Page 30 - Studio International - February 1969

depends upon figures of language and Rene Magritte
thought. This unique and uncompromising
enterprise, at the confines of the physical and
the mental, brings into play all the resources of Andre Breton
a mind exacting enough to envisage each
picture as the scene in which a new problem
is to be resolved.'
This appraisal (cool compared with the poetic
evocation of Tanguy which precedes it in the
essay) might seem to assort ill with Breton's
warning, in the same text, that 'the other
road (the first being automatism) available to
surrealism to reach its objective, the stabiliz-
ing of dream images in the kind of still-life
deception known as trompe-l' oeil . . . has
been proved by experience to be far less re-
liable and even presents very real risks of the
traveller losing his way altogether'. But the
truth is that, as Breton suggested later in his
two short essays on Magritte (of 1961 and
1964), the 'object-lessons' provided by the Bel-
gian artist constitute yet a third possible
approach towards the synthesizing aspirations
of surrealism. In fact, in a series of interviews
with Andre Parinaud in 1952, Breton com-
pared Magritte's paintings with his own
'object-poems'; defining his own construc-
tions as 'compositions tending to combine the
resources of poetry and plastic art in a process
of speculation on their reciprocal powers of
exaltation', Breton accorded similar aims to
Magritte who, he said, 'investigated the pos-
sible results of juxtaposing concrete words
possessing a great resonance (the word "moun-
tain", the word "pipe", the words "child's
head") with forms which negate those words
or, at least, do not correspond to them ration-
ally'.
The automatic element enters Magritte's
paintings by proxy, so to speak, in the in-
stinctive reaction of the spectator's mind to
the paradoxical image with which it is con-
fronted : it is the very ordinariness, the meticu-
lous realism, of the boots that are feet, the
night scene under a bright blue sky, the easel
painting blending exactly into the scene out-
side the window, that induces a sense of
disorientation. Everyday objects become de-
coys into a realm of hallucination which the
surrealists had originally determined could
be induced only by the processes of automatic-
ally inspired imagery and poetry.
Under the rather daunting smoke-screen of
philosophical-psychological verbiage so char-
acteristic of Breton's inimitable style, Magritte
is, in the final analysis, being welcomed into
the surrealist camp as a witness of the power
of metaphor to exercise an almost magical
mechanism of transference when it assumes
concrete form. Although Breton does not
mention him in the same context, Marcel
Duchamp springs to mind immediately as the
other highly idiosyncratic iconoclast who,
with the 'meta-irony' of his 'concrete witti-
cisms', has contributed most powerfully to a
subversive redefinition of 'objective reality' in
terms of humour and desire.
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