ABSTRACT
In 1919, Rene Magritte embarked on the adventure of modernism, a second age of modernity—as distinct from the early modern period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—in an industrialized European world that had just emerged from a devastating world war. In the standard narrative of Magritte, he was a painter who first dabbled in abstraction, producing derivative and unoriginal paintings in a cubist and futurist idiom until he discovered the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico in the mid-1920s, which set him on the road to surrealism. In Magritte’s hands, painting could be used to shock, shatter, and provoke experience, to transform life. Roger Rothman’s reevaluation of the significance of Magritte’s pre-surrealist painting is important, but it does not challenge the standard art-historical approach, the opposition of formalism and iconology. In his account, in Magritte’s paintings abstraction becomes another icon, albeit an object lacking resemblance.
