Saturday morning, my dad calls me up. He was listening to NPR and they mentioned how it was the 2nd to last day of the Magritte exhibit at the LACMA. A sly way of urging me to go he slips in, “I doubt I’ll make it down there by tomorrow, but I thought you might want to go.” Actually, I was glad he reminded me because I had wanted to go. I was already driving aimlessly in my roommate’s car (he had gone to Vegas for the weekend and conveniently left me his car key) I decided to head over the to show.
The second-to-last day of the show, I knew it’d be crowded. And crowded it was. The set up the show, the exhibition itself, was great I thought. They paid special attention to detail: doors and walkways were carved from his made-famous images (the man the bowler hat, recognizable abstract shapes), the carpet was a repetitive image of his famous sky with clouds.
And it was a lot of fun getting to see a lot of these famous paintings in person (as it always is with images like his). The show was actually titled Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images and was based not only off his works, but features many contemporary artists (31 other artists, to be specific, including Vija Celmins, Andy Warhol, and Robert Gober – to name a few of the memorable ones) whose work had been based off or greatly influenced by his. While is really an interesting concept and worked quite well with some works, some of the pieces were a little far stretched – maybe just playing around with words and word juxtaposition in art rather than actually being more related to Magritte’s works. I guess that this works in some ways, seeing as Magritte’s most celebrated contribution to art history is his play with words and images, but I think his work is deeper than that, and a lot of the contemporary art that I saw wasn’t.
One of my favorite things about this show, however, was due to the audience. Maybe it’s a blessing that I went on the last day with the rest of the Los Angeles crowd. Many of the people were there as families and had brought their young children with them, little ones maybe only five years old, etc. Because of the surrealist nature of his work, it was a lot of fun to see how these kids were reacting the pieces. There was one little boy and his father who were looking at Le temps traversé together. Of course the boy was squirming a bit, it was towards the end of the exhibit, but once the painting got his attention he was exclaiming, “Oh dad, I love this one! I love it!” and then after a brief pause, “Where’s the other part of the train, Daddy?”
There were kids at the show like him, full of wonderment and excitement. And there were others, like the two boys I saw with their parents on my way out who were griping to their moms, “What are these? How are these pictures? I don’t get it” without even really glancing at the works. It was just funny seeing/hearing all the different interpretations of the work, especially from a child’s POV.
Either way, it was overall an interesting show. I would recommend it, if it hadn’t already ended.
