Lieberman of the Metropolitan, so that the full course of Magritte's career unfolds, as it should, with all its ups and downs. It has been handsomely installed by William S. The show comes to the Metropolitan from the Hayward Gallery in London, where it was organized by the Magritte scholars David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, who are putting together the artist's catalogue raisonne. Almost all of the famous works are here, from two versions of "The Treachery of Images," with its depiction of a pipe above the text "this is not a pipe," to the earliest version of "The Domination of Light," with its incongruously darkened street below a daylight sky. The retrospective, the first major overview of his art in the United States in more than a quarter of a century, includes about 150 paintings, drawings and sculptures. And it is the ethos of his Flemish and Belgian predecessors, from Hieronymus Bosch through James Ensor, with their shared predilection for the bizarre, that Magritte carried forward until his death of pancreatic cancer in 1967, at the age of 68. The grayness of Hainaut, the province where he was born and grew up, which is known as the Black Country for its slag heaps and sooty skies, pervades much of Magritte's art, contributing to its air of mystery. Unlike the French Surrealists, who sought public scandal, he strove in his personal affairs to be inconspicuous. He was tied not to the glittering scene in Paris, where in fact he failed to achieve popularity for many decades, but to the quieter, more modest milieu of his native Belgium. Yet he was said to be like one of his bowler-hatted men, painstakingly punctilious in appearance and in his habits, married to the same woman for 45 years. ![]() ![]() ![]() For the millions of people who have seen his work co-opted, as it has been over and over again, by advertisers and corporate image makers, Magritte is the essence of Surreal weirdness. His depictions of trains steaming out of fireplaces, of rooms stuffed to the brim with giant green apples, of bowler-hatted men raining like hailstones from the sky are among the most enduring images in modern art. In a way, Magritte himself defied common sense, or at least conventional expectations. "I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense." "IF the spectator finds that my paintings are a kind of defiance of 'common sense,' he realizes something obvious," said Rene Magritte, who is the subject of a stimulating retrospective that opens tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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