Modern Art Introduction The work featured in this paper is Le Viol (rape) by surrealist painter Rene Magritte. The painting was done in 1934 and it was clearly meant to shock the viewer as it is a repulsive representation of a woman's face. However, instead of eyes she has breasts, instead of a mouth she has pubic hair that one assumes is covering a vagina, and instead of a nose Magritte has placed a human belly button in that spot. There are many possible suggestions that an alert observer could present in terms of what the artist had in mind when he created this piece (it was first a drawing and later Magritte produced an oil on canvas painting from the drawing). One idea that has value is that Magritte was not-so-subtly protesting against rape. He presented a woman's face as her anatomy, as though perhaps it would be her destiny to have her breasts and her vagina be a focal point for men who may wish to violate her (or a woman).
¶ … Le Viol (rape) by surrealist painter Rene Magritte. The painting was done in 1934 and it was clearly meant to shock the viewer as it is a repulsive representation of a woman's face. However, instead of eyes she has breasts, instead of a mouth she has pubic hair that one assumes is covering a vagina, and instead of a nose Magritte has placed a human belly button in that spot.
There are many possible suggestions that an alert observer could present in terms of what the artist had in mind when he created this piece (it was first a drawing and later Magritte produced an oil on canvas painting from the drawing). One idea that has value is that Magritte was not-so-subtly protesting against rape. He presented a woman's face as her anatomy, as though perhaps it would be her destiny to have her breasts and her vagina be a focal point for men who may wish to violate her (or a woman).
The point of the dramatic artwork is that the face made up of body parts and hence it appears to be blind, dumb (unable to speak), and basically just a sexual object with hair. Susan Guar explains that the artist may have been subscribing to the position of one of William Faulkner's "…fictional surrogates, a man who celebrates the feminine ideal as 'a virgin with no legs to leave me, no arms to hold me, no head to talk to me'" (Gubar, 1987, p. 722). Faulkner went on to describe that person with "no head to talk to me" as "merely [an] articulated genital organ" (Gubar, 722).
It is frightening, hideously chauvinistic on the surface, but there are obviously deeper meanings intended. It "fetishizes female sexuality," Gubar explains. The painting doesn't even really have a vagina (only pubic hair) and moreover, Magritte has basically destroyed a woman's face, and Magritte is said to have offered this explanation: "In this painting, a woman's face is made up of the essential features of her body" (http://onesurrealistaday.com).
About Rene Magritte and Modern Art
Rene Magritte was born on November 21, 1898, in Belgium and passed away on August 15, 1967 in Belgium. He is quoted praising "…that pictorial experience which puts the real world on trial," and his painting of Le Viol certainly puts the way men sometimes view women on trial (Gale Biography In Context). Magritte had been drawing and painting since the age of 12, and when he was 14 years of age he suffered an emotional blow when his mother drowned herself.
He attended the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels between the years 1916 and 1918, and along with a number of other young talented artists he co-published the review, Au Volant! (Gale, p. 1). By the age of 22 he was using an abstract idiom that was based on "Cubo-Futurist principles," according to the Gale biography. He served briefly in the military, married Georgette Berger, and earned a living working in a wallpaper factory and designing posters.
Magritte had a revelation in the early 1920s after seeing a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's painting The Song of Love; he was reportedly "moved to tears" by the "strange juxtaposition of objects in Chirico's work," the Gale biography continues. In the mid-1920s Magritte was beginning to emulate and learn from the surrealists, who "overturned conventional notions by exercising their unconscious impulses for creative effect" (Gale). Some of Magritte's paintings had a "bizarre, dream-like quality" (Gale).
The artist began being recognized as a quality creative person and in the 1930s he created his Key of Dreams series (objects in this series did not conform to what was labeled below) and in the 1940s he experimented with impressionism, saying "life obliges me to do something so I paint" (Gale).
Modern Art / Surrealism
Andre Breton was considered the visionary in the surrealist movement, and in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism he noted that the aim of surrealism is to "…supply it with practical possibilities in no way competitive in the most immediate realm of consciousness," and in fact, he went on, there was a need to "put an end to idealism," and to place surrealistic artists "at a point of departure such that for us philosophy is 'outclassed'" (Breton, 464).
George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde were "militantly opposed to any notion of a 'pure' art"; and they wrote (in "Jesus in the Trenches") that surrealism embraces Freudian doctrine insomuch as it helps to flush out ideas and evaluate them; Freudian criticism (literature) is the "first and only one with a really solid basis," they wrote. Given the bizarre surrealism from the likes of Magritte (two people kissing with towels wrapped around their heads; a man with a bowler top had whose face is blocked by a gull; a man with a face in the back of his head); an eagle wearing a suit jacket; a hanger with a top hat; a horse with a rider who becomes part of a tree; and a building with a massive finger jutting upward from a broken corner), Freudian doctrine of sexuality seems appropriate and idealism seems a long-gone movement.
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