Iconic in impact yet elusive in meaning and technique, the haunting body of work that René Magritte (1898−1967) created during the years leading up to the Second World War is the subject of the new exhibition Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938. Opening at the Menil on February 14, the exhibition is the first to focus exclusively on those breakthrough years, presenting approximately eighty paintings, collages, and objects, along with a selection of photographs, periodicals, and early commercial work.
Organized jointly by the Menil Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art (where the exhibition opened in September), Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 incorporates a wealth of material from the holdings of all three museums, as well as significant loans from other public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to see original paintings, often complex and challenging in their execution, that have become known primarily through reproduction, while gathering the full range of materials needed to trace Magritte’s development during years that were crucial both for him and for the course of modern art. By uniting works such as the three toiles découpées of 1930—which have not been seen together since 1931—the exhibition makes a vivid case for Magritte as both a modern painter and a Surrealist: two identities that could be at odds with one another, with the image overshadowing its making and its maker.
“We take special pride in this once-in-a-lifetime presentation,” said Menil Director Josef Helfenstein, one of the exhibition’s three curators. “It is precisely because we have such close ties to Magritte that we appreciate the collective scholarly effort that has resulted in discoveries that change what we thought we knew about his art, just as surely as his art itself unsettles what we think we know about the world.”
[Magritte_Time Transfixed]Beyond the artist’s native Belgium the largest and most significant collection of Magritte works is held by the Menil (publishers of the artist’s seven-volume catalogue raisonné, edited by David Sylvester), the result of the artist’s friendship with museum founders John and Dominique de Menil.
Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary begins in 1926, when Magritte first formed the intention of creating paintings that would, in the artist’s words, make “everyday objects shriek aloud.” It then follows the artist through his Surrealist sojourn in Paris and back to Belgium, concluding in 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II. This was the most inventive and experimental period in Magritte’s prolific career, when the artist developed innovative tactics including displacement, doubling, metamorphosis, juxtapositions, the “misnaming” of objects, and the capturing of visions. Magritte’s is a world that defies gravity, conflates waking and dream states, and honors the mystery of the ordinary.
Exclusively at the Menil: A pendant exhibition and a symposium:
Memories of a Voyage: The Late Work of René Magritte, through July 13