In Which René Magritte Offers Aesthetic Illumination

Traces of the Divine

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The pleasure in surrealism does not lie in its ability to reassure that the world is not so, but rather in the knowledge that that it could be so. It is the idea that perhaps we will wake up in a world where water does not pour but slithers through the air, where a mere step will take us to the Moon. It might be a world in which a pipe is not a pipe, in which a rose by any other name wouldn’t smell as sweet; in which, by rule of non sequitur, we would be incapable of hurting those closest to us.

As its name indicates, the movement emphasized more than reality, and not less. Convinced that reality was unattainable, its adherents conjured a brilliant simulacrum of reality — on one hand, something that looked and felt and tasted like it without being it; and on the other, something that strayed so far from the exact nature of things that it could only call attention to truth. In tampering with our perception — especially our visual perception — they took away from us what we put most of our faith in. They asked us to look, and in so doing taught us we were blind.

Quite literally, then, René Magritte's "Key to the Fields" painting not only represents a broken window, it is a broken window. Upon looking at the shards of glass the observer realizes two things: first, that they are the pieces of a painting, and second, that they also serve the function of a mirror. The painting ostentatiously refers to itself as art by being a window into reality; it shows us life as we think we see it. Yet the closer we get to what is beyond the window, to what is outside, the more we realize that art is much like walking towards Michelangelo’s La Pieta in St. Peter’s basilica: sooner or later we’ll run into plate glass, or oil on canvas, and realize that no matter how many leaves are on the trees, they are still nothing but brushstrokes. We’re looking at a painting of a painting of a painting, and the only real thing is our perception, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Frailty — or limitations both physical and mental — built boxes and frames around concepts we had taken for granted up until the war. Death, represented heretofore in human terms (a putrefying corpse, a robed figure, a dancing skeleton) became the great Finisher; except instead of finishing life, it merely finished art by framing canvases with wood, by hiding humans inside boxes or behind trees, and by creating absurd, albeit ingenious, metonymies. That we find Jacques-Louis David’s Madame Recamier in Magritte’s parody (1951) is solely due to the fact that only a certain kind of box can hold a human, just like our minds fit into certain boxes and hibernate there quite comfortably under six feet of soil.

Yet with the acknowledgement of human limitation came an incontrollable desire to present thought in its purest condition, unbridled by aphorisms, cold logic, or even language. No one explored this more than Dali, whose paintings captured the most fantastical wanderings of the unconscious mind. The Spanish master’s eccentric and occasionally frightening visions bled into his daily life: for example, in order to attract the attention of Gala, who was at the time married to surrealist poet Paul Eluard, he coated himself in goat excrements, dyed his armpit hair blue, and laughed uncontrollably in her presence. Inexplicably — again, non sequitur — Gala found this appealing.

Similar to Magritte’s obsession with bringing to light an apparent contradiction was Dali’s obsession with placing time and space outside of time and space. Thus his predilection for vast desert landscapes filled with degraded, almost unrecognizable objects begins to make sense; the pocket watches in 1931's "The Persistence of Memory" melt not because they are in a desert, but because they have ticked themselves out of existence. Millet’s famous couple, who had bent their heads so quaintly, so reverently over a patch of ground in Angelus, lost their humanity when they ceased to have land to pray over and church bells to pray to. The couple’s aesthetic function remains the same in both Millet and Dali, except that in Angelus they are sowing heaven in earth, and in "Atavism at Twilight" (1933) their bodies are symbolically harvesting hell: a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow.

Magritte took pleasure in hiding his subjects’ faces, whether it was with a piece of fruit or a piece of cloth. "The Lovers" (1928), engaging in an act as simple as an embrace, find themselves fumbling blindly for each other. Dali, on the other hand, concealed the subjects of his paintings behind Gala’s face. In her homely, middle-aged body he found traces of the divine, and at different times she masqueraded as both the pagan and Christian symbols of feminine zeal: Leda and the Virgin Mary.

Everything floats in "Leda Atomica" (1949), a not-so-subtle allusion to the disaster in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Leda — Gala — almost embraces the swan, whose wing almost touches her, as she’s almost seated, her feet almost resting on pedestals. Even the sea in the background recoils from land, all of it a picture of atoms hanging in suspension. Even in its eerie representation (the weirdest being that Leda has slightly crossed eyes and distinctively eastern European features), there is no mistaking the classic elements of Renaissance art, namely the divine proportion. Espousing the A-bomb to the golden ratio turned this piece, in Dali’s opinion, into the best kind of art: a picture of both mankind’s greatest achievements and its current wondering and wandering.

A man with wings, an overgrown apple in a tiny room, melting watches, and a woman enclosed in a coffin are surreal not because they could never be but because we forget to realize that they could be. Our simplemindedness, our laziness consists of this: that we are constantly and erroneously surprised by what is. Why should we ever be surprised that a rose smells like a rose, or that the sea comes back time and time again to the shore? This is the paradox, the greatest of non sequiturs: waking up and looking at the world as if you had never seen it before, and discovering that this might in fact be the secret formula of happiness.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about her letter to the editor. She tumbls here.

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with georgette berger