Magritte’s Drawing Power

His jarring visions spawned the posters that decorated a million dormitory rooms. Familiar yet bizarre, Rene Magritte’s creations--impossible landscapes, men in bowler hats, giant apples, floating boulders--have been plundered by advertisers, spoofed by critics and mass-marketed into one of the best-known cultural products of the 20th century.

Despite its ubiquity, the art of the Belgian Surrealist, who would have turned 100 this year, continues to attract large crowds. A centennial retrospective of Magritte’s works, the largest ever mounted, has rapidly become the cultural event of the season in his native country.

Even experts have a difficult time explaining Magritte’s broad, enduring appeal. Frederik Leen, an organizer of the exhibition at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, admits he is still bewildered over the spell cast by one of Magritte’s images: a bird taking flight from a storm-tossed sea into gray skies, but seemingly made of sunlit, cloud-dappled sky itself (“The Great Family,” 1963).

“This bothers me--why is this such a popular painting?” Leen asks, without being able to offer an answer. With another museum official, the 45-year-old curator toiled for the past five years to assemble the trove of Magritte’s works from private collections and museums as far away as Australia, Japan and the UC Berkeley.

As hermetic and outwardly conventional as his contemporary Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dali was glib and flamboyant, Magritte was of notoriously little help to anyone looking for the meaning of his canvases, mostly painted in drab-realis style.

“People often wonder what my painting hides. Nothing!” Magritte said in 1966, the year before he died. To admirers who claimed to have understood his art, the artist sometimes replied, “You are more fortunate than I.”

The exhibition, which runs through late June, comprises more than 350 oils and gouaches, about 40 painted objects, drawings, papiers colles and other works, from wallpaper patterns and sheet music covers designed by the young Magritte to home movies and still photographs.

The items are arranged chronologically and are captioned (including in English) so visitors can easily trace the development of the artist’s peculiar genius.

“I’m sure Magritte never saw so many paintings of his together in his own lifetime,” Leen says as he sits in his office hand-rolling a cigarette. One disappointment, the curator says, was his failure to coax the Los Angeles County Museum of Art into lending a seminal work, a 1928-29 painting of a pipe that is captioned, in French, “This is not a pipe.”

That provocative contradiction dramatizes a central idea in Magritte’s philosophy: Art is not the thing it depicts, but merely its image.

His mission as an artist, according to biographer Suzi Gablik, was “to overthrow our sense of the familiar, to sabotage our habits, to put the real world on trial.”

For instance, in one painting that later inspired the sleeve art for a rock album, a green apple has grown big enough to fill a room. (Unless, of course, it is the room that has shrunk.) In a series of paintings dating from the early 1950s, “The Dominion of Light,” a bright sky leaves a city street plunged in inky darkness. The effect is chilling, foreboding: The universe, although instantly recognizable, is obviously out of joint.

If the spectator experiences unease, even anxiety, at being plunged into such unfamiliar environments, Magritte would probably have been pleased. He once said the goal of his art is “to better define mystery, to better possess it.”

The eldest of three brothers, Magritte was born Nov. 21, 1898, in the town of Lessines in southern Belgium. He began taking art lessons at 12. Two years later, his mother drowned herself in a river. When she was found, her face was shrouded by her nightgown. Veiled or averted faces later became a recurring element in Magritte’s imagery, showing the unbridgeable distance between people and the world, or amongpeople themselves.

The painter discovered his own style after a decade of experimentation, passing from Impressionism to Expressionism and from futurism to Cubism.

“I believe that I have made an absolutely startling discovery in painting,” he announced in 1927. “A new potential inherent in things, their ability to gradually become something else.” For a time, the inspired artist was cranking out nearly a canvas a day.

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In mid-career, Magritte made some abrupt if short-lived detours. During World War II, when Belgium was under Nazi occupation and his wife, Georgette, worked as a waitress to help the childless household scrape by, Magritte went through a “sunlit” phase inspired by Renoir. In 1948, to goad the public and critics alike in Paris, the cradle of Surrealism where he had lived in 1927-30 without achieving notable success, Magritte whipped up 17 oils and 22 gouaches in a rude style he dubbed vache (“nasty”).

Some unimpressed critics have dismissed Magritte’s prodigious output as a more pretentious, older version of Pop art. For Leen, who began collecting postcards of Magritte paintings when he was 12, the artist was able to convey his particular mix of black humor, utopian ideals and disturbing insights into human nature to a global public precisely because he used laconic, everyday images painted in a matter-of-fact way.

A special museum gift shop serves as a reminder that in his centennial year Magritte also has as many commercial spinoffs as a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, baseball caps, ties, jigsaw puzzles, wristwatches, vintage wines--a total of 300 items of merchandise with Magritte tie-ins--are on sale, and business is brisk.

To avoid the crowds that can turn large art exhibitions into unpleasant mob scenes, the Royal Museums are limiting the number of entries to the Magritte show to 500 an hour. The advantage is that visitors have plenty of time for an exhibition that organizers recommend taking at least two hours to see, and that they don’t have to peer though a forest of heads to view the art. The drawback is that people cannot leave midway through the visit for a break.

* The exhibition continues through June 28 at Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 3 rue de la Regence, 1000 Brussels. Advance reservations are recommended and can be made in the U.S. through Edwards & Edwards, (914) 328-2150, fax (914) 328-2752.