Retuning to Reproduction Forbidden

There are two heads looking at something in the distance. But it's a reflection. Where is the face? I suppose one interpretation is that we never can truly see. But if we look at this with the intention of discovering what it means, then we don't see the painting itself, but instead think of the question that has been raised.

According to Margritte: The mind sees two different senses. It sees, as with the eyes, and it sees a question (with no eyes). But the eye itself sees in the way that the hand grasps -- passing over many things which, through a lack of interest, nothing induces it to seize.

Seeing is an act, according to Magritte, in the course of which it can happen that a subject escapes our attention.

Magritte the Man; chronicler of ennui

When it came to painting, Magritte manifested an almost constitutional dislike, feigning something between boredom, fatigue and disgust -- the "savored infirmities of a retired acrobat." He particularly liked to refuse the name of artist, saying that he was a man who thought, and who communicated his thought by means of painting, as others communicated it by writing music or words. Painting represented for him a valid means of expressing, in a constantly changing light, the two or three fundamental problems with which our mind is always struggling. More particularly, it represented a permanent revolt against the commonplaces of existence.

Man Reading a Newspaper 1927-28
L'Homme au journal
Oil on canvas 46 x 31 1/2 (54.5 x 73)
Tate Gallery, London

Reproduction Forbidden

To those who tried to interpret his pictures, Magritte liked to answer "You are more fortunate than I am." Magritte's paintings are intended as an attack upon society's preconceived ideas and predetermined good sense. He considered his work successful when no explanation of causality of meaning can satisfy our curiosity.

The fear of being mystified, says Magritte, applies equally to painted images which have the power to provoke such fear. Sometimes an image can place its spectator under serious accusation.

A person who only looks for what he wants in painting will never find that which transcends his preferences. But, if one has been trapped by the mystery of an image which refuses all explanation, a moment of panic will sometimes occur. These moments of panic are what count for Magritte.

Magritte used painting for this purpose alone: "I think as though no one had ever thought before me."

La Reproduction interdite
1937
Oil on Canvas
81.5 x 65 cm [32 x 25.5 in]
Collection, Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen, Rotterdam

Cornell's Box of Taglioni's Jewel Casket

Joseph Cornell spins the story of ballerina Marie Taglioni on the lid of her box. This is a beautiful brown box with brown velvet with three rows of four glass cubes resting in slots on blue glass. There is a glass necklace hanging near the inscription that tells the story of this beautiful ballerina and why he has created this box:

"On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835 the carriage of Marie Taglioni was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther's skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, Taglioni formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape."

This is Taglioni’s Jewel Casket. Cornell has named it thus. He created it for her, for her legend, to let her name go on. She will never see it, or own it, or comment on it. It’s a romantic scene of ice and jewels that relates to a legend that we love to hear.

The First Collage Novel

La femme 100 têtes was the first collage novel. The title itself is a collage of meanings: "The woman a hundred heads" as well as "the headless woman" -- and there are more possibilities than "100 têtes" -- "sans tête," "s'entête" or "sang tête." Nine chapters tell the story of a woman who is believed by some to be Mary (the virgin, that is). Her name is Wirrwarr, Perturbation and Germinal ("my sister," camping out alone between phantoms and ants).

Though I still need to get my hands on the book these illustrations stand alone so well: translated this page ("la meme pour le deuxiame") means "the same one for the second," and I love the drama of the raised hand and the headless, floating body that appears to them. Is all this french pretentious? I just like the illustrations....

La Femme 100 Têtes

Where and when did collage first appear? I believe, despite the claims put forward by several of the pioneers of Dada, that it is Max Ernst who is to be thanked for it, at least as regards the two forms of collage furthest from the original idea of glued paper: photographic collage and the collage of illustrations.