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René Magritte was the rugged individualist among surrealist artists and has endured as one of the most interesting. Now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a vast retrospective exhibition of some 65 paintings covering his whole mature career, from 1926 until his death in 1967, including many unfamiliar examples from private collections. It offers us a very special opportunity, through September 5th. 

Born in 1898, Magritte began with conventional academic training but gravitated toward avant garde literary circles. As a young man he tried various modern styles and was particularly influenced by the cubists and futurists. Then he learned of De Chirico’s paintings of apparently real objects hauntingly detached from their normal context; at first he knew only a black and white reproduction in a magazine but that provoked a new vision of distorted reality with strange powers of suggestion. 

The exhibition opens with a gallery of strangely distorted figures in weird landscapes painted in a prosaic manner as if this were reality. These are from the years 1926-7 when he was still working in Brussels, relatively isolated and overwhelmed by ideas developed from De Chirico, and some also from Max Ernst. Then he moved to a Paris suburb for three years and gradually worked his way into the surrealist group organized by the writer André Breton. 

His paintings began to look simpler but the ideas behind them became more complex. He introduced words in script that seem to be labels but that contradict the objects or amorphous forms they are attached to, and he gave his paintings titles with still different implications, all this in keeping with surrealist doctrine. 

The most celebrated of these is called “The Treachery of Images;” it shows a briar pipe painted in the manner of a commercial photograph, suspended against a tan background, and labeled on the canvas in artificial script “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” There is no use reproducing this painting because it seems no one has photographed it in its large gilded frame of classical design. When you see this wonderful framed painting three feet wide hanging on the wall, casting a shadow, you know intuitively that it is not a pipe; it is a painting depicting a pipe. But reproduced in a book it becomes inconclusive; it could be an advertisement in a magazine or on a billboard, and this has led to endless portentous writing. In actuality it is a delightful one-line visual joke. 

Magritte tired of the personality clashes within the Paris group and withdrew to Brussels permanently in 1930, where he was the center of a smaller group of writers, where he developed his own version of surrealist ideas. One of the best of these is a painting entitled “The Rape” (1934), which shows the head of a young woman with tousled hair, but her face is her nude torso in which her pubic area becomes her mouth, her breasts her eyes. This is a case of a directly expressive surrealist transformation, one easy to understand, for the resulting face has an appropriately alarmed look. A drawing of it was used for the cover of Breton’s pamphlet explaining Surrealism and Magritte maintained some contact with the Paris group. 

As he matured, Magritte tended to rely more on purely visual devices. “The Listening Room” (1952) shows an apparently normal interior, with a window at the left looking out on idyllic country, but the room is filled from floor to ceiling with a green apple. A more subtle elaboration on this idea is the fine painting from the same year recently bought by our MoMA, “Personal Values.” Here the walls of a room have become a blue sky with cumulus clouds, with a bed in one corner, an armoire with mirrors in the other, but the rest of the room is filled with colossal versions of objects of everyday use: a comb, a bar of soap, a shaving brush, a match, and a small wine glass. 

One of the most thought-provoking of these later works, which are contemporary with the masterpieces of Jackson Pollock and others in New York, is “Golconde” of 1953. The setting is the upper stories of a street of houses in a northern European city like Brussels, stripped of any identifying detail, and a pale blue cloudless sky above. But the painting is covered with repeated figures of a man standing, wearing a long dark coat and a bowler hat. These figures are suspended in three layers of depth: the nearer ones are slightly smaller than they should be to match the building but the second layer, which overlaps the building and casts shadows on it, has figures only about a quarter the size they should be for the building, and the third layer, which the building overlaps, has diminutive figures in the distance. 

It is easy to think that it is raining little men, but it is clear that the men are standing quietly in suspension; they are nearly identical but they are turned at different angles. These men are Magritte’s Everyman, who often appears in his later work, normally one or two at a time. They are so characteristic of his work that photographers frequently got Magritte to pose wearing a bowler hat, but they are not a self-portrait, for Magritte did not wear a bowler hat, rather a Trilby, a soft felt hat, and the faces on these men do not resemble him. The title was chosen by his close friend Scutenaire, a surrealist poet, and refers to a ruined city in India, legendary for its phenomenal wealth of gold and diamonds in the early modern period. It is a powerful image; it stays with us, but image and title do not resolve into a simple answer. Magritte would not have wanted