Magritte was a curious kind of surrealist in the sense that he didn’t indulge
in any kind of outrageous behaviour like Salvador Dali, for example.
He wore conventional suits and a bowler hat.
He pretended to be a kid of average Belgian businessman.
But it was very much a kind of pose, really.
And within the surrealist group, that kind of ultra-conventional behaviour
was of course abnormal and eccentric.
So in his own way, he was behaving in a surrealist manner
within the surrealist group by not behaving in a surrealist manner.
Magritte painted this picture in Cadaqués, near Barcelona, staying with Dali,
and you see the bay there - Mediterranean landscape.
The painting’s called 'Menacing Weather' and so that of course invites us to see
the three objects floating in the sky as cloud forms
that may turn into a tempest, or something.
Now why these three objects?
I mean the torso, the tuba, the chair.
Well the torso and the tuba, anyway turn up in quite a lot of Magritte’s paintings.
The torso, the female torso, as a sort of substitute for a female figure.
The tuba as an enigmatic object that is often
associated with the woman.
And in this particular configuration,
the pipe of the tuba
pointing towards the female torso does have a sort of phallic connotation,
it seems to me.
So you’ve got a sort of sexual suggestion there.
And she seems to be nuzzling up to the tuba.
The chair, to the right of them
slightly detached, What relationship does it have to them?
Some sort of third party, perhaps; I don’t know.
Magritte never explained his pictures,
he always claimed that they did not come from dreams.
But they are dream-like in that the relationship between the objects
is irrational and inexplicable
and it would require Freudian analysis perhaps
to make some kind of story out of them;
make some sort of sense out of the relationships.
But he always leaves it to the spectator to
to put some kind of story themselves onto the objects
that have been put together in this irrational way.
His real popularity as an artist - and he is a very popular artist now
and is often featured in, not just books about surrealism and so on,
but he’s often imitated by advertisers and so on, on the television
- you often see pseudo-Magrittian works.
I mean, that really is a development of the 1960s
just shortly before his death in 1967.
This coincides with the Pop Art movement,
where a kind of popular imagery and a sort of
mass-produced style,
becomes the order of the day.
And Magritte could be seen very much as the
figure who had initiated that within the surrealist movement,
far more than someone like Dali.
He was an extraordinary artist
who could encapsulate that sense of the strange within reality;
that combination of the very familiar, the ultra-familiar,
the real, and the unfamiliar because of the context in which
the real objects were put.
And that was really the definition of surrealism;
that it does incorporate the real,
it brings together the real and the imaginary.
And that’s what’s sort of fused in paintings like this.