René Magritte
How did sunshine and rainbows help defeat fascism?
Art can be so many things: a straight representation of reality, an escape from reality, or a reminder of issues that need our attention. And it’s that last role that captivates many viewers today. Activism has become a serious aspect of the arts over the last century, particularly when artists are responding to various crises present in their own time. This became most apparent during the Second World War.
Fascist governments in early twentieth-century Europe often had entire segments of their state ideology dedicated to defining what kinds of art were acceptable for public display. In Germany under the Nazis, nearly all abstract art was prohibited. Furthermore, any art regardless of genre or style, created by an artist who was Jewish, non-white, or a political opponent of the regime was likewise banned. Entire genres like Dada, Bauhaus, Fauvism, and Cubism were completely removed from cultural life. The works of Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Kokoschka, Beckmann, Chagall, Ernst, and Kandinsky were declared “degenerate”. In some cases, art was not only banned but also destroyed. The arts were under attack, and many artists found it necessary to defend themselves against these campaigns. In the years leading up to this darkness, the Surrealist movement flourished.
The organized Surrealist movement first got off the ground in France in the 1920s, led by André Breton. For the most part, the Surrealist movement was a radical organization. They sought to actively unleash the subconscious, turning the normal and the everyday on its head. Surrealism is the destruction of the barrier between dreams and reality. Nearly all the Surrealists were sympathetic to or involved in leftist movements opposed to fascism. In the 1930s and 1940s, many actively fought against fascism in Europe, using their art to aid the Allied war effort. One of the most inventive ways was a pair of gender-bending Surrealists named Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, who actively spread mutinous rumors through leaflets and flyers supposedly written by disenchanted German soldiers. Also, a British Surrealist artist named Roland Penrose helped design camouflage for the military. But the art of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte gives people another way to resist darkness.
Magritte’s paintings made during the Second World War are one of the most overlooked parts of his artistic career. For decades, critics and the public did not take these paintings seriously because they incorporated bright colors and overwhelmingly positive imagery. Compare them with his pre-war paintings like Le Double Secret (1927), Le Modèle Rouge (1934), and La durée poignardée (1938), which address subjects like modern life, war, domesticity, and the subconscious mind. But during the early 1940s, Magritte had been suffering from depression. Three years of Nazi occupation didn’t exactly help either. While his previous paintings were thought-provoking, they were not what he needed then. So he turned to the loose brushstrokes and bright colors of the Impressionist masters. He found particular inspiration in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s work, especially his 1919 painting The Bathers. As a result, he produced some incredibly bright and lively paintings amid an extremely dark time in everyone’s lives. His art became warmer and more cheerful, with paintings like La Moisson, La Préméditation, and Présage favorable. In his manifesto Surrealism in Full Sunlight, he later wrote that many of his fellow artists “hold on to their comfortable reputation or have resigned themselves to abandoning the fight. However, the experiment continues in full sunlight.” The experiment he refers to is his insistence on bringing light and positivity into a world seemingly ruled by darkness at that moment. He wrote, “We have chosen pleasure as a reaction against years of tedious terror.” A small group of other Belgian artists and poets joined him in this direction, including Marcel Mariën and Paul Nougé. Magritte would self-style this part of his career as his Renoir period, but the style is also popularly known as Sunlit Surrealism.
Magritte experienced resistance to this new direction, especially from the leaders of the organized surrealist movement in France like André Breton. Magritte realized that one of the purposes of Surrealism was to confront and dissect social and cultural values, causing people to question even their most fundamental beliefs. However, by the 1940s, the main disruptive force in Europe was not Surrealism but fascism. Given the new set of circumstances, Magritte believed that Surrealism had to evolve to fit the new reality. Many art critics and historians consider these paintings objectively bad, a slight detour from his original style during the war years. However, some are starting to reassess these colorful paintings, with the first major exhibition dedicated to Magritte’s Sunlit Surrealism being held in 2021 at the Musée de l’Orangerie. Museum specialists wrote that these sunny paintings indicated Magritte’s belief in himself as “a prophet of happiness and of the return of peace”.
The works from Magritte’s Sunlit Surrealism carry an important lesson. Magritte realized there is a time and a place for art that engages in deep thought and serious consideration of broad philosophical and social issues. But there are times when other kinds of art are necessary. In times such as these, when it sometimes feels like the world is falling apart, art that reminds you of the world’s problems and the suffering they cause can sometimes be unnecessary. You’re already well aware of these issues, so consuming art that further reminds you becomes akin to putting a hat on a hat or rubbing salt into a fresh wound. Magritte tells us that it is necessary for art to also bring positivity and color into people’s lives, not to distract or anesthetize us from the darkness but to bring balance.