ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1943, Rene Magritte abruptly changed his style, adopting the palette and painterly technique of the impressionists, specifically Renoir. Magritte’s Renoiresque paintings, as well as a second series also from the 1940s, the so-called vache paintings, have received recent critical attention. Authors of monographs always include illustrations and some discussion of the two series, usually limited to description and explanation of the historical circumstances of their production and reception. Surrealism and sunshine would seem to be mutually exclusive terms; in Magritte’s mid-career period he found a way to bring them together so that one notion would in effect deconstruct the other. In earlier paintings, Magritte had experimented with color and light, using illusionism to create surreal effects. The vache works have been considered in the context of 1980s examples of “Bad Painting,” which, as a reflexive mode of painting, is appropriate for the series and consistent with argument that Magritte used painting as a tool for thought.
