Magritte's "The Fanatics": Surrealism, Symbolism & Fanaticism

Introduction: Magritte and the Surrealist Tradition

Although Belgian artist René Magritte is recognized as a premier and even pivotal surrealist, he had at times been "marginalized within the history of modern art," his work "labeled realist," and "accused of being retrograde, banal, and worse yet, unpainterly."¹ Yet Magritte's corpus of work precludes any generalizations at all, let alone accusations of realism. "Les Fanatiques," or "The Fanatics," is as symbolic as it is surreal and bears little resemblance to many of Magritte's more famous works that do bear some elements of realism. Certainly some of Magritte's paintings "have the acribic precision of photographic realism," but "Les Fanatiques [The Fanatics]" does not.²

In "The Fanatics," Magritte depicts a raven and a bonfire against a background of stormy sky and sea. Although representational of the core elements of bird, fire, sky, and water, the painting is metaphorical, symbolic, and surreal rather than realistic. "The Fanatics" calls into question the nature and function of artistic representation, particularly within the surrealist genre. Magritte had a strained relationship with the more formal members of the surrealist movement, but can still be considered a surrealist because of his use of dreamlike imagery, symbolism, and metaphor without veering towards abstraction. Without incorporating political motifs or meanings into his work, Magritte inadvertently tapped into the collective consciousness that prevailed during the first half of the twentieth century, a time when Europe grappled with fascism and war.

"The Fanatics" is rendered with gouache on paper, which gives it an entirely different look and feel from Magritte's oil paintings. Moreover, "The Fanatics" was completed in 1963, four years before Magritte's death. Painted towards the end of Magritte's career, and well after the war years had decimated Europe, the painting offers a sense of hope and closure, as well as subtle commentary on the nature, implications, and causes of fanaticism. Fanaticism connotes irrational obsession and could just as well refer to religious or ideological fanaticism. Consumerism and capitalism could also be considered types of fanaticism. Without incorporating any overt references to either political or religious concepts, Magritte lets the viewer decide what fanatical elements prove most dangerous or destructive. Because its imagery and meaning are open for interpretation and can be applied to different historical, cultural, and political contexts, "The Fanatics" has an enduring and universal quality.

Composition, Medium, and Visual Field

More than most of Magritte's paintings, "The Fanatics" bears some resemblance to primitive art as deeply embedded in the collective consciousness as the Lascaux cave paintings.³ The raven is not rendered perfectly but roughly and is more a silhouette. There is also a striking absence of detail in "The Fanatics." The fire seems to rise of its own accord from the water, but Magritte does not even differentiate between sea and sand. Magritte allows the stone circle and the bonfire to simply float in the foreground rather than placing these elements in any realistic composition. Instead of Magritte's signature style of rendering everyday objects with precise realism but placing them in uncommon circumstances, "The Fanatics" is neither realistic in its depiction of the raven and the fire pit, nor a depiction of mundane objects in unique situations. Instead, "The Fanatics" offers viewers insight into the artist's subconscious as well as the collective unconscious.

With characteristic simplicity of composition, form, and representational elements, Magritte offers relatively few actual objects in the visual field — only the bird, the cloudy sky, the stormy sea, the fire, and the stone circle surrounding it. The viewer is charged with the responsibility of piecing together the disparate elements to perceive either a whole emotional meaning or a symbolic narrative. Half the composition is comprised of the oversized raven, whose black silhouette is striking even against the dark grey stormy skies. Likewise, the bottom half of the composition is taken up by the fire and the fire pit. The fire offers the only color in the painting: tendrils of orange and red. As if Magritte wants to remind viewers of his technical expertise, the artist allows the flames to cast shadows on the rocks — one of the only realistic elements in "The Fanatics." Another subtle touch of realism is the circular ripples that form in the sea around the rocks. These ripples imply at once that the stone circle was just placed atop the water, but also that the water could be about to envelop the stones.

Optical Illusion and the Hidden Phoenix

A closer examination of the raven reveals that the bird is itself an optical illusion, and is really two birds in one. It is the silhouetted raven, flying straight ahead from the right side of the canvas to the left, soaring nonchalantly over the fire pit. Yet the outstretched wing on the far side of the bird angles downward to look into the fire, and that wing seems to bear a face. Effectively, Magritte is giving the viewer a glimpse of the mythical bird the Phoenix, which rises from the flames of destruction to usher in a new world, new paradigm, or new reality. The Phoenix is not overtly drawing attention to itself and remains disguised as an ordinary raven, but the raven also leads a double life as a thinly disguised Phoenix. Things are not what they seem, and the mystical and magical are present in the ordinary and everyday.

Given the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the natural and the supernatural, in "The Fanatics," the painting is more representative of Magritte's broader body of work than it seems at first glance.

Conclusion: Hope, Warning, and the Collective Unconscious

The surrealist and symbolist movements in art allowed artists like Magritte to use non-literal means of conveying political messages. During the decades immediately following the Second World War, Europe was extricating itself from years of struggle against fascism and other forms of fanaticism. "The Fanatics" offers both a message of hope and a warning to viewers to recognize the subtle and illusory forms fascism can take.

Bibliography

Forceville, Charles. "The case for pictorial metaphor: René Magritte and other Surrealists." Vestnik IMS 9, no. 1 (1988): 150–160.

Guerlac, Suzanne. "The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, Magritte." Representations, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Winter 2007): 28–56.

Stake, Robert, and Dale Kerr. "Rene Magritte, constructivism, and the researcher as interpreter." Educational Theory 45, no. 1 (1995): 55–61.

von Morstein, Petra. "Magritte: Artistic and conceptual representation." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41, no. 4 (1983): 369–374.