ART : Magritte: Looking Through New Eyes : The Surrealist is given his due in a huge and rewarding show at Metropolitan Museum

Rene Magritte was the Andrew Wyeth of Surrealism. OK, so there is one big difference between them: The late Belgian artist made a significant difference in the art life of the 20th Century, while the American has made virtually none. Still, as an artist firmly committed to academic style, worldly description and a developing sense about the newly arriving world of popular culture, Magritte is about as close to Wyeth as an artist of the Modern avant-garde can get.

Surprisingly, the sizable retrospective of paintings by Magritte at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Nov. 22) is the first in a quarter-century. Not only is he a favorite with the public, but his occasional conjoining of words with painted images has formed a significant precedent for countless American and European artists since the 1950s.

The show, which was organized by London’s Hayward Gallery, presents nearly 170 paintings, drawings and posthumously cast bronzes. Its wildest section is a group of about a dozen paintings made between 1943 and 1948, which are almost never shown.

Half are Surrealist twists on the plump and rosy nudes of that most saccharine of bourgeois painters, Auguste Renoir (imagine a reclining Renoir figure with one brushily painted blue leg, one yellow one, a violet torso and red and green arms, and you’ll have an idea of what Magritte was up to). Half are raucous, cartoon-like pictures reminiscent of classic images by Belgian painter James Ensor, filtered through the later paintings of Francis Picabia (a seaside Venus licks her shoulder before a plaid sky, to cite one loopy example). Widely reviled, they form an anxious if energetic wartime pause between Magritte’s classically Surrealist work of the 1920s and 1930s, and his large-scale, poster-like Surrealism of the 1950s and 1960s (he died in 1967 at the age of 68). They also give a bit of juice to an exhibition that otherwise feels rather wan.

Visiting the Met’s retrospective is odd because there’s very little difference between seeing a Magritte in person and seeing it in reproduction. You don’t find out much from scrutinizing the paint, as it has been methodically, almost tediously laid down on canvas. The smooth surfaces of his pictures are parched and arid, with imagery that looks less painted than merely “filled in.” Everything about the art looks predetermined, fully worked out in advance--long before the actual business of painting began.

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This effacement of the artist’s hand, with all its autographic associations of individualism and personality and on-the-spot decisions, is fitting for an artist who was mesmerized by the bourgeois world he inhabited, and who wanted to make sense of its relentless strangeness. What is most interesting about Magritte is his lifelong insistence that, when he made a painting, he was not making art. I’m inclined to take him at his word. He cultivated, instead, a personal image akin to that of a Sunday painter, eschewing a studio and working diligently at an easel set up in a corner of his living room.

No wonder he turned to Renoir and to hometown hero Ensor when he had a crisis of faith in the war-ravaged ‘40s. They were what the general public had ardently embraced, and popular taste was always the ground zero on which he built his art.

The resulting sense of painterly numbness in Magritte’s work also seems directed toward a conspicuously photographic form of realism. Max Ernst, the Surrealist whose art had had a considerable impact on his slightly younger colleague, once described Magritte as a maker of “hand-painted collages.” This telling description doesn’t accurately describe his working method, but it correctly evokes an artist reassembling on canvas existing images.

Surrealism had two branches, one figurative, one abstract. The abstract, epitomized by the brilliant work of Joan Miro, has been most important for the history of 20th-Century painting, having opened up the medium to a realm of playful imagination. The formal ground for this imaginative effort is represented in the vaporous fields of surface color through which Miro’s eccentric forms cavort. That aqueous, amorphous surface lives today, in the paintings of important artists such as Germany’s Sigmar Polke.

By contrast, Surrealism’s figurative side has had its most important resonance in popular art. It’s almost impossible to know where to start in citing the examples. They’re legion, but take just two.

A current clothing ad featuring Kyle MacLachlan, star of the estimably bizarre movie “Blue Velvet” and the TV show “Twin Peaks,” presents the deadpan actor with a lobster incongruously perched on his head. The device is straight from the eccentric iconography of Salvador Dali. (Remember his famous lobster telephone?)

And William Golden’s original, 1952 logo for CBS television--a stylized human eye with fluffy clouds floating across its pale iris--derives, as the retrospective at the Met explains, from Magritte’s more naturalistic 1929 painting of the same subject. (Ironically for the youthful medium of television, the Magritte is titled “The False Mirror.”)

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The retrospective is drawn from a variety of sources, including several large private collections, so it does offer a substantial number of paintings that haven’t often been publicly shown. Still, if there’s an aesthetic experience to be had in the exhibition, it’s the peculiar one of being repeatedly in the presence of “originals,” the models to all those reproductions and myriad adaptations from the advertising industry that rattle around in your memory.

The familiar works are abundant: “The Human Condition” (1933), in which an easel set before a window holds a painting whose image continues into the landscape seen through the glass; “The Rape” (1934), in which a woman’s nude torso doubles as her face; “Time Transfixed” (1938), in which a floating, toy-like locomotive engine chugs out from a living room fireplace; “The Listening Room” (1952), in which a domestic interior is filled, floor to ceiling, with a plump, green apple; “Golconda” (1953), in which bowler-hatted businessmen rain down in geometric precision over the city, and many more.

This peculiar experience of slight dislocation--is what you’re seeing live, or is it Memorex?--is one you have with any work of art that has moved into the crowded realm of popular consciousness, from Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” to Wyeth’s “Christina’s World.” Unlike Leonardo or Wyeth, however, Magritte makes it seem like an experience that’s inseparable from his work.

That’s because Magritte was a Surrealist quite unlike any other. The engine that drove Parisian Surrealism was its exploration of the Freudian world of the unconscious. As befits an outsider, however, the primary motor for Magritte--a bourgeois artist working quietly in Brussels--was related but substantially different. His art probes the brand-new, hitherto unexplored world of popular consciousness.

Magritte was something of a self-taught expert at it. For more than 20 years he made his living as a commercial artist, and the relationship between his paintings and his commercial work can be explicit. The exhibition’s catalogue, written by Sarah Whitfield (she co-organized the show with David Sylvester), shows a cigarette advertisement he designed in 1934 that bears a strong similarity to “The Rape,” painted that same year.

Elsewhere, parallels can be drawn to contemporaneous magazine illustrations for pulp fiction. In this regard it’s not surprising that Magritte’s own paintings could be easily adapted to a corporate logo or other commercial venture. In his art, the academic manner of the Realist style seems pointedly designed to give his pictorial conundrums the camera-like veracity of photographs.

Magritte also used words in his paintings--”The Use of Speech” (1928) or “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1935), for instance, or the famous “The Treachery of Images,” in which the phrase “This is not a pipe,” written in French, accompanies a picture of a pipe that looks like a tobacconist’s sign. The writing in these paintings doesn’t have the idiosyncratic character of handwritten letters, which is common to several elegantly scripted contemporaneous works by Miro. Instead, Magritte’s words go with his brand of photo-like Realism. Typically they mimic typeface printed by machine, or else they recall the uniform and impersonal script taught in a penmanship class.

As its title makes plain, “The Treachery of Images” is a painting that portrays a pictorial deceit. It’s a betrayal of a particularly modern kind. The image of a pipe is paired with the aforementioned phrase “This is not a pipe.” On the most obvious level, the sentence is correct: Of course this is not a pipe; it’s a painting.

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On another level, though, the expected dichotomy between words and images is collapsed. The caption-like words tell you about the picture, but if there is in fact an equivalence between them, what does the picture tell you about the words? One thing it says is that words too function like images. Both are fictional, both fool you. We expect them to faithfully represent the world, but they don’t. Instead, they create the world we think we know.

If, historically, paintings meant to create an image in which to have faith, Magritte made paintings to disbelieve.

This conundrum hides in full view, right there on the surface of Magritte’s canvases. One of his most explicit exegeses on this peculiar situation is the late painting called “Carte Blanche” (1965). It depicts a prim gentlewoman on horseback riding through the forest; the image of the rider and the forest is sliced up in such a way that she seems to alternately disappear behind trees and to re-emerge between them. Space becomes solid, solid becomes vaporous, stillness is endowed with the illusion of movement. The term carte blanche means the freedom to do as one pleases--and Magritte does.

This kind of art has an obvious appeal, but it’s decidedly limited too. There’s a trickiness to Magritte, who is in many ways a one-take artist: Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty much over.

Almost all the artistic punch he wants you to get can be carried by a reproduction of one of his paintings. When you leave the retrospective’s galleries at the Met and are deposited into the obligatory museum shop selling souvenirs from the show, you wonder why Magritte didn’t just make a clean break with traditional painting and start mass-producing enigmatic posters instead.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., New York, (212) 879-5500, through Nov. 22. Closed Mondays. “Magritte” will travel to the Menil Collection, Houston (Dec. 15 - Feb. 21) and the Art Institute of Chicago (March 16 - May 30).