How René Magritte surprised me at the Museum of Modern Art
I have loved museums since I was a child; seeing up close the actual work created by great artists has a mesmerising effect on me. Looking at art permeates my feelings, and introduces me to a different level of thinking.
The MoMA is one of the greatest museums in the world. Its collection (200,000 works of art) is as vast as it is varied (it showcases more than 10,000 artists).
I was looking forward to focusing on the their magnificent Van Gogh collection. However, I found myself drawn towards an artist whose work I had not known of — or so I thought. Rene Magritte’s ‘The False Mirror’ was a painting that I simply could not take my eyes off. It portrays a single eye without lashes, with a cloud-swept blue sky filling the iris and a jet black disc for the pupil.
Magritte’s single eye functions on many intriguing levels: the viewer both looks through it, as through a window, and is looked at by it. It is as though the viewer is both watching and being watched at the same time.
I felt a sense of awe when I looked at it, and it looked at me. When I looked him up, I found that Magritte was known for his unusual, thought provoking and at times, witty paintings.
While reading up on him, I found a very familiar painting, that I had come across while I was reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. The main protagonist, had a favourite T-shirt of that painting. It was a painting of a pipe, with the words: Ceci n’set pas une pipe (‘It is not a pipe, but the drawing of a pipe’ is a sort of rough translation). I suppose that is why he is called a witty painter. Once I had discovered this work of his, I knew that I had known of Magritte, but inadvertently.
In Keeping An Eye Open, his anthology of essays on art, Man Booker Prize winner, Julian Barnes, has this to say on the painter: “Magritte’s art is of control and exclusion: he uses a blandly frontal viewpoint; symmetrically and parallel receding planes; a deliberately reduced set of image objects, either ordinary in themselves (curtains, birds, fire) or worked up into ordinaries by repetition (the biblioquet, the jingle bells); flatness of paint; and a detached way of representing things, so that, for instance the blue of the sky is always parricidally bright.”
As soon as I saw The False Mirror, I immediately fell in love with his work and his humorous style. It made me question the mystery that hid behind the painting. But what of the art, in the end? Well, art in a way captures the different lives of people, and shows us, the viewers, a different way of looking at things. After all, as Barnes says, “How could you be young and fail to love Magritte?”
