Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Soup-ready


Does being a surrealist just free you up to be goofy. I'm pretty certain this was a bone of contention for critics who opposed the movement. (And perhaps some within it. Andre Breton was notorious for excommunicating followers.) Anyway, Rene Magritte sometimes seems to have decided the answer was "yes" and that he'd lean into it.

The above painting seems to have only surfaced a few years ago, well after Magritte had left us. It's a funny image, and an unsettling one if you keep looking at it, due to the upsetting of scale.

2 comments:

susan said...

If I had to choose a favorite Surrealist I'd have to pick Rene Magritte for the simple reason he took such delight in juxtaposing images of people and objects in a way that was always disconcerting to rationalists.

I think his window images are especially neat. Hopefully this link will work but in case not it was a google search under Rene Magritte Windows.

Ben said...

As an image maker he seems to have been very chill. That is there's not a lot of ferment on the surface, it's not busy, it's balanced. But there's always something off-kilter, which might be obvious and might not be.

I love those window images. Especially where the glass is broken but seems to still hold the image that was outside a few seconds ago. Much like the mind, I suppose.