Page 24 - Studio International - October 1967

René Magritte to whir, chime, and cuckoo according to their nature.
René read on unperturbed.
The evaluation of his work will come later. Already
1898-1967 the tide had begun to turn, and the parrot cries of
those who attacked him for 'not being a painter' had
become less confidently shrill. As a man he chose to
live at first like a bank clerk and later, when more
successful, like a bank manager. His revolutionary
thought went into his work. His work was his thought.
He once told me that he needed to sleep at least
fourteen hours a night. 'To dream ?' I asked him. 'No,'
he explained calmly, 'to sleep.'
George Melly

René Magritte, the Surrealist painter, who A few weeks ago I was nearly on my way to Brussels
to visit him. He wrote: Don't come, I am ill. A few days
died in August at the age of 69, was a major
ago, I was writing to find out how he was. Someone
figure in the international Surrealist move-
telephoned: I suppose you've seen the papers ?
ment from the early thirties onwards, and Magritte's died.
was represented in all important exhibitions. It was a last act of subversion. All his life he had
He was a close associate of Yves Tanguy, struggled to unbalance life, to overthrow our sense of
the familiar, to put the real world on trial, to sabotage
André Breton and Paul Eluard.
our habits. Now this: where we used to look for him,
In 1965 the Museum of Modern Art, New
we will not find him any more. He had already tried
York, put on a retrospective of Magritte's work, to show us that nothing is where we expect it to be.
and a retrospective for the Tate Gallery is Like Baudelaire, he exasperated his own lucidity. He
under consideration. suffered 'the bizarre affliction' which was at once the
source of all his ills and all his miserable progress:
ennui. He lived it as a metaphysical condition. The
success or hatred that his work aroused would
interest him for a short time, then he would sink into
his usual mood of feeling every enterprise absurd,
and steeping himself in this sense of absurdity.
Again, like Baudelaire, to be a useful man appeared
to him to be something particularly hideous. His
On holiday in Wales I heard the news from my mother death is a final evocation of that mystery to which the
who had rung up to wish me 'Happy returns'. I felt whole of his life was committed, that ordinary which
immediately older-the death of people one has is not ordinary. On the table, the flowers in a bouquet
known and admired always has this effect. are replaced by a tree-filled meadow, in the way that
My enthusiasm for Magritte goes back to my ado- things continue to happen inside and outside of the
lescence. In the Navy I had a reproduction of Le mind: interiors and exteriors coincide, as death with
Viol-the woman's torso which has replaced her face life, but the piano, they say, always plays the same
-stuck on the back of my locker. Later I was lucky sonata. Man has to choose his own end, without
enough to become the owner of the picture. I believe waiting for orders, notice or advice.
it to be a masterpiece. Suzi Gablik
While working at the London Gallery during the late
forties, I pestered its director, the Belgian poet and I had a singular chance of experiencing Magritte's
collagist E. L. T. Mesens, for anecdotes about very strict sense of discipline about his own worth. I
Magritte in the days when they-and Surrealism-were first met him in London before the war, but the inci-
very young. From E.L.T's vivid and humourous dent which I want to relate concerned a painted
stories I was able to form a picture of a man who bottle of his (which wasforsometime in my possession)
chose to conceal his daring and poetic philosophy to which I added a small carved African stopper
inside the shell of a petit bourgeois. (once belonging to a negro sorcerer?). Bottle and
I finally visited the painter in the middle fifties when stopper eventually arrived in the exhibition 'The Art Above, de Chirico's The Song of Love, 1914, oil,
on holiday in Brussels. Although forewarned I was of Assemblage' in the Museum of Modern Art in New 28+ x 234- in., Private coll., New York, and, below,
even so amazed by the militant normality and high York in 1961. Whereupon Magritte wrote to Seitz René Magritte's Memory, 1938, oil, 29+ x 21+ in.,
gloss of his environment. I managed to persuade him saying that the assemblage book might contain other Aberbach coll., New York.
and his wife to spend an evening out. First we visited erroneous photographs, because of a stopper in his The painting by de Chirico had an overwhelming
a street fair and had our photographs taken looking bottle, which he had never placed there. When impact on the young Magritte when shown to him by
through the holes of a property comic picture. We Magritte discovered that I was the culprit, he pro- his friend Marcel Lecomte. Recording this in his
went on to the café of an old friend of Magritte's, the tested against the transformation, writing more in catalogue introduction to the Museum of Modern
poet Van Bruaene. I got the impression it was rare for sorrow than in anger, saying that a work of art thus Art's exhibition of Magritte's work, James Thrall Soby
the Magrittes to stay out so late, or indeed to go out altered, is not his responsibility. He assured me that also refers to Magritte's own account of his 'meeting'
at all. Nevertheless it was an enjoyably hilarious it is now my work. (True, for I had made it an assem- with the painting and of how it moved him to tears.
evening despite the fact that it finished with a row blage) and I quote `Ce que je concois de valable est
between René and a taxi-man over the mud on the etranger a tout style, le style Africain entre autres'.
paws of one of the Magritte's long line of rather I need hardly add that the stopper, of course, had
excitable small dogs. remained inadvertently in the bottle when it reached
The last time we met was when Jonathan Miller and the dealer.
I went over in '65 to make a film about the painter for Although Mr Seitz wrote and assured me not to be
'Monitor'. Magritte was sadonically co-operative and troubled 'by his irritability', I decided to be more
wrote an unsolicited text about the aims of his work careful and not put a stopper in his bottle in the
Eileen Agar
which he recorded on tape. In the middle of the future.
recording the innumerable clocks of the house began
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