Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Magritte, like Giorgio de Chirico, the painter of the first great canvases that can be called Surrealist, was a technically conservative painter, whose literalist brushwork lends a certain weighty calm to his bizarre juxtapositions and daring visual deceptions. Using the freedom of dreams, he composed meditative puzzles upon meaning and signification. Written language, as much as the representations of graphic arts, presumes to substitute for reality, and frequently in the late 1920s Magritte contented himself with simply spelling out on a canvas, in a lucid and pretty script, words such as “horizon,” “cris d’oiseaux,” “salon,” “fores,” “femme triste.” The viewer feels cheated, but should he? Are not painted images themselves a vocabulary? And what is more surreal, more enigmatic in its juxtapositions, than a list, an inventory, such as we find in paintings like Le Dormeur téméraire (The Daring Sleeper, 1928), which embeds representations of a bird, a candle, an apple, a bowler hat, a hand mirror, and a tied ribbon in a tablet of lead, or Les Six Éléments (1929), which in six irregular panes presents such images as a nude woman, clouds, house fronts, trees, hells and flames? In L’Évidence éternelle (The Eternally Obvious, 1930), five parts of a nude woman are framed discretely—a piquant catalogue of what most attracted the painter’s attention, ending with the humble bare feet. Magritte’s habit of notation translates, in his manner of painting, to a conscientious clarity that never requires any flourishes of brushwork or color; he coolly stands at the opposite temperamental pole from the feverish virtuosity with which Dalí insisted on his visual non sequiturs.

  He painted in a corner of his comfortable home south of Brussels, and worked intermittently as a commercial artist, even in a wallpaper factory for a time. His first paintings are done in a neo-Cubist style that became Art Deco; his early Surrealist works, dating from the mid-Twenties, are greasy in texture and dull in color and show barely enough skill to create trompe-l’oeil effects. He improved as a painter through much of his life; his paintings from the Fifties and Sixties show a delicate touch and brightness of tone absent from his work before the war; the late canvases that recast familiar objects in stone, such as Souvenir de voyage (Memory of a Journey, 1951) and Le Manteau de Pascal (Pascal’s Coat, 1954), depend upon a confident technique. His levitating loaves and apples and little bowler-hatted men would have no power to charm and startle us if they were not persuasively solid. The disturbing power of Le Survivant (which roiled a 1950 exhibition of paintings by members of the Belgian Communist Party, to which Magritte faithfully paid dues) lies not just in the blood but in the impassive correctness of the gun’s detail and the obsessively rendered middle-class wallpaper, wainscoting, and wood-grained floorboards. The same deadpan fidelity to bourgeois décor creates the neoclassic dignity in La Durée poignardée (Time Transfixed, 1938), whose marmoreal fireplace is so memorably pierced by the emergence of a smoking locomotive instead of a stovepipe. The monstrous joke of the notorious Le Viol (The Rape, 1934)—another of his most famous images—enfolds into its double entendre a skillfully, even reverently rendered female nude.

  In Le Viol, the doubling of the female pudenda as a furry mouth is certainly assaultive and prickly, a kind of fur teacup. The fur teacup remains the ultimate Surrealist object, the paradigm of Surrealism’s procedures of aggravation and abrasive resistance to conventional expectation. Les Amants (The Lovers, 1928), in wrapping the kissing heads of lovers in white cloth, rubs disagreeably against the imagined sensation of a kiss—as well as awakening, in this era, sinister thoughts of hooded terrorists. Surrealist shock tactics remain effective and commercially viable; there is a contemporary television commercial, for a make of golf club, which shows flinty-looking rocks being addressed as if prior to being struck. Any golfer, to whom hitting rocks is the worst of sensations, finds his attention concentrated.

  Yet such perversities lose their interest; having delivered its shock, the image has nothing left to tell us. Surrealism suffers the danger of any art of ideas: the delivery of the idea exhausts the content. The overturning of conventionality becomes as boring as conventionality. We give highest honors, in art, to the artists who widen our discourse with reality and who in their work give the impression of holding themselves open to the last minute to further impulses from nature. Cézanne and Vermeer, for instance, keep receiving messages—glints, tints—that modify and even override whatever intention they began with. Their canvases brim with being. The allegorical and sentimental content of Vermeer’s canvases becomes the least of it, though it remains there; the formal intent gathers a halo of reality, of unsayable thingness. The artist as showman and preacher moves to the side of the stage, and his self-effacement leaves us with a work of art that is more than an argument, a defiance, or a more or less political proclamation. Even in abstract art we can feel this evolution; Pollock, for instance, is a more replete artist than Newman, and Mondrian than Malevich.

  Les Jours gigantesques (The Titanic Days, 1928) is about rape, or attempted rape, and vividly illustrates the victim’s struggle and fear. Yet Magritte’s Surrealist trick, learned from his experiments in collage, of giving the rapist substance only within the victim’s outline, creates an image of heated intimacy, in which the relations of victim and assailant are transformed into a metaphor for struggle within the self. It is interesting how his later revision of this powerful image, adding to the woman full-length, heavily Légeresque legs and to the surrounding space a rudimentary geometric logic, fatally weakens its suggestive power. The artist must tread delicately through our psyches to make a mark. The wonderfully comic and mysteriously consoling painting of the great green apple in a windowed room just big enough to hold it (La Chambre d’écoute, or The Listening-Room, 1958) fails, when the oversize object is a red rose (Le Tombeau des lutteurs, or The Tomb of the Wrestlers, 1960), to evoke much more than a corsage in its box. A number of Magritte’s enigmatic signifiers—the slotted bells and the humanoid forms suggesting balustrade supports of turned wood—signify little to this viewer, and remain private clutter.

  Magritte, L’Aube désarmée (after Les Jours gigantesques), 1928. Pen and brush. (Photo Credit Ill.32)

  A striving toward an elemental idealism ran through Magritte’s work, and strengthened toward the end. Late paintings like Les Mémoires d’un saint and La Clef de verre (The Glass Key), both from 1960, have the blue largeness of Romanticism, at the moment it discovered that mountains and ocean were sublime. That other traditional epitome of beauty, the female body, figures in Magritte’s work from the start and achieves apotheosis in La Folie des grandeurs (Megalomania, 1967), the bronze-sculpture version of a telescopic conceit present in an oil of 1927, L’Importance des merveilles (The Importance of Marvels). Another large bronze of 1967, “Madame Récamier” de David, refers back to a painting of 1949; the homage to the most sternly neoclassic of French artists is both droll and sincere. The bent coffin is one of Magritte’s simplest and most resonant images. Another, the floating loaf of bread, seen in La Force des choses (Inevitably, 1958), suggests a miracle of the Middle Ages; levitation has been ever a symbol of spiritual grace. Magritte has survived the stale furors of Surrealism by virtue of a humanism that transcends shock and scorn; there is a benign grandeur in his best work, and its surprises have the surprising effect of making the viewer feel good.

  Jean Ipoustéguy, 1920–2006

  A TRIBUTE published in the Le Transréaliste, the bilingual newsletter of the Friends of Ipoustéguy, March 2007.

  The work of Jean Ipoustéguy first struck me in the Sculpture Garden of the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C. There, within sight of the great obelisk erected to the honor of George Washington and amid a host of modern outdoor sculptures from Rodin to David Smith, Ipoustéguy’s vigorous male nude Homme poussant la porte (Man Pushing the Door, 1966), wearing the expressionless face of a doll or a robot, pushes two hands and part of a leg through a louvered door while on the other side of the door a dog’s head nuzzles the hip of the man’s partially flayed body. What can this mean? I as
ked myself—this solemnly comic “double take,” this mixture of well-muscled human anatomy and straight-edged forms: the louvers, the doorposts, the blank disk in one of the man’s hands. “J’ai cassé l’oeuf de Brancusi,” Ipoustéguy once said—“I broke Brancusi’s egg.” It is in one of the many witty self-explanations with which he has offered to clarify sculpture that remains resolutely and aloofly yet energetically enigmatic.

  In a single work, passages of an Ipoustéguy hark back to the physical realism exultantly explored by Renaissance and neoclassical masters, while other, closely juxtaposed passages look ahead to the simplifications of modernism and, even, minimalism. A brilliant, provocative restlessness keeps us off balance as it flays, corrodes, and layers consummately representational figures. La Femme au bain (Bathing Woman, 1966), her long-legged body brought to a high burnish and nicely detailed from teeth and toes, comes with a hinged carapace that reveals, when lifted, nipples and navel and a beautiful belly. The copulating woman in La Maison (1976) wears a formalized, impassive mask hiding a head thrown back in orgasmic ecstasy.

  Jean Ipoustéguy, 1999 (Photo Credit Ill.33)

  “Toute oeuvre vient du corps et y revient,” he said—“All work comes from the body and returns there.” Yet the organic is subject to the inorganic: he once described an aspect of his work as “l’anatomie des hommes mêlée à une sorte d’environnement” (“human anatomy mixed up with some kind of environment”). His mature sculpture is not Cubist, but it insists on what he called “plusieurs points de l’espace à la fois” (“many points in space simultaneously”). He works in the traditional materials of permanence—bronze, marble—but playfully imitates the textures of paper and the shape of fractures, seeking “vivantes contradictions” (“living contradictions”), improvising at the intersections of the inner and the outer, the architectural and the human, the fluid and the frozen, the multiple and the single. Further subverting the illusion of stable volume, his later work became more and more linear—drawing in the air with lines of inflexible metal.

  Though he was awarded a major prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale and a number of prominent public commissions within France, Ipoustéguy is but lightly noted in surveys of modern art, and has received few exhibitions in the United States. His sculpture confounds, perhaps, with its restless complexity and its considerable, if obscure, narrative content. It seems “literary” when this is not a compliment. An Ipoustéguy sculpture would not self-effacingly adorn a luxurious modern apartment or serve, like a riveted and painted Calder stabile or a patiently rounded Henry Moore monolith, to ornament a peaceful outdoor space. An Ipoustéguy agitates; it demands second looks; it defies expectations. The art which found iconic favor in the second half of the twentieth century did not ask for a complex interaction; Brancusi’s eggs, Pollock’s evenly spattered canvases, the large abstract forms of Newman and Rothko, the machined boxes of minimalism all stun us into the silent suspension of thought with which we stand before colossal works of nature or human engineering. This art asserts rather than invites discourse. Ipoustéguy, a connoisseur of integuments, seeks to get under the viewer’s skin, and to itch there. Alluding to a host of earlier sculptural styles—battered barbaric, Roman monumental, medieval devotional, medical-school écorché—he exploits a full range of techniques and methods, but all under the aspect of permanence. No fragile rope sculptures or temporary assemblages of bricks or plastic dolls for him. He belongs, if with conscious irony, to the grand tradition of sculpture, and sounds in that company a French note of hearty wit, of strenuous introspection.

  I was enough struck by the two works at the Hirshhorn (the other is David et Goliath, of 1959) to do some research in Harvard’s Fogg Museum Library and to compose an article on Ipoustéguy for my book of art essays Just Looking (1989). On the strength of that modest work of appreciation, I was invited to meet Ipoustéguy when he visited the United States some years later. The photographs of him that I had seen often showed him working bare-chested, like a Gallic Vulcan at his forge; he startled me by being short, though his frame was knotted with muscle. His English was as fragmentary as my French, and in any case I could only attempt to repeat phrases of admiration I had already expressed in print. But it was an encounter still impressed in my memory, and precious to my sense of art and who forms it. The origin of so much epic creative force was revealed as merely human in size. I am pleased to learn that, a year after his death at the age of eighty-six, a society of his admirers, Les Amis d’Ipoustéguy, has been founded to keep alive and to refine awareness of his intricate, spacious, and unique achievement.

  1See the article by Leo Steinberg (“This Is a Test,” New York Review of Books, May 13, 1993) concerning this painting; Steinberg makes the surprising point that the “three witnesses” (André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the artist) are none of them witnessing the shocking scene. The two French poets are pointedly looking elsewhere, and the artist, from his background vantage, is watching us, the viewers. Steinberg wrote, “The painting is engineered to embarrass: so long as I look, I am exposed to the artist’s accusing gaze as he watches the churl in me trapped in the act of ogling a sacrilege—a provocation which my betters scorn to acknowledge.”

  PHOTOGRAPHERS

  Visual Trophies

  THE ART OF THE AMERICAN SNAPSHOT, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson, by Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner with Sarah Kennel and Matthew S. Witkovsky. 294 pp. National Gallery of Art / Princeton University Press, 2007.

  Among the homely staples of twentieth-century life that have been unceremoniously retired by the microchip revolution—the typewriter, the pressed-wax record, the card catalogue—the camera loaded with film has met a swift and stealthy end. Digital cameras look much like their analogue predecessors, but the viewfinder is different—a tiny TV screen, held at arm’s length—and we don’t have to wait for the mistakes to come back from the drugstore before discarding them. We didn’t, in fact, often discard silver-based snapshots, but kept them, with their negatives, in boxes and drawers to await a definitive culling that rarely came. They began to slide into obsolescence before the turn of this century, and had already become “collectibles,” with a fellowship of collectors and dealers feeding on the shoals of these silverfish as they raggedly rose from the depths of the private realm to surface in the marketplace. One prominent collector, Robert E. Jackson, of Seattle, struck up a relationship with the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., that has resulted in his donation of 138 snapshots to the institution and an exhibition, titled The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978. The exhibition, which runs through the end of the year, includes 254 items, all from Jackson’s gift or his collection, and is commemorated with a 294-page catalogue of the same name.

  The volume defies easy handling—it is heavier than one expects, and wordier—and an easy aesthetic response. The brief foreword, by the National Gallery’s director, Earl A. Powell III, poses the critical problem nicely:

  In the years since 1888, when George Eastman and others made it possible for anyone to make a photograph, billions of snapshots have been made in this country alone. Most of them poignantly remind their makers of a person, place, or event with special meaning or importance to their lives.

  My own shoeboxes of curling, yellowing snapshots derive their fascination almost entirely from my personal connections with the depicted matter—grandparents and parents, cousins and schoolmates, houses I once lived in, vistas and furniture lifted from my private temps perdu. The fascination extends to snapshots of my father in his First World War soldier’s uniform and my mother in her college hockey outfit, youthful and hopeful in the void before I was born, but thins with snapshots they saved of people I never knew, and reaches the vanishing point in stiff studio portraits, not snapshots at all, of ancestors to whom no narrative has been attached. A little halo of photographic illumination, in other words, accompanies us in our traversal of the decades, and any aesthetic or sociological values that the photographs poss
ess are incidental. With a poignance peculiar to photographic images, the past is captured while its obliteration is strongly implied. Susan Sontag wrote in the first of the brilliant essays collected in her book On Photography (1977):

  All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.… A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.

  Without a felt connection to one’s own mortal course through a lifetime of circumstance, snapshots become baffling and boring, their “qualities and intentions,” as Sontag says, “swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.” The generalized pathos, however, needs less than a multitude of illustrations. Most amateur snapshots fall short of being either art or news. An album by a professional art photographer, such as Richard Kalvar’s recent Earthlings, has us studying each page for the joke or trick or shock—the news—in each elegantly composed example, selected from sheaves of less happy exposures and reproduced large enough for every detail to tell. The prints in The Art of the American Snapshot are reproduced at their actual modest size, with lots of blazingly white space, and have taken their riddles into oblivion with their anonymous creators. Is the baby, for instance, lying on an open packed suitcase, apparently asleep, alive or dead? What impulse led someone, probably not the photographer, to scribble a ballpoint dress over a man in bathing trunks and pen the words “Hey Big Boy, come up & see me some time!”? What is the woman standing in a field and covering her face with her shapely hands while being photographed trying to tell us? Is she peeking at the photographer (and at us) through her fingers? Is she being coy or grief-stricken? The image is arresting enough to use on the book’s dust jacket, but its peculiar agonized playfulness hangs enigmatically in the general pathos of lost time.