This week’s New Yorker carries a piece about a new exhibition at MOMA of René Magritte’s early work, and it reminded me of a Magritte exhibition we went to in 1993 at the Menil in Houston with T, who was six at the time.
The exhibition had examples of many of Magritte’s best-known pieces. T took it all in, and didn’t seem weirded out by seeing men with green apples for faces (Le fils d’homme), or a castle on a rock floating in the sky (Le château des Pyrénées), or an eye with a sky and clouds in place of the iris (Le faux miroir). About halfway along, we got to Le trahison des images (“This is not a pipe”). I explained to T that the point Magritte was making was that we were not looking at a pipe, we were only looking at a picture of a pipe. With the withering scorn that only a six-year-old can achieve, she looked at me and said “Well of course!”
Everyone should experience a Surréaliste art exhibit in company with a six-year-old. They tend to see what is really there instead of what we expect.
