You may know him for enigmatic silhouettes and levitating apples, but there’s much more to René Magritte than that.
At least, this is what SFMOMA aims to show in its special exhibition, René Magritte: The Fifth Season. Showcasing around 70 works from Magritte’s oeuvre, the exhibition explores the artist’s works from the 1940s onward. The result is a striking visual narrative that highlight’s Magritte’s mastery of wit, paradox, and mystery.
Paintings such as Personal Values or The Son of Man may be familiar, but perhaps not in the context of Magritte’s other works. The show begins with paintings that drew from the painterly Impressionist style. These earlier paintings belong to Magritte’s ‘sunlit’ or ‘Renoir period’, so called for their luminous, colorful appearance and inspiration from the late Pierre-Auguste Renoir. These works were painted by Magritte starting from the German occupation of Belgium in World War II. Despite the use of a lighter palette, these works have a somber undertone. Magritte’s interlude in the early 1940s parallels the abrupt changes that war inevitably produces. Within this period, paintings such as The Harvest immediately piqued my interest and had me wondering, how Magritte’s signature surrealist approach developed from and built upon his earlier works.
From this point, the exhibition becomes more familiar. The next set of works highlight ‘hypertrophy’ as a theme. In these paintings, ordinary objects are blown out of proportion. From rocks to roses, the works are dominated by impossibly and uncomfortably large objects. The compositions range from pleasantly perplexing to frustratingly enigmatic. They convey immensity in size but a reduction in practicality. The museum’s informational text likens this phenomenon to the human body, as the objects ‘seem to endanger rooms just as hypertrophied organs endanger bodies’.
The exhibition continues with more paradoxes and even more of Magritte’s surrealist expressions. One highlight in these areas was the series of canvases from The Enchanted Domain. Each painting contains surreal elements that blend from one canvas to the next. The paintings transport the viewer through several enchanted domains, each as enigmatic as the one before it. These galleries feature other well-known works including The Happy Donor and Pandora’s Box.
From here, bowler-hatted men become more prominent. Among these paintings is Magritte’s famed The Son of Man. Magritte once said of this painting, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.” This sums up a theme present in many of Magritte’s later works in which silhouettes reveal and objects obscure.
At the end of the exhibition, visitors have the opportunity to enter Magritte’s enigmatic compositions. Using different types of visual technology, visitors can become Sheherazade or be interwoven with trees like in The Blank Signature (among other augmented reality experiences). This felt like a fitting end to the exhibition. Having followed Magritte’s creative journey, visitors can immerse themselves in the motifs that have come to be most recognizable in Magritte’s oeuvre.
Overall, René Magritte: The Fifth Season was an excellent show that presented Magritte and his body of work in a whole new light. The exhibition featured rare opportunities to enjoy works never before seen in the U.S. In doing so, the SFMoMA was able to create a dynamic narrative of Magritte that also primed viewers for exciting immersive elements at the end of the exhibition. For the museum, the show is a momentous accomplishment. For visitors, it is a momentous occasion that is not to be missed.
