Small exhibit from Belgium has big impact

Rene Magritte's oil on canvas "Le Visage du Génie" ("The Face of Genius," 1927) is on display at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

"Magritte and Delvaux: Surrealism from the Musée d'Ixelles — Belgium" creates a mystifying and dream-like mood in one intimate gallery at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Displayed through May 29 in conjunction with the Memphis in May International Festival, the exhibition offers only 11 works — four by Rene Magritte, seven by Paul Delvaux — but they are beauties. The works were selected by Brooks director Cameron Kitchin and the museum's curator of decorative and European art Stanton Thomas in collaboration with the Musée d'Ixelles.

Partly inspired by Freud's revelations about the sordid doings of the unconscious mind, partly by the horrendous slaughter of World War I and the subsequent loosening of Europe's social and cultural traditions, the artistic and literary movement called surrealism was like a cup of acid flung in the face of the bourgeoisie, a raised middle finger directed at the art establishment or, indeed, any establishment.

The best-known surrealist artist was the Spaniard Salvatore Dali, whose flamboyantly eroticized paintings represented the movement's Baroque extravagance. Far quieter were the Belgians Rene Magritte (1898-1967) and Paul Delvaux (1897-1994).

Through the meticulous execution of what Magritte called his "snapshots of the impossible," he became one of the world's most famous artists; his black-clad man wearing a bowler hat with a green apple hovering in front of his face ("The Son of Man," 1964), attained near universal acknowledgement as the witty and unsettling symbol of anonymity and unknowability. Magritte's exploitation of the enigmatic and the poetic imagination struck a chord with the general malaise of disassociation and uncertainty that dominated the first half of the 20th century.

Unlike (again) Dali, whose works exude a near-frenzy of paranoia, self-consciousness and virtuosity, Magritte and Delvaux created their works at the fringes of silence and motionlessness; they are notable for a lack of ego. While many of Magritte's paintings occupy a sort of oblique urban setting of brick facades, bridges and empty streets, Delvaux's work is more classical and pastoral, his concession to the architectural environment being marble buildings and temples reminiscent of ancient Greece and Rome. In either case, the effect is distancing and timeless.

Delvaux's tendencies sometimes ran to the garish and superficial, but the pieces chosen for this charming and mysterious little show reveal his craftsmanship, his sense of psychological and artistic balance and his almost Olympian serenity. Of the seven Delvaux works here, five feature his characteristic nude women, a theme that dominates his midcareer — these span the years 1935 to 1944 — while the other two include a Magritte-like interior from 1936 and a large, angular Crucifixion from 1954.

In exceptionally suave pieces like "Les Femmes Nues ou Paysage Antique" ("Nude Women or Antique Landscape") and "Les Belles Errantes a Ephese" ("The Fallen Beauties of Ephesus"), Delvaux plays on the motif of the statuesque nude or partially clothed woman in a classical setting or landscape as symbol of the Eternal Feminine and the yearning for an ideal, unchanging world beyond the mundane.

Magritte's sensibility was far more arcane than Delvaux's, and he dealt not merely with ambiguity in his calmly unsettling imagery but with the indecipherable, or at least resistant to interpretation. Still, his work resonates with the shock of the unconscious's dreamlike insights.

For example, in "Le Visage du Génie" ("The Face of Genius," 1927), Magritte offers a marble or plaster bust whose eyes are closed and whose features are frozen in an expression of indifference or pain. Niches are carved through the face, while the bust balances precariously on a board stretched over a swath of dark clouds. Barely perceptible grapevines grow to one side, with a stalk penetrating a niche where the right eye should be. The viewer infers that the creativity of the genius is not easy work.

"Magritte and Delvaux: Surrealism from the Musée d'Ixelles — Belgium"

At Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Overton Park, through May 29. Call 544-6200 or go to brooksmuseum.org for more information.

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