René Magritte: The Fifth Season – SFMOMA

René Magritte, La chambre d’écoute (The Listening Room), 1952; The Menil Collection, Houston, Gift of Fariha Friedrich; © Charly Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

René Magritte: The Fifth Season – SFMOMA ‘René Magritte: The Fifth Season’ focuses on the latter half of Magritte’s career, from approximately 1943 to 1967, a period of remarkable artistic transformation and revitalization. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), May 19 – October 28, 2018.]]>

Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

René Magritte, the consummate surrealist painter, faced a question of conviction at the age of forty-four, as Europe was overwhelmed by the horrors of World War II. Already in possession of his classic style of painting, honed over the previous two decades, Magritte suddenly began to make paintings that looked almost nothing like his previous work. In this era of instability and upheaval during the German occupation of Belgium, he questioned the role of art and looked for a new direction and new meanings.

Featuring more than 50 oil paintings and a dozen gouaches, the exhibition reveals Magritte as an artist attuned to the paradoxes within reality, who subverted our expectations of the world around us. The subtitle “The Fifth Season”—taken from one of Magritte’s paintings made during the war years — evokes an alternative reality both within and outside the accepted conventions of time and space.

Through nine immersive galleries the exhibition explores how Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967) balanced philosophy and fantasy, irony and conviction, to illuminate the gaps between what we see and what we know. Magritte’s work creates a world beyond rationality, liberated from the traditional understandings of how artworks convey meaning.

”René Magritte: The Fifth Season”, which follows the 50th anniversary of Magritte’s death in 2017, builds on SFMOMA’s longstanding relationship with the Magritte Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and was developed in partnership with the Magritte Foundation.

Related content

‘Magritte. The Treachery of images’ at the Schirn (exhibition, 2017)