Behind the apple
Magritte: a Life
Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield (Profile, £30)
IN 1946, René Magritte painted his most famous picture, The Son of Man, which shows a bowler-hatted figure in a black overcoat standing ramrod straight in front of a featureless background of sky and sea. Before his face floats a bright-green apple, which obscures the features and expression of this son of man, Magritte himself, except for one bit of eye that stares back out as the viewer stares in.
According to Magritte, the picture—and, indeed, most of his art —makes play with the fact that: ‘Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.’ Alex Danchev’s biography, the first major work devoted to Magritte, is an attempt to look behind the apple.
Danchev, who died before the book was completed (it was finished by the art historian Sarah Whitfield), reveals a man who was simultaneously deeply conventional and deeply subversive. Here was an artist who lived as a petit bourgeois citizen in a quiet
Brussels suburb, who painted in a suit, tie and slippers and who was devoted to his Pomeranians. The dogs were always called Loulou or Jackie and, if they were not allowed into a restaurant, he would eat with them in the kitchen.
Yet, between 1927 and 1930, he and his wife, Georgette, lived in Paris at the heart of the Surrealist group at its most experimental. He was, he said, always on the lookout for what had never been seen. He played games with perception and the relationship between image and reality: underneath a bright midday sky sits a row of houses at night with the street lamps lit; a man looks into a mirror and sees the back of his own head reflected; two lovers kiss with their heads covered by veils; bowler-hatted men fall from the sky instead of raindrops.
Magritte’s paintings, says Danchev, always contain ‘a pinch of eroticism, and a sizzle of dread’.
What Danchev doesn’t find is a life of incident. The one moment of real drama came in 1912 when Magritte was 13. His mother, a depressive, sneaked out of the house at night and threw herself into the River Sambre; her body was not found for 18 days. The story runs that Magritte saw the corpse hauled from the water, her nightdress covering her face, and this accounts for the innumerable veiled figures in his paintings and his fascination with concealment. Danchev maintains, however, that he wasn’t present, but was told by someone that her face was covered (she had been hit by a dredger) to spare his feelings. Whatever the truth, Magritte said nothing about the suicide for 30 years, even to his wife, who found out from someone else.
Magritte’s paintings grew from unremarkable beginnings; his early career was as a draughtsman for a wallpaper company and a designer of advertising posters for Alfa Romeo cars and fashion houses. His first solo exhibition, in 1927, received a critical mauling, yet, within a few years, he was famous. He would fall out with the Surrealists, join and then fall out with the Communist party, rush off to Carcassonne when the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940 and return soon afterwards to paint fake Picassos for the black market. He would remain devoted to his wife even as he visited brothels and pursued a Surrealist performance artist called Sheila Legge.
As a boy, he liked to pour yeast into public toilets and delightedly wait for the screams as they overflowed; as an adult, he would kick people from behind and meet their outrage with the pretence that nothing had happened. However, as a painter he remained serious. For Danchev, ‘Magritte is the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world’, and the influence of his paintings, with their clever, witty double-takes, can be felt across popular culture. His achievement in this biography is to show that a largely placid life was full of interest. And we now know who was behind that floating apple. Michael Prodger
His paintings have “a pinch of eroticism and a sizzle of dread”
Symphonies for the Soul: Classical music to cure any ailment
Oliver Condy (Cassell, £15) Perfect Pitch: 100 pieces of classical music to bring joy, tears, solace, empathy, inspiration (& everything in between)
Tim Bouverie (Short Books,
£9.99)
HUNGOVER? Listen to Bernstein’s ‘I feel pretty’. Stressed? Be soothed by the deliciously dark tones of Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium.
Feeling slothful? Rossini’s
William Tell Overture will have you galloping around the house. These are among the brilliant ideas in Oliver Condy’s compendium, in which he works his way with a light touch through the A–Z of emotions and senses and how they affected great musicians. Did you know that Mendelssohn suffered dreadful seasickness en route to Fingal’s Cave (Q for Queasiness)?
Mr Condy, former editor of the BBC’S Music magazine, links A for Abandonment with
Messiah, for its dependably uplifting music and for its links to the Foundling Hospital, and recommends a lesser-known ‘miniature masterpiece’, Invocation, written for strings, harp and timpani by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s father, William, if suffering from P for Panic. Under F for Forgiveness Mr Condy reminds us that Richard Strauss wrote Metamorphosen in response to the bombing of Dresden, but that it ‘edges towards resignation and relief’; Britten’s War Requiem, for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, has angry lines from Wilfred Owen, but its overriding message is one of reconciliation. This original, informative book, attractively cloth bound to make a present, is so engrossing that I had to reach Z for Zen (deficiency in) —lose yourself in Jonathan Harvey’s ‘...towards a pure land’.
During lockdown, Tim Bouverie, a historian, sent friends a daily link to a favourite piece, eventually realising he had ‘unearthed a way into classical music’ for others. The result is a compilation of his 100 greatest hits; some will sniff that it’s not terribly radical—gershwin, Walton and Richard Strauss are about as modern as it gets—but I found myself nodding approvingly at Rossini’s wonderfully quirky Petite Messe Solennelle, Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice (Kathleen Ferrier is surely the ultimate Orpheus, however) and, my all-time favourite, Bach’s B Minor Mass.