on his face seems a strange way to advertise an airline -but there's a Magritte exhibition in town!
The bowler-hatted man is synonymous with Magritte: once representins him and a disguise. Surely a man who identifies with a city gent couldn't chis exhibition? We are left paint the without idea Magritte the man or Magritte the artist.
Similarly his images of women, and sometimes men. with a cloth over their heads is apparently explained by the suicide of his mother, who was discovered, drowned, with her face covered by her nightdress - or is it? We don't know.
But it doesn't matter relation the images might have to Magritte's life for they continueto intrigue, shock and horrify without reference to the artist's biography. They also CIA make you laugh.
A framed painting of a brie is entitled This is a piece of cheese: a unquistc pun similar to the painting of a pipe called This is not a pipé.
Of all the surrealists he understood the complexity heterosexual relations. Rather than representing the unknown 'other', as in the poet bluara s work, ora passive sexual victim, as does Bellmer, his women are part of, sometimes even central to, both sexes understanding of desire.
He even seems to have come close to understanding the violence that is endemic to sexual relations under capitalism and the oppression that women suffer from male violence and rape.
A painting like • The Titanic Days' where a nude woman is invaded by a clothed man, Whose own existence is confined to her contours, is a terilying and violating image and the work The Rape' itself where the woman's face is replaced by her torso - breasts for eyes, navel for nose, pubic hair for mouth - all atop an elongated neck: these images go way beyond most surrealist representations of sexual rela tions.
Much of the early work in the exhibition shows the influence of the ideas of Freud and his work on dreams and their "The Reckless Sleeper from the Tate collec tion equates sleep with death, while suggesting that dreams are probably worth the danger that you might not wake up again!
Despite the horror of some of the images, the overwhelming feeling of the exhibition is humour. Visual and verbal legacy, fill the exhibition space.
it is dilficult not to laugh out loud at many of the pictures 880009 - though of course the atmosphere of a grand Haywood show is not altogether conducive to laughter!
The Magritte exhibition isat the Hayward gallery until 6 August