitcase is accurately identified as “the valise”.
It’s the last that makes this an unsettling demolition of reality rather than a piece of whimsy. If all the images we saw in dreams were fantastically misrecognised, that would be amusing, but one time out of four, says Magritte, the dream is true. You can neither ignore dreams nor understand them. You’re screwed.
But if Magritte rejected the psychoanalytic overconfidence that dreams can be decoded, he had no problem recalling the most vivid and appalling nightmares. The Pleasure depicts a girl eating a bird and in The Listening Room a giant apple completely fills a chamber, its bright green skin pushing monstrously against the walls and ceiling.
There are so many connections here with modern art – how many installations have echoed that space-swallowing apple? But the patchiest part of this show is its attempt to link with today’s artists. A Jeff Koons train and Aqualung, a floppy Sarah Lucas nude, an obscene wooden statue of a woman interacting with teddy bears by Isabelle Albuquerque – these are one-dimensional compared with Magritte’s conundrums. Gagosian has done a brilliant job of borrowing his work but descends into commercial glibness in its choice of his supposed 21st-century peers.
Who did this piece of trash, I wondered, in front of a ludicrous cartoony daub of three legs strutting about independently, one with a red nose, moustache and feathered headdress, another puffing a pipe, all rendered in slobbery horrid hues. Then I saw the signature: Magritte. This and a couple of equally lurid daubs come from Magritte’s “Vache” (cow) period when he deliberately did bad, stupid paintings to annoy his family, friends and fans.
What a dude. He could paint like Jan van Eyck when he wanted but sometimes preferred to paint like a clumsy moron. Magritte was too intelligent to respect anything, least of all art.