| Artist: | Magritte, Rene |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Philosophy in the Boudoir | |
| Date of Work: | 1947 | |
| Nationality: | Belgian | |
| Context: | Post-War Fantasy | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: In "Philosophy in the Boudoir," Magritte again makes use of the strategies of Freudian dream logic--displacement, condensation, and fetish--to create a disturbing image of the surrealists' favorite subject: woman, who Andre Breton called the "most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world." The implication here is that she is marvelous precisely because she is so disturbing, so the "woman problem" was certainly not one the surrealists wanted to solve. Here Magritte substitutes fetish items of clothing for the actual woman, as if the fetish were preferable to the real woman. 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. Magritte messes with the system of things: his art points to an underlying disturbance rather than an underlying order (Mondrian). He is the secret agent man, the sabateur who sabotages our sense of security about the reality of appearances and the appearance of reality. Style: Magritte uses a realistic style to de-rail reality. Without interfering with the shape of things, he interferes with the system of things. Here he makes bold use of the strategies of Freudian dream logic: 1) he exploits irrational juxtapositions by displacing body parts from their normal context and re-situating them where they clearly do not belong; 2) he condenses dissimilar things--a dress that sprouts breasts and shoes terminating in real toes--to form one composite image; and 3) he turns the woman's intimate apparel into overcharged fetish objects. Magritte is precisionist in technique, using a seemingly straightforward, descriptive 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. "We see the world as being outside ourselves, although it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves." Magritte 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, language, 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." | ||
