René Magritte

Not to be Reproduced, 1937
Oil on Canvas 80 x 65 cm

Victoria & Albert Museum, London
April 2007

This is a painting that I have seen quite a few times and is my favourite Magritte. Most recently in the Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This explored the influence of Surrealism on the worlds of fashion, design, theatre, interiors, film, architecture and advertising. It had some interesting exhibits to show how artists engaged with design and how designers were inspired by Surrealism. This painting was in a quiet corner in one of the first rooms and although it wasn’t over a fireplace, which is how I always imagine it would be hung, it looked at ease in the V&A environment.

Like the majority of Magritte’s paintings it shows us a scenario that at first glance seems completely realistic but almost immediately we recognise that it doesn’t make sense. His aim was to overthrow the idea of a painting as a window on reality and make you think about what you are seeing. He never explained his work and particularly disliked people decoding a symbolic meaning in it.

Nowadays his imagery is absorbed into popular culture, but at the time I can imagine that the paintings induced a degree of panic into the viewer. It shows collector and patron of the Surrealists, Edward James, looking into a mirror over a fireplace. However, the image in the mirror is either a doppelganger beyond the mirror or a temporal shift showing a reflection from an earlier instant when the man was facing into the room. Another explanation could be that it depicts a surreal mirror that deceives by denying the subject the narcissism of seeing his own reflection. The idea came from Paul Colinet, a member of Magritte’s secretive group of Belgian Surrealists based in Bruxelles.

The novel on the mantel is Edgar Allen Poe’s “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” in which the protagonist journeys south from Nantucket and discovers a vast white chasm, rather than the “pole”. The journey in the novel can be seen as a metaphor for death and rebirth, but I don’t think there is a symbolist intention in its inclusion. Magritte, like many surrealists, was an admirer of Poe’s preoccupation with the mingling of the real and artificial in his fiction, and the novel actually masquerades as non-fiction. As the journey unfolds the narrative proves to be distorted and unreliable, and the reader realises that he is dealing not with sight but with vision. The inclusion of this particular book is the clue that Magritte is challenging the way of looking where we pass over many things, discarding them as unimportant. He is making sure that the mind sees in two different senses, both with the eyes, and without eyes. Significantly he depicts the reflection of the book correctly, contradicting the reflection of Edward James.

Magritte was a melancholic man, given to ennui and boredom, but any interpretation of metaphysical loneliness in his violation of the physics of the reflective surface in his surreal mirror is probably in the mind of the observer rather than the intention of the painter. Personally I find the painting melancholic.

©blackdog 2009