The Belgian Surrealist René Magritte is one of the most distinctive and popular artists of the twentieth century. Whereas many of his contemporaries set out to shock their audiences with outrageous antics and extreme behaviour, Magritte carefully developed an image of bourgeois conformity. He dressed like a banker in an anonymous suit and bowler hat, painted at his dining room table and projected an air of quiet domesticity. His artistic mission, however, remained utterly subversive. In his paintings he depicted situations that undermine our expectations of the work of art as a representation of reality. Whether it is a train emerging from a fireplace, a pair of boots sprouting human toes or an apple the size of a room, the art of Magritte takes us into an unsettling realm in which the ordinary becomes strange and the bizarre becomes familiar.
Magritte was born in Brussels where, apart from a brief spell in Paris, he lived for much of his life. After training at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, he experimented with avant-garde styles, mainly variants on Futurism and Cubism. But around 1925 an encounter with the work of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico had a decisive impact on his work, offering Magritte what he later described as ‘a new vision through which the spectator might recognise his own isolation and hear the silence of the world’. Inspired by De Chirico, he began to paint unexpected and enigmatic combinations of objects using a deadpan realist style. He also began to use words and text to disrupt the relationship between an object and its painted image, most famously in The Treachery of Images, his depiction of a pipe above the legend ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’).
The Gallery of Modern Art is fortunate to have four superb paintings by Magritte. The work selected here was painted in the summer of 1929 when Magritte and his wife were staying at the Spanish fishing village of Cadaqués, where Salvador Dalí’s family had a summer house. Magritte had met Dalí in Paris earlier in the year and they admired each other’s work. Together with his friend, the poet and gallery owner Camille Goemans, the Magrittes took an apartment in Cadaqués for a month. Other acquaintances from surrealist circles came by that summer, including the poet Paul Éluard and his wife Gala who soon began an affair with Dalí that developed into a lifelong relationship.
The painting Threatening Weather no doubt reflects something of the heady atmosphere of that summer in Dalí’s company in its mixture of humour, menace and eroticism. The setting is a conventional view of the bay at Cadaqués on a sparkling summer day. The clouds above have the forms of a woman’s torso, a tuba and a chair. These are all items that appear in different guises in Magritte’s works. It is difficult to resist the temptation to derive some hidden meaning or connecting narrative in this bizarre combination, but there is none to be found, and indeed Magritte would probably have chided us for trying to find one. He later observed that one of the obstacles to understanding his work is a fear of mystery: ‘People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image.’
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.