BWW Reviews: MoMA's MYSTERY OF THE ORDINARY Showcases Magritte's Intriguing Art

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary is being billed as an exploration of "the evolution of René Magritte's work from 1926 to 1938, an intensely innovative period in which he developed key strategies and techniques to defamiliarize the familiar." Okay, I know how academic this all sounds. But before you decide against visiting the Museum of Modern Art's latest offering (or decide to navigate away from this review), please hear me out. Academicism or no academicism, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary is a glorious rarity among avant-garde retrospectives: a fairly conventional and conservative exhibition that does full justice to its subject's surpassing weirdness.

For some viewers, Magritte's weirdness may need no emphasizing; after all, this is an artist who spent his career painting flaming tubas, gigantic eggs, living statues, mislabeled objects, more mislabeled objects, more and more sights and scenarios that could have been pulled from a five-year-old's fever dream. Theme and topic, however, aren't everything. Unlike his Surrealist comrades Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalì, Magritte was never a perfectly photo-realistic painter. Some of his training was in commercial and advertising art, and some of his most famous images were imported from illustrated dictionaries. The blocky figure proportions, the simple shadowing, the not-quite-right handling of perspective: all these traits add up to a painterly approach that is both endearing and explosive. Without quite knowing why, I kept imagining that the paintings in The Mystery of the Ordinary would burst into flames-like Magritte's infamous tubas-right before my eyes.

The curators of Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary have been wise enough not to burden Magritte's wild imaginings with imaginative touches of their own. Instead, organizers Anne Umland and Danielle Johnson have simply placed about 80 of Magritte's paintings, collages, and naked-woman-decoration-concoctions (my terminology, not theirs) on display in MoMA's International Council Exhibition Gallery. With its high ceilings, the Gallery may not be the most natural setting, since Magritte's paintings can seem close and campy. Or maybe they just seemed close and campy in Art History 101; in fact, some of the less studied and more interesting Magrittes have substantial proportions, and feel right at home on MoMA's airy sixth floor.

Although the exhibition catalog walksteps its readers through Magritte's crucial Surrealist years, the exhibition itself is more of a wander-around, pick-and-choose experience. This is liberty of the best kind. Remember the pre-renovation MoMA, how good it felt to commune with the same Cézanne or Picasso during your lunch break or on your spare weekends, visit after visit, year after year? When it's less crowded, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary gives you the same comfortable sensation. Also, remember that annoying sampler-plate Dada exhibition that toured around in 2006, the one that offered a little history and a little film and a little immersion and made nobody happy? Both a smaller and a smarter approach to radical art, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary is all immersion all the time.

For me, some of the standouts in The Mystery of the Ordinary are some of the earliest works on display. I've always had a soft spot for the luxuriantly nutty The Secret Player (Is that a cricket game? With a flying sea turtle? A headless flying sea turtle?), yet I'd never seen it in the flesh, in all its pink-tinted, 5'-by-6'4" splendor. And I can't say enough good about The Denizens of the River. Imagine Grant Wood's American Gothic, replace the subjects' heads with clay-colored grayish shapes, and you'll get something like this mini masterpiece. I was also delighted to see one of my own pre-renovation MoMA favorites, The Menaced Assassin, holding forth here. Whatever the reason, the Surrealists tended to be mediocre or worse at compositions with several figures. (If you want an idea of what I mean, take a look at Max Ernst's inexcusable Temptation of Saint Anthony-the closest thing we have to a Surrealist Little Golden Book illustration.) The Menaced Assassin succeeds because it is so deadpan, because so little of Surrealism's usual fraught emotion is in evidence. It looks like a piece of film noir acted by dimestore dummies, and it works like a charm.

The curators of The Mystery of the Ordinary have also picked out a few of Magritte's famous experiments with dissonance and bizarre association: The Six Elements, The Literal Meaning, and the seminal The Treachery of Images among them. As intriguing as these are, there are also Magritte paintings that proceed along the same principles yet achieve uncanny harmony. The Annunciation is one of them; its looming, heterogeneous forms are somehow a perfect fit for the idea of "annunciation," though nobody (Magritte included) can really say who or what is being announced. The Healer is another; though this painting of a part-man, part-birdcage figure should be disturbing, it turns out to be an incongruously comforting work. Why is the birdcage man wearing a hat and carrying a sack? Is he on an important journey, is he coming to heal us all? Only in a few works (like The Rape, which André Breton adored and which doesn't do all that much for me) is Magritte pure provocation. The rest, from The Annunciation to those famous pipes, have both an intellectual edge and a cool, crepuscular softness.

Magritte would spend the last three decades of his long career either brilliantly refining themes like these (to take the positive view) or cautiously re-fashioning them (to take the negative one). Personally, I take the negative; while later Magritte canvases such as The Companions of Fear, The Empire of Light, and The Fury of the Gods are fine, facetious, even touching creations, they don't add all that much to the breakthrough ideas on display in Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary. Even by the time you reach 1930, you get the feeling that Magritte is mostly repeating earlier conceptions. To be fair, Magritte probably had this feeling himself; in 1930, he went ahead and repeated a bunch of his older motifs in On the Threshold of Liberty, only to re-paint On the Threshold of Liberty itself in 1937. You don't have to love this painting, in any of its versions, to love the funhouse logic behind it. While some painters give us mirrors onto the world, Magritte gave us a hall of mirrors-paintings that add up to one of most quietly entertaining exhibitions you will see this autumn.

Photo Caption: René Magritte (Belgium, 1898-1967). La clairvoyance (Clairvoyance). 1936. Oil on canvas. 21 1/4 x 25 9/16″ (54 x 65 cm). Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Ross. © Charly Herscovici -- ADAGP - ARS, 2013

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