| Artist: | Magritte, Rene |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Menaced Assassin | |
| Date of Work: | 1926 | |
| Nationality: | Belgian | |
| Context: | Post-War Fantasy | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | oil on canvas | |
| Subject: it's a sex murder story, and is typical in the work of Magritte, the picture is a puzzle that cannot be solved. In the center of an inner room, we see a woman's nude body lying on the divan. A towel is placed over her neck, but that does not prevent us from determining that she has been decapitated. All is still now; the only trace of the bloody deed is evident in the blood that trickles down from her mouth. But who killed her? Could it be the man holding a club outside the open doorway, or the man on the other side holding a net, as if waiting to trap someone? Could it be the man inside the room, who has turned his back on the nude woman to stare intently into the phonograph? His overcoat is thrown over a neaby chair and a suitcase is all packed, ready to go. Out the window, three men poke their heads up to look inside. What did these three voyeurs witness? The scene presents us with a narrative puzzle that cannot be solved; instead, we only come up with more questions. Magritte's pictures are always violent in some way; though he never really shows an act of violence, he does violence to our accepted ideas and conventions in the way he undermines the reality we take for granted. Behind those proper bourgeois suits and bowler hats, a crime of desire is lurking. Magritte hints at a latent vs. manifest content. He is the secret agent man, the sabateur who sabotages our sense of security about the reality of appearances. Style: Magritte uses a realistic style to de-rail reality. He employs a lucid dream technique by using an almost trompe-l'oeil style that on the surface seems innocent enough, but that covertly undermines the reality we take for granted. Without interfering with the shape of things, he interferes with the system of things. He is precisionist in technique, using an almost textbook style, but his content is always a disturbing riddle. Precision, rather than alleviating fear, ends up being the cause of added fear and apprehension. Trompe-l'oeil (trick of the eye) and trompe-l'esprit (trick of the mind) become his strategies for upsetting the assured mindset that we bring to viewing reality. And reality, as a result, turns out to be a much more complicated thing than we might have suspected. Magritte's highly realistic images end up undermining the authority and certainty of an external world; we start to suspect that the world might only be an extension of what is taking place inside our own heads. He pits the rational, reasoning mind against the imaginative and fantastic with no way to resolve the conflict. He is determined to fight reason with its own weapons. Reason always tries to make things determinate, to pin them down definitively. His pictures resemble dreams of reason with a frightening precision that ends up backfiring, throwing reason itself, and reality, into question. Quite simply, he creates picture puzzles that cannot be solved or destroyed by reason alone. Context: Magritte is a surrealist in the way his puzzling images undermine reason and the reality we take for granted. His realistic style and surreal content place him in the camp of Dali and others who use reality against itself, as opposed to the more abstract dream imagery of Miro. Magritte lived in France for 3 years and was an active participant in Surrealism. His work is sometimes called "Magic Realism" in the way his precisionist, trompe-l'oeil style yields puzzling pictures that reason alone can neither solve or destroy. As with all the surrealists, his work touches on how reality itself might only be a dream and, conversely, how our dreams and desires are the stuff of which reality is made. "If the dream is a transcription of waking life, waking life is also a transcription of the dream." | ||
