Mapping the Modern : Surrealism , Rene Magritte and Joan Miro

1A Generic research statement/question

Compare and contrast Rene Magritte's, The Lovers with Joan Miro's, Carnival of Harlequin in relation to the modernist concept of The Anti-aesthetic.

The artists Joan Miro and Rene Magritte employed two distinct aesthetic approaches to surrealism and the anti-aesthetic. Miro's painting Carnival of Harlequin exploring biomorphism and Margritte's painting The lovers, being more naturalistic and veristic. Of the two, Joan Miro adheres most strongly to the modernist concept of The Anti-Aesthetic.

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I with the center of the movement in Paris. Andre Breton , a trained psychiatrist, writer and poet was influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud and the political ideas of Karl Marx. Freud's theories of the unconscious, dream analysis and free association were integral to the development of the surrealists methods to release the imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the ideas of an underlying madness.

Andre Breton officially founded the surrealism movement in 1924 when he wrote Le Manifeste du Surrealisme(The Surrealist Manifesto). In it, he defined Surrealism as

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. (Breton 1969, 26).

Surrealist artists, in terms of the modernist concept of the Anti-aesthetic, rejected traditional art forms and aesthetics, favoring new art forms such as collage and frottage, automatic/aleatory methods, photo montague, performance, veristic and biomorphic painting techniques. They reacted to the culture around them critiqing modernism's rationality. Often employing imagery with symbolism, parody, with the intention to shock, enlighten or confuse the viewer.

The influenced by their times the Spanish artist Joan Miro and Belgian Rene Magritte explored surrealism through new visual languages, rejecting traditional aesthetics and techniques. Their approaches will be disgussed with the semiotic analysis of the paintings Carnival of harlequin and The lovers.

Both artists were influenced by the post world war one cultural and financial climate as well as their personal circumstances while making Carnival of harlequin and The lovers.

In the early 1920s mainstream French art was absorbed in cubism (Adamowicz 2012, 2). Miro was interesting in challenging the conventions of art and taste, he wanted to break their guitar, he chose to completely reject the traditional aesthetic codes of the renaissance and of cubism.

I personally don’t know where we are heading. The only thing that’s clear to me is that I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have an utter contempt for painting. The only thing that interests me is the spirit itself, and I only use the customary artist’s tools – brushes, canvas, paints – in order to strike more precisely. The only reason I abide by the rules of pictorial art is because they’re essential for expressing what I feel, just as grammar is essential for expressing yourself (Miro 1992, 116).

Magritte had little interest in breaking art. For Magritte he faced financial hardship while persuing his passion as an artist, struggling to support himself and his wife by painting and worked various jobs such as graphic design and later establishing a business with his brother.

The bourguiose environment of his daily life, filled with businessmen in bowler hats, inspired Magritte to critiqing the conformity and mundane reality of aristocrats, the bourguoise and the petit bourgouise. This can be seen in the black suit the man in The lovers is wearing, an image that would appear often in many of Magrittes paintings. Magritte used the techniques of realism and surrealism of visual metaphore and metanym to undermin art, reality, languague, object, signifer and signified.

The use of symbolic imagery was fundamental both Miro's and Magritte's paintings.

The painting, Carnival of harlequin by Joan Miro, depicts a room with a window, the room is populated by a collage of bizarre objects and creatures. There is a black pyramid, red flame and stylised sun out of the window. In the room there are many forms, a guitar to the top center, a musical stanza, a ladder with an ear at its top and eye at its base on a plinth, a pipe, horizontal black and vertical white wavey line in the center, a cat to the bottom right, a winged bug sitting on a dice, two cats playing with a thread, a fish on a table and a dark sphere above, geometric objects with eyes and ears a grouped next to the ladder. The horizon line of the room sits through the center of the painting, the floor being a darker tone brown than the wall, with the window in the top right hand corner. Harlequin was a catalan theater character, portrayed as a often playing a guitar and a victim of unrequited love in this painting he is a guitar. This character can be seen in the center left of the painting with a red and blue sad face, smoking a pipe, white body and a hole in his stomach.

This has importance as at the time of the paintings production Miro faced financial hardship, often going without food and a sharp rod or nail pierces the side of his head, perhaps reflective of Miro’s mental state at the time. When asked later in life about Carnival of harlequin Miro stated, 

In the canvas certain elements appear that will be repeated later in other works: the ladder, an element of flight and evasion, but also of elevation; animals, and above all, insects, which I have always found very interesting; the dark sphere that appears to the right is a representation of the globe, because in those days I was obsessed with one idea: ‘I must conquer the world!’; the cat, who was always by my side as I painted. The black triangle that appears in the window represents the Eiffel Tower. I tried to deepen the magical side of things (Miro 1992).

The painting, The Lovers by Rene Magritte, depicts a man and woman kissing, their faces enshrouded with cloth. The man is wearing a black business suit, white shirt and tie, the woman is wearing a brown sleveless garment with one shoulder exposed. The figures are in a room with the right wall, ceiling and backwall visible. The woman is tilting her head upward towards the man allowing the profile of his nose to be seen.

The enshourded face was a common motif used by Magritte, speculations have been made that this useage stemmed from the suicide drowning of his mother who had her wet nightgown wrapped around her face when she was found. In The Lovers, the shroud prevents the intimate embrace between the two figures, transforming this passionate act into an isolating, frustrating and unsettling.

The surrealists attempted to express the subconsious, or even the unconscious, with minimal control or selection by the consious. Inspired by Sigmund Freud and Andre Breton, lead to the differing aesthetic languagues used by Miro and Magritte. Both artists were exploring visual language, Miro was attempting to create a new pictorial language where as Magritte was creating visual poetry.

Miro took to disecting pictorial codes by rejecting representation and experimenting with painting as matter and gesture. Drawing attention away from painting as figuration to the purely pictorial symbolic elements as a means to communicate between the tangible and the intangible. This new language appeared abstract, based on colors and shapes, but every shape and color held meaning to Miro. Carnival of harlequin is not making reference to the dream analysis of freud that we are accustom to seeing, It was, Miro said, inspired by circumstance, he would go to bed nearly starving not having eaten due to limited financial resouces at the time. Miro would go into a trance like state, seeing surreal hallucinations which he would record through sketches that would later be incorporated into his paintings.

Magritte developed a technique of visual poetry to explore Freudian dream analysis, presenting strange juxtapositions of objects that Magritte is asking you to make sense of while you are awake.

One night … I awoke in a room in which a cage and the bird sleeping in it had been placed. A magnificent error caused me to see an egg in the cage instead of the bird. I then grasped a new and astonishing poetic secret ( Dubnick 1980, 410).

For Magritte the function of painting is to make poetry visible, provoking shock by placing unrelated objects together. The relationship between the verbal and visual image are explored and the titles of his works were just as important as the images themselves. In The lovers the shrouded forms and title alude to something more, to an underlying message that while we may convince ourselves that we connect with others, that intimacy is an illusion, we are alone. Its important to note that Magritte denied any symbolic meaning within his works (Silverman 2012, 204).

The medium of the Carnival of harlequin and The lovers is the traditional medium of painting, but the aesthetic of Miro and Magritte were rejecting traditional aesthetics in favor of new techniques.

In the Carnival of harlequin, Miro has completely flattened conventional three-dimentional forms and schematised them to simple line-drawings. Miro used biomorphic organic forms and methods of automatism inspired by the dadaist techniques of collage, assemblage and montage. The collage of forms ignore traditional compositional rules forcing the viewers eyes to dart around increasing the intensity of the scene portrayed. To further 'break the guitar' Miro used biomorphic forms, minimising the use of straight line, simplified abstracted shapes, grotesque figuration and non-naturalistic use of primary colors and black and white. related techniques

Magritte was less concerned with rejecting the technical convention of traditional art. The composition of The lovers is quite traditional in that the figures are set within the golden mean. He is creating a veristic illusion but The lovers is conservative, realistic with familiar objects and a traditional perspective. Magritte believed realism allowed the viewer to focus on the subject of a work instead of the techniques used to paint it. As a result he tried to minimise the artists hand and strove to create a photo like surface, smooth and deviod of painterly mark making and texture.

In conclusion Magritte explored the modernist concept of the anti-aesthetic by questioning the modernist rationality and use of veristic illusion through visual poetic language of metaphore and metanym, hinting to underlying freudian influences. While both artists chose painting as a medium, it is Miro who proved to better explore the anti-aesthetic in the Carnival of harlequin through his symbolic pictoral language of biomorphic forms. And his passionate drive to reject traditional aesthetic codes of the rennaisonce and cubism by using unconventional strategies of composition influenced by free association.

Figure 1. Rene Magritte The Lovers 1928, oil on canvas, 54 x 73.4cm.

Source: Museum of Modern Art 2015. Moma Learning. Accessed 18 April. http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/rene-magritte-the-lovers-le-perreux-sur-marne-1928.

Figure 2. Joan Miro Carnival of harlequin 1924-5, oil on canvas, 66 x 90.5cm.

Source: TATE 2015. Moma Learning. Accessed 23 May. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/miro-london

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