'Naturalizing' Rene Magritte

Abstract

René Magritte, a one-time Surrealist, has begun quietly and rather belatedly invading our field of "vision" (in its many senses) with his not-tooeasily-forgettable images and their disturbing implications. The extraordinary scope and extent of his influence can be easily gauged by simply leafing through books of modern art and ads and illustrations in popular magazines: Magrittean images are all over the place, ranging from a pair of five-toed shoes in the ad for Canadian Customs Service by Hodges. Freeman and Robinson. transplanted from Magritte's "The Red Model" (1935), to an arty but all-the-same randy cover of the Playboy magazine (March 1972 issue), featuring the famous nude on the bottle from his canon. "The Lady" (undated)(Roque 71, 73). Those ubiquitous visual puns and perplexities of his art seem to point to a world where the drudgery of logic and practicality can be playfully bypassed and the inexorable demands of the real may be lightly brushed off. In his pictorial world. rocks float peacefully in the air side by side with clouds ("The Battle of Argonne" of 1959); a huge. gorgeous rose fills the entire room ("The Tomb of the Wrestlers." 1960); and a man cuts his steak and scarf it at the same time. deftly using his four hands ("The Magician." 1952).