Mad or Bad? Magritte’s Artistic Rebellion

René Magritte, La moisson (The Harvest), 1943.

Long considered aberrations in his artistic career, René Magritte’s sunlit surrealist and vache pictures have recently been reassessed by art historians and critics not only on their own terms but also in relation to the notion of “bad painting.” The two bodies of work have often been discussed separately, since they are stylistically dissimilar and the latter was produced specifically for Magritte’s first solo exhibition in Paris, in 1948. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think of them as related. Both series are almost unrecognizable as “Magrittes,” and one followed directly after the other, together spanning World War II and the immediate postwar period. Far more than a neutral background, historical events may have helped shape, if not determine, the nature and terms of these works more than has until now been presumed.

These paintings are deeply, thoroughly weird, not only in their iconography but also in their departure from Magritte’s long-established style, palette, and facture. Whereas previously Magritte acknowledged only the artistic influence of the Italian Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, the sunlit surrealist works refer—sometimes quite directly—to late paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. But examples such as , with its harlequinesque, multicolored limbs, torso, and works evoke other artists: the sinuous contours of several female nudes recall those of Henri Matisse, and the intense hues and crude brushwork in other pictures have invited comparison to German Expressionism. With their penis-nosed grotesques, lurid colors, and bodily eruptions, the paintings have been described as “look[ing] like nothing so much as the missing link between James Ensor and Zap Comix.”