The final work in the Art Gallery of New South Wales Magritte exhibition is a simple image on paper of a smoking pipe. Not that pipe of “This is not a pipe” fame (its title being The Treachery of Images), which hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but one that reads, “Ceci continue de ne pas etre une pipe” (“This continues to not be a pipe”) – a 1952 callback to his iconic 1929 work.
It’s a cheeky send-off from René Magritte, one of the 20th century’s best-known surrealists, perfectly summarising an oeuvre that plays with everyday objects to prompt questions about how we think of reality.
“He’s interested in the mystery of the ordinary,” says Nicholas Chambers, the exhibition’s curator. This sets him apart from surrealists like Salvador Dali, whose works were dream-like. “Magritte was quite sceptical about the psyche and the idea of creating images derived from the unconscious. If Magritte’s interested in dreams, he’s only interested in the dreams that we have when we’re awake.”
The result is artwork where the objects are meticulously painted to look like what they are, sometimes trompe l’oeil style, but in a composition that leads the viewer to question the connection between representation and reality.
In The Listening Room, for example, a green apple fills a room – the viewer is left to wonder, is the apple large or the room small? “He brings these different ways of representing the world into strange, surprising relationships with each other so that the connections between them no longer seem straightforward,” says Chambers. “In Magritte’s hands they become untethered.”
The exhibition is set out in chronological order to give context to the Belgian artist’s life and work. Chambers says Australian audiences have likely only seen Magritte pieces in group shows with other surrealists; this retrospective is deliberately designed to give visitors a glimpse of his early work – including commercial illustrations and experiments in cubism – before we see the evolution of certain motifs.
“What’s really fascinating about him is that, from the outset, he really sees himself as a painter of ideas,” says Chambers. “In telling the story of Magritte, we’re really telling the story of how those ideas evolve over time and we’re looking at this artist who is, above all else, a maker of really powerful and arresting images.”
Compare 1927’s The Meaning of Night, an early depiction of two bowler-hatted men standing back to back on a beach, with Golconda, a large-scale work where 172 nearly identical bowler-hatted men fall from the sky like rain, produced almost three decades later. In the 1920s, the bowler hat was ubiquitous and Magritte used the motif to represent the everyman; by the 1950s, the bowler hat had become less common and Magritte played with the idea that he was the bowler-hatted man.
Six years in the making, the exhibition also features several never-before-seen pieces sourced from private collections. “Many [art lenders] were moved by the fact that this was going to be the very first opportunity for Australian audiences to see his work in depth, and those collectors actually travelled here for the opening to see it all together, so it was a really special thing,” says Chambers.
While Magritte’s best-known work is shown in the exhibition chapter called “The Alphabet of Revelations”, don’t rush through “The Ellipsis”, his post-World War II period.
“What kind of art is relevant, or even appropriate, to make at a time of such great social upheaval, such violence? Magritte famously comes up with a new idea, the English translation of which is ‘Sunlit Surrealism’. He abandons his very refined, almost photorealistic technique and instead adopts this freewheeling impressionist style that services his sense of humour,” Chambers explains. “Magritte was an utter prankster.”
The curator’s favourite piece is an earlier one. The Song of the Storm (1937) depicts rain falling onto a bulbous cloud hovering close to the ground. “It belongs to this group that I think of as his ‘problem’ paintings, where he’s attempting to solve various representational problems, this idea that every object in the world has a hidden, poetic resonance with something else,” Chambers says. “This cloud has shape, it has volume, but it’s somehow without mass. In this picture, Magritte gives us this image of a heavy cloud. You have to see it in person if you’re to make sense of it.”
Viewing Magritte’s work in real life seems to slow people down, Chambers adds. “Magritte knew how to create images that were very legible. They functioned as strong, immediate images, but he often laboured over the details. In many of the pictures – often literally in the shadowy elements of the compositions – he secreted these elements that do not reproduce [in photographs]. There are lots of pictures that really reward close viewing.”
Magritte is on now at the Art Gallery of NSW until February 9, 2025.
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