10/10/2023 0 Comments Magritte faceless portraitsThe anonymous-looking bowler-hatted bourgeois gentlemen about to pass each other are like Magritte’s omnipresent alter-egos, yet different. Both motifs are typical of Magritte’s 1930s paintings, but painted as if someone else had done them. The paintings within the painting, carried under the arms of two men, are executed with the same kind of brushstrokes as the primary scene one is a dense forest landscape, while the other is just a blue sky with clouds in it. Here Magritte combines heavy pseudo-Renoir brushwork with two of the characteristic tropes of his earlier work-frames within the frame and men in hats. The exhibition takes its name from a 1943 painting, The Fifth Season, which exemplifies Magritte’s “sunlit” style, basically a deliberately debased imitation of Impressionism, especially that of Renoir. “René Magritte: The Fifth Season” (May 19–October 28) brings together some 70 works to present a portrait of the artist in transition. However, an exhibition opening this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) aims to make sense of them in the context of Magritte’s thought and to show how they led to the final, and arguably greatest, phase, in which he flew free of Surrealist dogma to achieve a completely original and personal art. Critics labeled them wrong turns at best, if not signs of waning powers or simply “bad painting.” Even today, the works from this period, which lasted until the late ’40s, have a hard time finding appreciation. In Nazi-occupied Brussels, Magritte launched what he termed “sunlit Surrealism,” followed by his “vache” paintings, bodies of work that were both greeted with immediate and utter incomprehension and derision. ![]() On the other hand, since he also believed discomfort to be a hallmark of the experience of true art, he didn’t hold back from providing that, as well-and never more so than when he radically changed his style at the beginning of World War II, after a decade of producing Surrealist work. He would probably be gratified by that, for notwithstanding his revolutionary ideas, Magritte considered the providing of pleasure and delight to be one of his-and art’s-most important goals. With his bowler-hatted men, green apples, and ubiquitous cloud-dotted blue skies, René Magritte is an almost comforting figure in the modern-art pantheon, a familiar, if slightly bizarre friend whom it is always good to see again. René Magritte, Personal Values, 1952 oil on canvas. ![]() René Magritte, The Fifth Season, 1943 oil on canvas René Magritte, The Enchanted Domain I, 1953 oil on canvas René Magritte, The Happy Donor, 1966 oil on canvas. René Magritte, The Listening Room, 1952 oil on canvas.
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