The Beautiful Side of Life: René Magritte and the negative poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé

During the Belgian occupation by Germany during World War II, painter, René Magritte, radically broke from his previous acclaimed surrealist work to turn to what he called the, “beautiful side of life”. Beginning in 1943 with works inspired by Renoir, he turned to a colorful Fauvist style after he penned the manifesto, Surrealism in Full Sunlight, in 1946. He returned in the 1950s to the cool and exacting painterly style of his pre-war years and, once more, delighted in expressing, with visual plays and puns, that the representation of something does not have the same properties as that thing. Nonetheless, there is a quality threading through much of this later work that distinguishes it from his painting before the war. If his pictures in the 1930s reflected the impact of his encounter with Giorgio de Chirico, his post-war painting draws him closer to the later work of Odilon Redon. Both Redon’s late idealist turn away from his famous Noirs and Magritte’s orientation toward beauty may be cast through the lens of the negative poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé. Pursuing an idiom of polyvalence in poetry, where the presence of an absolute ideal is expressed through its absence, Mallarmé layered a single image with polyvalent significance. For example, the window recurs in his poetry as at once a curtain, a looking glass, and a frame which opens out to contain more polyvalent images—a painting, clouds that become a chimera, and so on. Such polyvalence was, for Mallarmé,the only way to express an absolute beauty, shaped by the idealism of Hegel, in the material world. Magritte in his Ecrits refers to the “beauty of what is neither meaning [sens] nor nonsense [nonsens].” This paper considers how the poetics of Mallarméand Redon’s later work can help articulate the beauty Magritte sought when he painted works that juxtapose contradictory elements, play with presence and absence in representation, and suggest ironic polyvalence. The paper will consider this question in relation to works such as, The Dominion of Lightseries (begun in 1953) Beautiful World(1962), La Grande Famille(1963), The Land of Miracles(1964), The Blank Signature(1965), The Great War (1964), and The Blank Page(1967).