Decoding Magritte by Silvano Levy (review)

The paintings of the prolific Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte have never fallen out of favour as a subject for discussion and dissection, as writings from Henri Michaux to Michel Foucault testify. Silvano Levy's elegant study, in arguing that Magritte develops a code throughout his visual art, uncovers perhaps the primary reason behind Magritte's enduring appeal. Magritte engages us precisely because we detect a visual lexicon across his body of work that speaks to an inherent logic in what might otherwise appear to be a perfectly illogical realm. Levy meticulously appropriates Roman Jakobson's studies on the condition of aphasia, which he then uses to break down the 'grammar' of Magritte's visual production. Understanding composition and content by means of this Jakobsonian model allows for a well-paced reassessment of Magritte's body of work as an innovative — but no less systematic — rejection and reconfiguration of the tenets of academic painting. Divided into three main sections, 'Rebel in the Making 1919–1924', 'The Rebellion 1924–1930', and 'Interviews' (the latter reproducing transcripts of illuminating interviews with key figures such as Georgette Magritte, the artist's wife), the book lays out its thesis in a preliminary section entitled 'To Decode or not to Decode'. One particular claim in this Introduction seems to jar, however. In suggesting that 'the presence of the written word renders the image redundant' in Magritte (p. 14), Levy passes up an early opportunity to capitalize on the imagistic properties of the written word, a driving force behind Michel Butor's seminal text Les Mots dans la peinture (Geneva: Skira, 1969; listed in Levy's bibliography). Moreover, in the light of Butor's work, it is perhaps surprising that a discussion of the frequently enigmatic titles of Magritte's paintings is mostly eschewed, except for a few fleeting instances (p. 109 and pp. 227–28). However, none of this is to detract from Levy's consistently superb pictorial analysis. The linguistic model he deploys helps to make persuasive connections among different paintings and periods, enriching an extended analysis of Magritte's treatment of the body in particular. It allows the reader to attain a comprehensive understanding of Magritte's evolution as an artist, taking into account his early flirtations with Dada and Cubism, for instance. Indeed, it was a delight to read an entire chapter devoted to Magritte's Vache period ('Vile Paintings'), highlighting a comic and even more reactionary sort of playfulness on the part of the artist in comparison to what is seen in his better-known work. The book is handsomely illustrated throughout; however, it would have been useful to have figures listed in the text as a quick guide to locating illustrations while reading. (This would have the added benefit of helping the reader ascertain immediately whenever a painting is not reproduced.) This oversight aside, Levy's work constitutes a distinctive and important addition to scholarship on Magritte and, more broadly speaking, to Belgian text and image studies.