Rene Magritte (Chicago Insitute of Art -- August 1, 2014)

The exhibition of paintings by Rene Magritte at the Chicago Institute of Art is diverting and spooky, but pointless. Magritte is the least painterly of the Surrealists and, I think, probably the most pure:  beauty didn't concern him much during the period addressed in this show and his images are astringent, dry, and highly conceptual.  For this reason, reproduction of Magritte's canvases as plates in books or on postcards suffices for the viewer to get the point -- the pictures are singularly lacking in "aura" and seeing them in person doesn't add to their appeal.  In fact, the show includes several versions of Magritte's most famous inventions reproduced by the artist as woodcuts or black and white engravings in chap-books -- and, indeed, I'm not sure whether the black and white graphics precede the paintings or vice-versa.  The works of art in the exhibition were made in Brussels and Paris during the period from 1925 to 1938 when Magritte was an apostle of Andre Breton; labels next to the images document Magritte's inevitable falling-out with the "Pope" of the Surrealists.  Many of Magritte's "greatest hits" are displayed in the show:  you can see the lovers kissing one another with their heads swathed in sinister-looking hoods, the shoes with toes on their reddish leather exterior (two versions), the locomotive rammed into the hearth in a cozy little room, the nude woman wrestling with a shadow man who is also her coat, an oddly distorted, trapezoidal frame containing an image of a woman's pubis and so on.  You've seen all of these images in books and the paintings are just larger, brighter, more dramatically lit, versions.  Magritte was enormously inventive and his paintings featuring words have a philosophical depth; they are like quirky exercises by Wittgenstein:  A picture of a pipe, most famously, accompanied by the French inscription "This is not a pipe" and a dozen or so other canvases with images either mislabeled or frames vacant except for a word painted there like "sky" or "wind".  But you don't take any pleasure, other than an abstract, intellectual one, in studying these pictures.  In a few of the early works, Magritte toyed with painting parts of the canvas as if it were ripped or torn, anticipating, it seems, Lucio Fontana, and some of his picture that feature pasty white discombobulated body parts seem to influenced Robert Gober.  The pictures are shown in darkened halls and the last gallery consists of a long corridor with specimens of Magritte's art hung seriatim in dim nooks.  Displayed in bright neutral light against a neutral background, I think these pictures would likely lose whatever appeal that they have as painted objects -- but the darkness and the grim, sepulchral silence of the spectators (why are people so terribly pious in art museums?) gives the pictures the monitory effect of emblems.  Only one object in the show struck me with any force:  this was a death mask of Napoleon, it seemed, the creamy white cast painted with a pale blue sky adorned with fluffy clouds.  Lit dramatically, this sculpture had an impressive effect.  (The Chicago Art Institute is too large for comfortable viewing and there were several other things on display worth careful perusal -- unfortunately, ocular exhaustion sets in after about two hours and it's hard to give things seen later in the day their due:  the photographer, Josef Koudelka, is represented by a huge retrospective of his images -- many of them, particularly, the late panoramas are spectacular -- he photographs the ruins of Greek and Roman cities as if they were Hiroshima or Nagasaki and images of the Russians invading Czechoslovakia in the sixties and European gypsies were suitably harrowing.  Bruce Nauman's hideously annoying, but important, video installation "Clown Torture" was on display:  Pete and Repete were sitting in a boat.  Pete fell out.  Who was left?  There was also an impressive, although opaque, display of Mexican political woodcuts and engravings -- I didn't have the energy to decipher the imagery to figure out who was satirizing whom.)