Word: surrealists
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...proper homage to his life and presence as well as his art was the double take. In the midst of a movement, surrealism, which specialized in attention-getting stunts, political embroilments, sexual scandals and fervid half-religious crises, Magritte-next to Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, the best surrealist painter -seemed to be all phlegm and stolidity. He lived in respectable Brussels; he stayed married to the same woman, Georgette Berger, for the rest of his life; by the standards of the Paris art world in the '30s, he might as well have been a grocer. Yet Magritte possessed...
...point of his career was in the 1940s. He decided, in a mood of perversity, to paint "modern art" -pictures full of impressionist fuzz and expressionist slather. The Gorgon, 1943, a wretched parody of Monet applied to a surrealist syntax, may be the least inept of these. If anything, they showed how far Magritte's real gifts lay from the orthodox processes of modernism. Nor did his first essays in the surrealist manner, done in 1925-26, indicate much about the artist to come; they are, for the most part, grab bags of motifs from other painters, chiefly Ernst...
Magritte's turning point was 1927, when he went to live in Paris. There, immersed in the surrealist movement, he was no longer a provincial spectator. And he quickly realized where his contribution to it might lie: not in the exploitation of chance and random effects, like Masson or Ernst, still less in exoticism and neurosis, like Dali, but in hallucinatory ordinariness. One of the obsessions of surrealism was the way inexplicable events intruded into everyday life. With his dry, matter-of-fact technique, Magritte painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrase book...
...best large sculpture in the show is a delicate construction of wooden slats, curled and woven through one another and supported on pebbles, by Michael Singer. Its ancestor is Giacometti's famous surrealist construction of the 1930s, The Palace at 4 a.m.−there is a similar feeling of spindliness, fragility and, isolated in its museum cell, of mystery. Though it suggests other cultures (bamboo lattices, fish traps, grave-marker posts), it does not do so in a sloppy, metaphorical way. At 33, Singer is clearly an artist worth watching...
...second style is represented in "Deserts," a duo mime with a surrealist tone. The piece is moribund in mood, somewhat reminiscent of Beckett. It is echoed by the somber song of a cello on stage, and two clarinets serenading one another from the balconies of the hall. In another piece, Kyr also uses an unusual spatial arrangement of sound. "Struggles in Passing," a dance mime about the nature of work, is accompanied both by a tape produced using subway noises and conversations, and by the ensemble of flute, tow clarinets, celesta and piano. The sounds of the instruments filter...