The Magritte Machine · Museo Thyssen
From 14 September 2021 to 30 January 2022, the Thyssen Museum presents a major exhibition of the work of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, the first to be organised in Madrid in the last 30 years.
Rene Magritte - The Key to the Fields - 1936Rene Magritte - The great century - 1954
Source: Thyssen Museum. Images: René Magritte, "The Key to the Fields" (1936), Museo Thyssen. ©René Magritte / VEGAP Spain ·· René Magritte, "The Great Century" (1954) Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen. ©René Magritte / VEGAP Spain
In contrast to the paranoiac-critical fantasy of Salvador Dalí and the almost abstract constellations of Joan Miró, René Magritte (1898-1967) sought to provoke through the manipulation of everyday concepts and images. An enormously prolific artist, creator of over a thousand paintings, Magritte drew inspiration from the symbolism of his compatriots William Degouve de Nuncques and Fernand Khnopff, and from the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico to develop his unique style, and went on to create some of the most famous works of Surrealism.
The exhibition at the Thyssen Museum, entitled "The Magritte Machine" - in reference to the artist's participation, along with other Belgian Surrealist painters, in the catalogue of a supposed cooperative, "La Manufacture de Poésie", which included a "universal machine for making paintings" - includes more than 90 paintings by the artist, as well as photographs and audiovisual material, and has been curated by the museum's own artistic director, Guillermo Solana.
"The Magritte Machine" is organised into seven sections. The first of these, "The Magician's Powers", brings together three of Magritte's four known self-portraits. "Image and word" shows how Magritte, probably influenced by the Dadaists, incorporates words into his compositions, as in his "This is still not a pipe" (1952) from the series "The betrayal of images". "Figure and background" shows how Magritte frequently resorted to the inversion of figure and background, turning solid bodies into hollow ones and vice versa, as in "High Society" (1965-66) from the Telefónica Collection.
The fourth section of the exhibition, "Picture and Window", includes two paintings - "The Key to the Fields" (1936) from the Museo Thyssen and "Les Promenades d'Euclide" (1955) from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts- in which Magritte reinterprets the classical equation between picture and window. "The Great Century", a 1954 painting from the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen, is included in the fifth section, "Face and Mask", along with other works showing figures with their backs turned and hidden faces. "Mimetism" revisits Magritte's inversion of figure and background, while "Megalomania", the final section of the exhibition, shows Magritte's frequent use of modifying the scale of an object, with "La Folie des grandeurs" from 1962 from the Menil Collection in Houston serving as an example.

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