Excerpted statements & photo
printed in "Secret Affinities," Institute
for the Arts, Rice University, Houston. 1976.
Translated by W.G. Ryan.
In the art of painting, as I conceive it, the role of technique is
only incidental. The interest it evokes is purely professional and
cannot satisfy any but a futile curiosity. The "matter"
manipulated by a painter acquires no new quality worthy of remark.
The essential consists in one unpredictable, indispensable event,
namely inspiration - always possible, or else present, when one is
asleep or awake, happy or unhappy. Without inspiration thought becomes
mechanical, is subject to the vulgarity of "common sense"
(itself more or less "conformist"), and knows no other than
an imaginary world. When thought is inspired it is no longer banal,
exceptional, delirious or genial: it resembles the world by having
similarities with what the world offers it, and by evoking the mystery
of what it receives. The mystery is permanent; it is absolutely exempt
from interpretation whether naïve or erudite: it can only be
evoked.
[originally appeared
in "Catalogue of the exhibition L'Oeuvre de Rene Magritte," Casino
Communal, Knokke, July - August 1962.]
*
The art of painting, like many
other things, can give rise to confusions easy or difficult. In particular
the art called "fantastic," which at times comes over as
charming but more often as puerile and sordid by preference. Its false
reputation designates it as being capable of discovering or imagining
a world to which only the few have access, a world which - if we heed
the partisans of the "fantastic" - is truer than the world
itself.
The art of painting, as I conceive
it, is neither easy nor difficult. I know that at certain moments
unexpected images appear to me and that they are models of pictures
I like to paint.
These images seem to me to dominate
my ideas and my feelings good or bad. They dominate them really if
they reveal the present as an absolute mystery.
[from unpublished manuscript
of Magritte's acceptance speech on becoming a member of the Libre
Academie de Belgique, April 5, 1957.]
*
The charm of the unfamiliar can
be felt as well, for instance, while looking at a distant blue, as
while looking at a landscape that appears in the sky.
We may be allowed to doubt that
we are obliged to experience a feeling "determined" by what
we are looking at. A very familiar thing is sometimes looked at with
a feeling of strangeness, and we can have a feeling of familiarity
for things called mysterious. In both possibilities are combined a
feeling of strangeness, the familiar thing, and ourselves. That scarcely
implies the "determination" of our feelings, nor does it
imply that the painter can decide what feeling a picture ought to
provoke. In this connection it is worth noting that anything that
is "determined," or alleged to be determined, is singularly
lacking in charm and interest: one doesn't really like a picture when
one learns what is supposed to have "determined" it: at
once the picture is "lost sight of" for the sake of a boring
and irrelevant commentary.
The feeling we experience while
we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or
from ourselves. The feeling, the picture, and ourselves are united
in our mystery.
[from draft manuscript
sent to Paul Colinet, end of 1957.]
The Natural
Graces, 1963
Image
printed in "Magritte,"
by Suzi Gablik, Thames and Hudson, Inc., New York, 1970.
