René Magritte is well known for being one of the most important artists of surrealism. Also, he is
remembered for his tragic life as a teenager, because his mother committed
suicide when he was only 13 years old. There are certain beliefs that his works
made between 1927 and 1928 reflect the pain and suffering that Magritte felt
for losing the maternal figure, paintings such as The Invention of Life,
The Heart of the Matter or The Menaced Assassin, show women with
faces covered, with worried eyes or simply lifeless female figures.
Another subject for which Magritte is
remembered is for the critic of the abstract idiom. This means, the words that
exits into the language do not correspond to a specific image, because as
humans we have created the images as we think those things are, despite we
don't know the real name of the nature of those things. Therefore, his famous
oeuvre The Treachery of Images has become relevant in the academic world
and in everyday life, due to the critic of the abstract idiom, and we can
observe it when we read in the painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, and
confirm that the image of a pipe is not a pipe, because is only an image that represents
the idea we have of a pipe.
However, René Magritte's work goes further than
just these topics, because he was the main artist to make elective affinities
visible in 20th century art.
According to Magritte, the elective affinities
were born when he woke up one morning and suddenly imagined that his wife
Georgette's canary had turned into an egg inside the cage.
We are familiar with the image of a bird in a cage; interest is heightened if we replace the bird with a fish or a shoe; but while these images may be intriguing, they are unfortunately accidental, arbitrary. It is possible to find a new image that resists investigation through its exact and definitive character: that is the image that shows an egg in a cage.
René Magritte
Although this may not seem important or
meaningful, by modifying basic elements within a work without going into
chance, it allows giving more power to the image. Thus, the canary is hidden
within the work to give the viewer more elements to imagine the double prison
of the bird before its birth, which is both the egg and the cage.
Similarly, since there are elective affinities
such as the case of the egg in the cage, it is possible to interpret what is
happening in the present and what may happen in the future. For example, the
bird before becoming a living being, is already inside a prison, which is the
shell, but this situation can still become somewhat pessimistic, the future of
the egg is to become a canary inside a cage.
Based on this, it can be thought that, in this Magritte's work, the artist follows both a surrealist and an existentialist
path.
However, the above does not only happen in the
work Elective Affinities, but also in many others, such as La Clairvoyance,
where a painter captures the possibility of a bird on the canvas; o Return,
a painting that allows us to imagine the future of the birds that are still in
the nest.
Therefore, with the elective affinities, René
Magritte breaks with the random schemes of the surrealists, since he proposes a
game with the other to investigate the logical possibilities of a work.