René Magritte, The Tomb of Wrestlers, 1960, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection, © Charly Herscovici, c/o ADAGP, Paris 2011.

René Magritte, Golconda, 1953, The Menil Collection, Houston © Charly HERSCOVICI, Brussels – 2011.

René Magritte, La Représentation, 1937, Oil on canvas laid on plywood, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, © Charly Herscovici, c/o ADAGP, Paris 2011.

René Magritte, The Dominion of Light, 1953, Private Collection, Guggenheim, Asher Associates, © Charly Herscovici, c/o ADAGP, Paris 2011.

René Magritte, The Future of Statues, 1937, Painted plaster, Tate, © Charly Herscovici, c/o ADAGP, Paris 2011.

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock
+44-151-702-7400
Liverpool
René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle
June 24-October 16, 2011

René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle brings together over 100 paintings, some never before seen in the UK, as well as a rich selection of his little-known photographs, home movies and commercial art.  The exhibition reveals new dimensions to René Magritte (1898-1967), one of the most important and revered artists of the 20th century, whose life and work is now more relevant than ever.

René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle examines the artist’s oeuvre from a thematic perspective, displaying works in different media and from throughout his career.  The exhibition explores in-depth compositional and conceptual  devices present in his work from the mid-1920s to his death in 1967.  Magritte employed techniques such as veiling and revelation (through curtains and stage sets), the uncanny double (the encounter with mannequins ambiguously located between life and death), paradoxical realities (the simultaneous state of night and day) and the metamorphic transformation of objects (through scale or petrification) to create an enigmatic and continually mesmerising world.

Drawn from public and private collections across the world, visitors will have the opportunity to view a diverse and rich selection of Magritte’s work.  Presented will be classic Surrealist images painted in Magritte’s characteristically graphic style, such as word-image paintings and his anonymous men in bowler hats with which the artist has become synonymous.  The exhibition will feature iconic paintings, including The Threatened Assassin, 1927, The Human Condition, 1933, Time Transfixed, 1938, The Dominion of Light, 1950, Golconda, 1953, and The Listening Room, 1958, which have become part of the popular imagination.  A large number of works have never been exhibited in the UK before.

In addition the exhibition will include paintings from his lesser known "Vache" period, erotic works and examples of his commercial designs.  Rare photographs and home movie footage will illuminate the life and work of the artist further, providing insights into his relationship with his wife and muse Georgette and his collaborations within the Belgian Surrealist group.  What emerges is a versatile artist and complex figure with an often anarchic sense of humour whose art transcends the image of the unexciting bourgeois which he liked to project.

René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle is curated by Christoph Grunenberg, Director, and Darren Pih, Exhibitions & Displays Curator, Tate Liverpool.
 
The exhibition is organised by Tate Liverpool in collaboration with the Albertina, Vienna where it will be presented from  November 2011 to 26 February 2012.

The exhibition is supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).  With additional Support from the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of Mr and Mrs Wilbur Ross.

René Magritte, The Pleasure Principle, 1937, Private Collection, © Charly Herscovici, c/o ADAGP, Paris 2011.

René Magritte, The Key to the Fields 1936, Oil on Canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, © Charly Herscovici, c/o ADAGP, Paris 2011.

René Magritte, The Great War, 1964, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection, © Charly Herscovici, c/o ADAGP, Paris 2011.

René Magritte, Time Transfixed, 1938, The Art Institute of Chicago © Charly Herscovici, c/o ADAGP, Paris 2011.

René Magritte, L'Ellipse (The Ellipsis), 1948, Oil on canvas, 50,3 x 73 cm., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, © Charly Herscovici, London 2008 / c/o ADAGP, Paris .

René Magritte, Pom'Po Pon Po Pon Pon Pon Pom Po Pon, 1948, Watercolour, gouache on paper, 32,8 x 45,9 cm., Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, © Charly Herscovici, London 2008 / c/o ADAGP, Paris.

René Magritte, Lola de Valence, 1948, Gouache on paper, 45,8 x 37,7 cm, Musée René Magritte, Brussels (Jette), © Charly Herscovici, London 2008 / c/o ADAGP, Paris.

René Magritte, Le Galet (The Pebble), 1948, Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels© Charly Herscovici, London 2008 / c/o ADAGP, Paris.

René Magritte, Les Profondeurs du Plaisir (The Depths of Pleasure), 1948, Gouache on paper, 46 x 32,8 cm., Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, © Charly Herscovici, London 2008 / c/o ADAGP, Paris.

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Römerberg
+49-69-29-98-820
Frankfurt
René Magritte 1948
La Période Vache
30 October 2008-4 January 2009

René Magritte numbers not only among the most important, but also among the most popular 20th-century artists. Often against the grain of the artistic tendencies of his time, the Belgian Surrealist painter developed a unique and unmistakable pictorial language. His work’s continuing crucial influence on later generations of artists and his impact on today’s visual culture are almost without par. Many of his enigmatic and equally hard-to-forget solutions have been reproduced in the millions and become famous icons far beyond the world of art.

However, a fascinating period of the artist’s landmark oeuvre has remained nearly unknown: his so-called Période vache. In 1948, Magritte made a group of paintings and gouaches distinctly different from the rest of his work for his first solo exhibition in Paris. Relying on a new, fast and aggressive style of painting — and particularly inspired by popular sources such as caricatures and comics, but also interspersing his works with stylistic quotations from artists like James Ensor or Henri Matisse — Magritte, within only a few weeks, produced about 30 entirely uncharacteristic works that caused an outrage in Paris. The artist deliberately conceived the exhibition as a provocation of and an assault on the Parisian public. Painting in an unexpectedly crude, playful, and intentionally “bad” manner, he reflected his own work and painting in general. While only sporadically included in most retrospectives of Magritte’s oeuvre, his works from the Période vache will be assembled in the exhibition at the Schirn outside France and Belgium for the first time. Especially against the background of the last thirty years’ art, this concentrated presentation will shed new, surprising light on an extraordinary artist whose work is often mistakenly regarded as far too familiar and easy to grasp.

The fact that Magritte’s first solo presentation in Paris did not take place before 1948 is of crucial relevance for the genesis of his Période vache. Paris was not only the center of the art world, but also the capital of the Surrealist movement, and Magritte, as the central figure of Belgian Surrealism, had been in close contact with the circle around André Breton since the 1920s. Yet, it was not only his attempt to establish himself in the French metropolis that failed after only a three-year stay (1927-1930); even after his international recognition had grown in the 1930s, he was denied an adequate appreciation of his work in Paris. In addition, Magritte came into direct conflict with Paris after the war when his redefinition of Surrealism met with the disapproval of the Surrealist group’s protagonists returning home from exile. In the preceding years, which Magritte had spent in Brussels under German occupation, he had made a programmatic turn and thus laid the foundations for the period of his work known as la Période Renoir or la Période soleil today: falling back on the French Impressionists’ colorful style, he propagated a change of direction towards “the beautiful side of life” and, dissociating himself from the official Paris line, launched a Surrealism in the blazing sun (surréalisme en plein soleil). He vehemently attacked the reactionary attitude of an avant-garde movement that he regarded as ossified and tried to convince Breton of his intentions. In vain — not only the manifestos he initiated but also his works in the Neo-Impressionist manner met with general rejection and criticism.

This was the polemical context in which Magritte regarded his invitation to Paris in 1948 less as an overdue chance of success in the French metropolis but rather as an opportunity for taking revenge — for the arrogance of the capital’s art scene and the ossified attitude of a Surrealism that had outlived itself and become far too socially acceptable — by pulling off a surprising coup. The term “vache” used by Magritte for his new group of works is mostly understood as an ironical allusion to the historical movement of the Fauves, whose exaggerated coloring Magritte’s works parodied as much as their decoratively pleasing character. Yet in French, “vache” does not only mean “cow,” but also as much as “mean” or “nasty”; “vacherie” signifies a mean trick. Other related words are “femme vache” for an extremely corpulent woman, “peau de vache” for a horrible, malicious person, or “amour vache” for brutal carnal love. Thus, the term hints at the aggressive and deliberately crude quality characteristic of the pictures.

Regarding both their motifs and their style, the works of Magritte’s Période vache do not constitute a consistent ensemble but rather present themselves as a patchwork of different pseudo-styles borrowing more or less openly from other artists and drawing on the artist’s own earlier works. These elements are transformed into something comic, trivial, or grotesque by being blended with aspects of popular visual culture. With numerous art historical references — like to James Ensor, whose grotesque physiognomies are given another turn of the screw, to Henri Matisse, whose colorful ornaments are degraded to wallpaper-like décor, or to Joan Miró, who, as we know, was not held in high regard by the artist — Magritte ridicules traditional cultural values and aesthetic norms and distances himself from an art scene lusting for innovation. By presenting motifs taken from his own previous pictures in a new manner of painting, he turned into his own caricaturist, as it were. Contrary to his “classical” works, their cool, precise and realistic approach, and the conceptual consideration behind them, the works of Magritte’s Période vache strike us as colorful, two-dimensional, quickly painted, and radiating an astounding directness and spontaneity.

The exhibition in Paris turned out the expected failure. Not one picture was sold. The press reacted frostily. The public was appalled. The Paris Surrealists kept their distance. Only one of the vache works was exhibited again during Magritte’s lifetime, i.e. until 1967. For exhibition makers as well as art dealers and art historians, this group of works constituted an alien element in an otherwise extraordinarily consistent oeuvre. In addition, it did not fit in with the image of an artist who had, above all, been presented as a pioneer of Pop art and Concept art since the 1960s. It was not before thirty years after their making that these hitherto forgotten works began to be gradually reevaluated and appreciated starting with the Westkunst exhibition in Cologne. In the context of the 1980s’ Post-Conceptual painting, the strategies Magritte had relied on for subverting the prevailing standards of painting in the medium itself appeared both exemplary and highly topical. Today, about 40 years after Magritte’s death, contemporary artists such as John Currin or Sean Landers often come to understand his oeuvre by making themselves familiar with the works of his Période vache at first. The works’ humor, spontaneous style, and daring bad taste provide an example for a form of painting deriving its momentum from the apparent meaningless of its subjects in order to refute the clichés of today’s world of images. With his manifesto-like protest against all varieties of arrogance and reprimands in the arts, Magritte has become a model for the artist’s triumph over the workings of an art scene that seem to be more overpowering today than they ever were.

Catalogue: René Magritte 1948. La Période vache. Edited by Esther Schlicht and Max Hollein. With a preface by Max Hollein and texts by Michel Draguet, Robert Fleck, Florence Hespel, and Esther Schlicht. German and English, 176 pages, ca. 90 illustrations, Ludion, ISBN 978-90-5544-768-8, 29,80 € (Schirn), ca. 34,90 € (Ludion).