The Magritte machine

THE

MACHINE

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

THE

MACHINE

Digital publication with the collaboration of

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

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Before we begin T H E M AG R I T T E C O D E

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Itinerary 1 Temporary exhibition rooms / ground floor

Itinerary 2 Exhibition room / first floor

Itinerary 3 Permanent collection rooms / first and second floor

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T H E M AG R I T T E M AC H I N E

Introduction

M AG R I T T E : PHOTOGRAPHS AND FILMS

H I STO R I CA L I N V E N TO RY O F M E TA P I C T O R I A L SOLUTIONS

Courtesy of Ludion Publishers

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Sections

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T H E M AG I C I A N’S P OW E RS

Biography

I M AG E A N D WO R D

Proposals

R E N É M AG R I T T E

FIGURE AND GROUND

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Activities Guided tours and lectures

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Guillermo Solana

PICTURE AND WINDOW FA C E A N D M A S K M I M I C RY M EGA LO M A N I A

Paula Luengo

Mariola Campelo

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The Online Exhibition

Additional information

Explanatory video Virtual tour Poetic and musical itinerary Podcast

Before we begin

THE MAGRIT TE CODE The digital publication you see on your screen will accompany you as you stroll through the museum, enhancing your tour of the Magritte Machine temporary exhibition. As you follow the different itineraries through the exhibition rooms on the ground floor and the first floor, and through the permanent collection, we’ll highlight some of the key elements and ideas related to the life and work of this artist. If you want discover art in the Magritte code, you can check our highlights before, during or after your tour of the rooms.

René Magritte was a key figure in the development of surrealism. He studied at the Brussels Académie royale des Beaux-Arts and began to paint in an impressionist style.

However, futurism caught his attention and his work soon evolved towards cubo-futurism. The discovery of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical painting had an enormous impact on the development of his career as an artist.

As you tour the museum today, we invite you to observe and reflect on painting through the paintings themselves. Because as René Magritte said, “ People who look for symbolic meaning [ in my work ] fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.”

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Itinerary 1 / Temporary exhibition rooms / ground floor

THE MAGRIT TE MACHINE

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Guillermo Solana 8/9

Itinerary 1 / The Magritte Machine / Introduction

If we knew only one painting by Magritte, it would seem impossibly enigmatic ; it takes an exhibition of almost a hundred of his works to begin to understand his methods. The artist himself explained : “ Since my first exhibition in 1926 […]

I have painted a thousand or so pictures, but I have not conceived more than a hundred of those images.

Those thousand pictures stem solely from the fact that I have often painted variations of my images : it is my way of better grasping the mystery, of better possessing it.” This output based on repetition, variation, and the combination of a few figurative motifs is what we have called “ the Magritte Machine ”. This exhibition includes different versions of some of his most iconic motifs.

Magritte always defined his painting as “ an art of thinking ”. Thinking and making people think about painting itself and its relationship with reality was his constant aim. Nothing is what it seems in his pictures. The painter makes use of a whole range of devices to dash our expectations and prompt us to ask questions about what we see.

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Itinerary 1 / The Magritte Machine / Introduction

T H E M AG I C I A N’S POWERS

Magritte’s self-portraits are a departure from usual examples of this genre. He does not set out to study his own features, as other painters do, and less still to tell us about his life. What interests him is to present the figure of the artist as a magician, endowed with superpowers. The concept of the magician is deliberately ambiguous here : is he a sorcerer capable of working wonders or a conjurer with a bag of tricks ? Unlike André Breton and other surrealists, in his self-portraits Magritte hints at an ironic attitude towards the myth of the creative genius.

René Magritte, Attempting the Impossible, 1928. Oil on canvas, 116 × 81.1 cm. Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota

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Itinerary 1 / The Magritte Machine / Section 2

IMAGE AND WORD

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images ( This is not a pipe ), 1952. India ink on paper, 19 × 27 cm. Private collection, Belgium

During the years he lived in Paris ( 1927−30 ), in close contact with the French surrealist group, the artist incorporated into his paintings words written in the handwriting style taught to schoolchildren ; these words are combined with or replace figurative images. Magritte drew inspiration from school primers where the names of objects are displayed alongside pictures of them ; but in Magritte’s paintings the names rarely match the images. This mismatch between images and words makes it possible to question the very reality to which they both refer.

In his most radical paintings, words appear on their own, in place of images. The framed words and the biomorphic contours surrounding them bring to mind absent objects and bodies, like traces of images that have vanished or not yet materialised. These works display the influence of Miró and his painting-poetry.

The paradoxical relationships between images and words extend to the relationship between paintings and their titles.

Magritte’s titles are designed to bewilder the viewer so as to safeguard the paintings from trivial interpretations, just as his paintings protect the objects they represent : “ As I see it, the art of painting represents objects so that they resist habitual interpretations.”

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Itinerary 1 / The Magritte Machine / Section 3

FIGURE AND GROUND

Max Ernst once stated that Magritte’s paintings were “ collages painted by hand ”. Although the Belgian artist made only a small number of collages, the influence of collage as a compositional method is clearly visible in his paintings, especially those dating from 1926 to 1931, which are full of cut-out, pierced, or torn planes and human shapes that are flat like stage scenery. In these experiments Magritte discovered a procedure that he continued to use for the rest of his life : the inversion of figure and ground, which enabled him to turn solids into hollows, into holes through which the spectator looks out onto a landscape or simply a patch of sky.

René Magritte, High Society, 1965 or 1966. Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm The Telefónica Collection

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Itinerary 1 / The Magritte Machine / Section 4

PICTURE AND WINDOW

El The motif of the picture within a picture, well established in old master painting, is used by Magritte in a systematically ambiguous manner, leading us to doubt whether the picture he includes is a picture, an empty frame, a niche in a wall, or a window. Pictures have been likened to open windows ever since the invention of perspective in the Renaissance. Magritte sometimes interprets this comparison literally and reduces it to absurdity. If we take the picture to be a window, he seems to say, the ideal picture would be completely transparent—that is, invisible. Perfection in a picture would amount to vanishing altogether. Though Magritte does not seek a sudden and definitive absence, but rather a gradual disappearance that always leaves us wondering whether we really see what we think we see.

René Magritte, The Key of the Fields, 1936. Oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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Itinerary 1 / The Magritte Machine / Section 5

FAC E A N D M A S K

Another source of enigmas is the face, or rather its deletion from the human figure. The figure viewed from behind, concealing its face from us, acts as a kind of representative of the spectator in the painting ; it makes us aware of the act of looking. But the painter has other ways of causing his figures ’ faces to disappear, such as placing an object in front of them or covering their heads with a cloth. Sometimes Magritte removes the face from where we expect to find it—that is, on the human head—and at other times he projects it, in mask-like fashion, onto other parts of the body, onto some object, or even onto the landscape.

René Magritte, The Pleasure Principle, 1954. Oil on canvas, 73 × 54.5 cm Private collection

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Itinerary 1 / The Magritte Machine / Section 6

MIMICRY

Later on, Magritte’s imagery is dominated by processes of metamorphosis based on two key concepts of his poetics : likeness ( ressemblance ) and decontextualisation ( dépaysement ).

For Magritte likeness is not merely a relationship of similarity between two things : “ To be like is an act, and it is an act that pertains only to thought. To be like is to become the thing one takes with one. In itself, the thought can become the thing it takes with it.” Magritte is fascinated by mimicry in the sense ofthe tendency of beings to camouflage themselves with their surroundings and even to dissolve into space. The outline of a bird is filled with sky, a sailing boat takes on the colour and texture of the sea’s waves, and the flesh of a naked body turns blue to blend in with the air. Mimicry seeks invisibility.

René Magritte, Sky Bird, 1945. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 48 cm Private collection, courtesy of Di Donna Galleries, New York

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Itinerary 1 / The Magritte Machine / Section 7

M EGA LO M A N I A Whereas mimicry embodies the tendency of an organism to submit to its environment and disappear into it, we also find an opposite movement in Magritte’s work : the painter removes an object or body from its usual context and places it in a foreign environment, making it more visible. This is what Magritte and other surrealists call “ decontextualisation ”.

Magritte’s frequent device of changing the scale of familiar objects is part of this anti-mimetic tendency. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s novels, where Alice grows and shrinks repeatedly, Magritte increases the size of objects until they appear strange and monstrous. For example, he enlarges an apple or a rock until it fills the entire space of a room. Whereas in mimicry the body was devoured by space, now the body devours the surrounding space.

Levitation can achieve the same effect as enlargement—for example, with the image of a rock suspended in mid-air. An object’s essence is revealed when we place it in an unusual location that is incompatible with our habitual experience. This is a way of showing us things as if we were looking at them for the first time. As the painter says, “ Things are usually so well hidden by their uses that if we do catch a glimpse of them we feel we possess the secret of the Universe.”

René Magritte, Megalomania ( La folie des grandeurs ), 1962. Oil on canvas, 100.3 × 81.3 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston

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Itinerary 2 / Exhibition room / first floor

MAGRIT TE : PHOTOGRAPHS AND FILMS

Courtesy of Ludion Publishers

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Itinerary 2 / Exhibition room / first floor

MAGRIT TE : PHOTOGRAPHS AND FILMS

The Giant, Paul Nougé on the Belgian Coast, 1937. Private collection, courtesy of the Brachot Gallery, Brussels

The Magritte Machine is accompanied by an installation in the first-floor exhibition room featuring a selection of photographs and home-made movies by the painter.

Magritte never considered himself a photographer, but he was undoubtedly drawn to cinema and photography.

Discovered in the mid-1970s, these photographs of the artist’s family members and surrealist friends, self-portraits and snapshots of paintings in progress, and the home movies with them, form a type of family album of brilliant images impregnated with Magritte’s signature style.

Magritte : Photographs and Films is a selection of pieces from the exhibition The Revealing Image, curated by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi.

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Biography

RENÉ MAGRIT TE BY

Paula Luengo

René Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, in 1898.

On 24 February 1912, his mother committed suicide by throwing herself into the River Sambre ; when her corpse was retrieved days later, her face was covered by her nightgown.

Magritte never spoke about what happened. In 1916, he enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and attended the classes intermittently. In 1923, he discovered a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Song of Love, and was dazzled by it. Around 1924–25, he met the writer Paul Nougé, who became his close friend and mentor and a key member of the Belgian Surrealist group. At the end of 1925, he painted his first Surrealist works under the influence of De Chirico and Max Ernst. In September 1927, he moved to Le Perreux-sur-Marne, outside Paris, with his wife Georgette and remained there until 1930 ; during this time, he was in frequent contact with a few members of the Paris

Surrealist group. Magritte’s first solo exhibition was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in the spring of 1933.

On 20 November 1938, he gave a lecture entitled ‘ La Ligne de vie ’ outlining his artistic aims at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The first monograph on Magritte, written by his friend Louis Scutenaire, was published in 1947. Between 1960 and 1961, the American artist and critic Suzi Gablik spent several months with Magritte preparing a book on him that came out in 1970. In December 1965, he attended the opening of the major René Magritte retrospective at the MoMA in New York ; during this trip, the only one Magritte and his wife made to the United States, the painter visited Edgar Allan Poe’s house in the Bronx and the couple travelled to Houston, where they were received by his collectors John and Dominique de Menil. Magritte was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer in July 1967 and died on 15 August at the age of 68.

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The online exhibition

Explanatory video The Magritte Machine W I T H Guillermo Solana

Podcast The Magritte Machine

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Listen on iVoox ►

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Guillermo Solana, artistic director of Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza, offers a fascinating introduction to the first retrospective on René Magritte ( 1898-1967 ) to be held in Madrid since the one hosted by Fundación Juan March in 1989.

Guillermo Solana, artistic director of Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza, and Paula Luengo, conservator and head of exhibitions at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza—curator and technical curator, respectively, of The Magritte Machine— talk about the exhibition.

Duration: 25 min 19 s Language: Español

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The online exhibition

Virtual tour The Magritte Machine

Poetic and musical itinerary The Magritte Machine

BY Overture

Tour the exhibition from your computer, mobile device or VR headset. You can follow the complete itinerary through the different sections : ( 1 ) The Magician’s Powers ( 2 ) Image and Word ( 3 ) Figure and Ground ( 4 ) Picture and Window ( 5 ) Face and Mask ( 6 ) Mimicry, and ( 7 ) Megalomania.

The band Overture offers its own interpretation of the surrealist atmosphere that envelops the Belgian painter’s work, transferring it to the realm of avant-garde electronic music.

Based on the different sections into which the exhibition is divided, the seven sound pieces create an immersive listening experience of the pictures, providing visitors who choose this alternative audio guide with an acoustic accompaniment as they proceed through the itinerary.

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Itinerary 3 / Permanent collection rooms / first and second floor

HISTORICAL INVENTORY OF M E TA P I C T O R I A L SOLUTIONS

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Mariola Campelo 36 / 37

Itinerary 3

HISTORICAL INVENTORY OF M E TA P I C T O R I A L SOLUTIONS

“ I make use of paintings to render thoughts visible,” said Magritte when discussing how the reflective aspect of painting was the underlying principle of all his work. To formalise this idea and separate painting from the exigency to reproduce reality as faithfully as possible, the Belgian artist created an inventory of problems which recur in his works, combined, repeatedly and disconcertingly.

As the exhibition The Magritte Machine clearly reveals, some of the metapictorial problems that obsessed this painter had already been addressed in earlier periods.

Conceptual differences apart and taking into account the context in which each artist lived and worked, we invite you to explore the permanent collection and discover how these dilemmas were resolved at other moments in the history of art.

René Magritte The Key of the Fields, 1936 Oil on canvas. 80 × 60 cm

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Itinerary 3

SELF-PORTRAITS

Historical Inventory of Metapictorial Solutions

Self-portraits have helped artists to assert themselves as intellectuals and creators and improve their social standing since the Early Modern Period. From a historical perspective, they have enabled us to learn more about the figure of the artist. But that’s not all...

During the Baroque period, the purpose of art, especially religious art, was to engage viewers ’ empathy.

The self-portraits which Rembrandt painted during the course of his life skilfully convey his state of mind and feelings, as well as allowing us to study the changes to his face with the passage of time. This has led some experts to refer to these images as an “ autobiography ” of the artist. Self-portraits can therefore represent documentary material.

In his numerous self-portraits, Lucian Freud always appears with a forced gesture—winking, casting a sidelong glance or looking down— a gaze that demonstrates the effort he has to make to paint himself through a mirror. In this painting, the low-angle perspective not only makes him seem larger to us but reveals one of the most invisible yet legendary aspects of his work : the tenacity demanded by his working method. The artist’s creative capacity was not the product of coincidence and intuition, as certain legends about art and artists would have us believe, but of constant learning and experimentation.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn Self-portrait Wearing a Hat and Two Chains, Circa 1642-1643 Oil on panel, 72 × 54.8 cm

Lucian Freud Reflection with Two Children ( Self-portrait ), 1965 Oil on canvas, 91 × 91 cm

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Itinerary 3

C O R R E L AT I O N S BETWEEN WORDS AND THINGS Magritte started introducing words and texts in his paintings after discovering cubist collages in Paris.

But words and texts are a device that has been used throughout art history, albeit to inform and complement the image rather than as a central element.

Historical Inventory of Metapictorial Solutions

Harnett’s painting is a modern version of the traditional vanitas or still life genre, in which every object acquires a significance related to the passage of time and provide us with a glimpse of the customs of the society in which he lived. In this painting, the written word on the newspaper serves a documentary purpose, a clue hidden among the objects depicted that reveals with archaeological veracity the date and context of the work.

William Michael Harnett Materials for a Leisure Hour, 1879 Oil on canvas, 38 × 51.5 cm

THE PICTURE WITHIN THE PICTURE

Pieter Hendricksz. de Hooch Interior of the Council Chamber of Amsterdam Town Hall, circa 1663-1665 Oil on canvas, 112.5 × 99 cm

Magritte’s paradoxical windows allude to the classic metaphor of painting as an open window before the viewer’s gaze. Sometimes the rhetoric is expanded to encompass the idea of the “ picture within the picture ”, a visual metaphor that references painting as image.

This painting by Pieter de Hooch is full of elements ( perspective, doors that open...) that make it seem that the picture is displayed before us in order to show us this interior of Amsterdam Town Hall. But the Dutch painter also used the device of the “ picture within a picture ” to create a disquieting exchange of glances : between the viewer outside the canvas, who observes the scene inside the chamber from the other side of the curtain while simultaneously gazing at the painting in the background, over the fireplace ; and the viewer inside the picture who is in the foreground behind the curtain, looking at the painting we know hung over the fireplace in front of him. The result is a disconcerting scene that seems to reproduce the actual relationship between the viewer and the canvas.

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Itinerary 3

PEOPLE VIEWED FROM BEHIND

Caspar David Friedrich Easter Morning, circa 1828-1835 Oil on canvas, 43.7 × 34.4 cm

Historical Inventory of Metapictorial Solutions

The figure viewed from behind first emerged in the Late Middle Ages : we find it in works by the early Flemish painters, although it was Caspar David Friedrich who, centuries later, incorporated it into his canvases systematically, making it the true protagonist of his landscapes. In Friedrich’s painting, this disquieting element juxtaposes the smallness of the human figure with the immensity of nature, but in particular it serves to introduce the viewer into the quiet contemplation of the landscape, the same landscape on which the people viewed from behind cast their thoughtful gaze.

MIMICRY

The Seated Man in Paul Cézanne’s painting blends into his setting, almost to the point of dissolving into space, not in the “ Magrittian ” sense of resemblance but rather as the product of a new formal experimentation of painting, the result of applying a novel type of brush stroke—geometric, agile, thick—that breaks down the image into tiny planes of colour.

Cézanne’s work reflects on painting as language. The French painter made no distinction between people and objects : they are all forms to be organised on the canvas according to the criteria of painting itself ( colour, forms, planes, composition, etc.).

Paul Cézanne Seated Man, 1905-1906 Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 54.6 cm

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Activities / Guided tours and lectures

The Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza has designed different initiatives to provide audiences of all kinds with a richer experience of the temporary exhibition.

The Magritte Machine Lecture series ED U CATI ON

As a parallel activity to the exhibition dedicated to René Magritte, the museum has organised a series of lectures on the life and work of this great artist.

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The Magritte Machine Guided tours for adults

All About Magritte Special activity for families

The Magritte Machine Guided tours for adults

E D U CAT I ON

EDUCAT I ON

F R I E N DS OF THE M U S E U M

The guided tour of the temporary exhibition The Magritte Machine invites participants to immerse themselves in the pictorial universe of this Belgian painter, considered one of the leading figures of the surrealist movement.

How can we make a visit to an exhibition more enjoyable ? How do we approach art when we aren’t experts ? Can we predispose our mind and body to have a more pleasurable experience ? We propose a practical experience for families with children aged 7 and over. Before touring the temporary exhibition The Magritte Machine, participants will be introduced in a very special way to the Belgian painter’s universe.

Friends of the Museum have the opportunity to discover Magritte’s wonderful inventiveness by attending a private tour with an art historian. Tours are available for small groups at specific times on selected dates and must be booked in advance.

The tour is designed for groups of adults from cultural associations and lifelong learning centres, etc. who visit the temporary exhibitions at the museum to improve their knowledge of art.

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Additional information

Exhibition fact sheet

Practical information

Title The Magritte Machine

Address Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Paseo del Prado, 8 28014 Madrid

Organised by Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Sponsored by Comunidad de Madrid Venue and dates Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 14 September 2021– 30 January 2022 Curator Guillermo Solana, artistic director of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Technical curator Paula Luengo, conservator and head of exhibitions at Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza Number of artworks 95 Publication Exhibition catalogue with an essay

by Guillermo Solana and biography by Paula Luengo

Dates 14 September 2021–30 January 2022 Place Temporary exhibition rooms.

Ground floor First-floor exhibition room Permanent collection rooms Opening times Tuesday to Friday and Sunday, 10.00–19.00 Saturday, 10.00–20.00 Ticket prices • General : 13 € • Reduced : 9 €. Senior citizens ( 65+), pensioners and students on presentation of proof.

• Groups ( minimum of 7 ): 11 € • Free : children and young people under 18, unemployed persons, disabled persons, large families ( 3 or more children ), practising teachers, and youth card ( Spanish or European ) holders.

Advance ticket sales • Museum ticket office • www.museothyssen.org • Tel. 91 791 13 70 Audio guide service Available in several languages Shop Ground floor. Exhibition catalogue available Cafe-restaurant Ground floor Transport • Bike. BiciMAD 29, Calle del Marqués de Cubas, 25 • Buses. Lines 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 20, 27, 34, 37, 41, 51, 52, 53, 74, 146 and 150 • Metro. Line 2, Banco de España • Train. Atocha, Sol and Recoletos More information mtb@museothyssen.org www.museothyssen.org/en/exhibitions/ magritte-machine www.museothyssen.org

Credits Editorial coordination Exhibition Department, Education Department, Publications Department, and Web and New Media Department of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Graphic design Sonia Sánchez Credits and disclaimer © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. The following list of credits refers to the works with copyright protection. Irrespective of any terms and conditions established by Fundación Colección ThyssenBornemisza, permission to use these images must be sought from the author of the work or from the manager of their rights. © of the publication : Fundación Colección ThyssenBornemisza, 2021 © of the texts : their authors © of the photographs : see photography credits.

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