Rene Magritte Research Articles

A modern patronage: de Menil gifts to American and European museums

In the early 1940s, John and Dominique de Menil began to acquire art. Collecting in an intuitive and personal manner, the de Menils gathered things in which we believe, as John phrased it, and proceeded to develop an inspired collection that would eventually find a permanent home at The Menil Collection in Houston. In addition to building their own collection, the de Menils were committed to extending their vision to major museums in America and Europe. This beautifully illustrated book showcases some fifty works that the de Menils collected over the decades, including pieces by such major 20th-century artists as Lee Bontecou, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Rene Magritte, Jackson Pollock, Jean Tinguely, and Andy Warhol as well as an important group of African, Oceanic, and pre-Columbian works. Published on the 20th anniversary of the founding of The Menil Collection, the book reproduces and examines works held in that museum and gifts in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. To complete the volume, the contributing authors examine the circumstances that inspired the de Menils' collection and generosity, the relationships they developed with legendary museum directors, and the gifts that were selected for each museum.

Research on the Poster Illustration Influenced by the Paintings of Rene Magritte

Research on the Poster Illustration Influenced by the Paintings of Rene Magritte

A man who has made his Marks on science

A man who has made his Marks on science

A compreensão em leitura enquanto processo cognitivo

Starting from the presumption that one of the aims of reading is comprehension, reflections will be developed about the following questions: What our body/ brain does when we read? How does the relationship between reading and comprehension work? Is it possible to evaluate reading comprehension? The Belgian surrealistic painter Rene Magritte (1898-1967), in the work entitled “Ceci n´est pas une pipe”, illustrates in a brilliant way the cognitive phenomenon characteristic of the human species: the symbolic capability, i.e., the capability of constructing and recovering meanings from a set of symbols or signs. The representation of a pipe in Magritte´s work carries us immediately to the pipe object, as does the printed word “pipe”. What cognitive processes are playing a role and allows the proficient reader, while reading, not to see the individual letters, but the words, or even better, the meaning of the words? Is this symbolic capability present in its entirety from birth? If not, how does it develop? All those questions guided our participation in the conference session “Reading and Cognition”.

Isto é um cachimbo

Partindo do quadro de René Magritte, La trahison des images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), este texto pretende tecer um comentário sobre as relações entre arte e realidade. Visando esse objetivo, tentarei interpretar a obra do pintor belga à luz do ensaio heideggeriano sobre a "Origem da obra de arte", não sem antes passar em revista alguns resultados da análise contida no livro de Michel Foucault, assim como algumas reflexões do filósofo da arte norte-americano Arthur Danto.

ウォーターフロント夜景の特長とその評価に関する研究

Recently, interest in night landscape has been increasing, and waterfront is one of the most significant spots to enjoy it. In the field of art, expression of night landscape in waterfront has been interested by, for example, Mr. Kiyothika KOBAYASHI, Japanese engraver in 19th century, or Rene Magritte, Belgium painter in the middle of 20th century. This study pointed out the clear reflection of light as significant factor of night landscape in waterfront in their works. In addition, we analyzed contemporary guidebooks of night landscape for Tokyo, Osaka Kobe and Kyoto regions to examine the light sources, their locations and conditions of reflected images.Furthermore, we attempted to manifest the evaluation of night landscape in Biwa-Lake, Shiga, Japan through in-situ questionnaire investigations and proved the property of night landscape evaluation in comparison with daytime.

Cultures of the death drive: Melanie Klein and modernist melancholia

Cultures of the Death Drive is a comprehensive guide to the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and to developments in Kleinian theory to date. It is also an analysis and a demonstration of the distinctive usefulness of Klein's thought for understanding modernist literature and visual art. Esther Sanchez-Pardo examines the issues that the seminal discourses of psychoanalysis and artistic modernism brought to the fore in the early-twentieth century and points toward the uses of Kleinian thinking for re-conceptualising the complexities of identity and social relations today. Sanchez-Pardo argues that the troubled political atmosphere leading to both world wars created a melancholia fueled by 'cultures of the death drive' and the related specters of object loss-loss of coherent and autonomous selves, loss of social orders where stability reigned, loss of metaphysical guarantees, and, in some cases, loss and fragmentation of empire. This melancholia permeated, and even propelled, modernist artistic discourses. Sanchez-Pardo shows how the work of Melanie Klein, the theorist of melancholia par excellence, uniquely illuminates modernist texts, particularly their representations of gender and sexualities. She offers a number of readings-of works by Virginia Woolf, Rene Magritte, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen-that reveal the problems that melancholia posed for verbal and visual communication and the narrative and rhetorical strategies modernist artists derived to either express or overcome them. In her afterword, Sanchez-Pardo explicates the connections between modernist and contemporary melancholia. A valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory, gender and sexuality studies, and the study of representation in literature and the visual arts, Cultures of the Death Drive is a necessary resource for those interested in the work of Melanie Klein.

The Law of Written Description in Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Patents

Biotechnology Law ReportVol. 23, No. 1 PapersThe Law of Written Description in Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology PatentsJoseph M. ManakJoseph M. ManakSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:5 Jul 2004https://doi.org/10.1089/073003104322838231AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 23Issue 1Feb 2004 To cite this article:Joseph M. Manak.The Law of Written Description in Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Patents.Biotechnology Law Report.Feb 2004.30-47.http://doi.org/10.1089/073003104322838231Published in Volume: 23 Issue 1: July 5, 2004PDF download

Les mots et les images: Eine optische Maschine von René Magritte

The writer discusses Rene Magritte's Les mots et les images, which was published in the final issue of La revolution surrealiste in 1929. The work, which combines text and images, has been read as a self-referential theoretical work, a kind of metatext relating to Magritte's Paris oeuvre. Commentaries have tended to focus on the work's verbal text and have thus neglected the role of its graphic elements, suggesting that these elements served only to illustrate verbally expressed theoretical positions. The writer disputes this reductive view and likens Magritte's work to an optical machine, as described by Gilles Deleuze, one that paradoxically makes visible the disjunction between seeing an image and reading a sentence.

Introducing Alain Robbe-Grillet

I!':TRODUCI!':G ALAI!': ROBBE-GRILLET Ben Stolrzru5 is 1I ProfC'ssor Emcrillls ofFrC'lIch a d Comparati\'C' LileratllrC'. t;l/in'YS;')' o/Ca/i/omia. Ri,'C'rsidC'. All lilerali know that Alain Robbe-Grille! is onc of Francc's le:!ding New Novelists and avant-garde cincmatoh'Taphcrs. that his works have redefined Ihe novel and the cinema as genres. and that his art hilS left an indelible imprint on the twenlieth- century. Less well known. perhaps. is the fact thai he likes to work with other :lr1ists and that he has collaborated with painters. photographers. and musicians such as Paul Dclvau.x. Robert Rauschenberg. Jasper Johns. David Hamihon. Irina Ionesco. and Michel Fano. In 1961. before he himself became a film director. his association with Alain Resnais produced L :-II/I/{;(> derniere Mariellbad. an intemational film success. After the death of Rene Magritte. Robbe-Grillet illustratcd onc of his novels. La Bf!l/e captive (1975). with seventy-seven paintings by the Belgian surrealist painter---paintings from the collection of Georgene Magrittc. his wido\\'. It is most appropriate. therefore. that Robbe-Grillet be the keynote speaker for an interdisciplinary conference on lilerature and the ans entitled Camera 01/ Stylo: A Problematic Dialogue? . One critic. when speaking of Robbe-Grillefs style in La Jalollsie. alluded to the descriptions of things and people in this 1957 novel as Ie srylo-camera. Already_ there is a clear and direct relationship befween image and writing even before Robbe-Grillet became a film director and began collaborating with other artists. Because space and time preclude a detailed presenlation of Robbe-Grillet's oeuvre. I will use La BC'I/C' capli\Y! to illustrate his ongoing dialogue using the written text and its visible counterparts. t\loreovcr. the coming together of Magrine and Robbe- Grillet is arguably not problematic because both men opposc Ihe natural b)' highlighting thc artificial. They both believe that art exists. not to mirror nature. but to mirror itself. For them. art functions as a specular system. and its emphasis is not on the writing or painting of a story. but on the story of writing or painting. Furthermore. the opposition between nature and art engenders a theatricalization of languagc. be it verbal or pictorial. In Ecrirs comp!(!ts (686). Magrine notes aptly that painting is the visible description of thought and. in literature, with reference to Robbe-Grillet. the dramatization of language privileges the signifier over the signified. Such :lrt. insofar as it speaks primarily of itself. devalues mimesis as a rcpresenlational system, However. unlike the nonobjective art of Kandinsky or Mondrian, r l agriue's paintings arc both mimetic and anti·mimctic. Similarly. Robbe-Grillet's fiction is both referential and self-reflexive. In 1985. La BellC' capti\'c (the pictono\'c1. nOI the film by the same name) had been remaindered and you could buy it in a Left Bank bookslore for fifty fmncs. I bought one copy. bUI after leaving the store. and while walking loward the Luxembourg Gardens, I decided that I needed another onc, The salesperson looked at me with a smile of complicity on her lips and SOlid: ··Ah. vous voulez une deuxieme belle caplive! And so I did. which roises the question: what or who is the beautiful captive? Obviously. it's the tille of the book. and the title derives from six pictures of seascapes and landscapes painted by Magrine. all of them entitled La Belle capl;I'C', However. despite the connotation. there is no woman in the paintings. I a

Basic Stereology

Abstract Many us who use microscopes are interested in the internal structure or components of three-dimensional objects. Often we must section these objects to observe these internal components. For many years, microtomes have been used to make physical sections, but in recent years confocal microscopes, MR imaging, CT scanners, and even standard optical microscopes have been used to obtain “optical” sections. Two-dimensional images of these different types of sections can be used to extract three-dimensional quantitative information about the objects and their internal components, The sectioning process reduces the observed dimensions of the object and components. With apologies to Rene Magritte, the structure portrayed in Figure 1 is not a three-dimensional glomerulus but a two-dimensional profile of a glomerulus. In most cases, interest is on the structure of the three-dimensional object and not the structure in the two-dimensional image. Thus, care must be taken when obtaining and interpreting data from two-dimensional images.

Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Art

Reading Relationally looks at literary works alongside works of art to enrich our appreciation of what texts do and how texts mean. Laurie Edson's fresh and provocative readings of a range of literature and visual art shed new light on the contributions of writers and artists and the resonances between their work.Reading Relationally is grounded in poststructuralist theory, feminist theory, interdisciplinary studies, and postmodern practice. It proceeds by a series of exemplary comparisons whose purpose is to unsettle habitual, codified terms of analysis and to suggest alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and organizing knowledge. The book explores reverberations between the work of Marguerite Duras and Cindy Sherman; Francis Ponge and Rene Magritte; Mallarme, Duchamp, and Calvino; Apollinaire and Picasso; Lautreamont and Dali; Rimbaud and Matisse; and Duchamp, Miro, Apollinaire, and Lichtenstein.Written in an accessible and lively style, this interdisciplinary study will interest general readers as well as students and specialists in postmodernism and literary criticism, as well as those interested in the relationships between literature and visual art.

Infinite Recess: perspective and play in Magritte’s La Condition Humaine

The paintings of Rene Magritte, with their unsettling of common‐sense relationships among objects, images and words, have been compared by many critics to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The 1933 painting La Condition Humaine, for instance, depicts a painting that exactly covers a ‘real’ landscape outside a window – thus raising questions about the ‘location’ of perception and thought. But Magritte’s uncanny use of perspective, and his depictions of spaces that have ambiguous depth, suggest that an equally helpful interpretive framework to that of Wittgenstein may be that of psychoanalysis, particularly the object‐relations theory of D.W. Winnicot and the latter’s concept of ‘transitional phenomena’. La Condition Humaine, for example, exemplifies how, by both negating and affirming the opacity of the picture plane, perspective transforms the painting into a transitional object that is both ‘there’ and ‘not there’ simultaneously. Many of the painter’s works, his ‘window’ series in particular, suggest approaching Albertian perspective itself as a question of object‐relating, the simultaneous search for autonomy and ontological security through play. An understanding of how Magritte’s ambiguous spaces suggest both security as well as open‐ended possibility can help to link his work not only with the traditions of Renaissance perspective and its modernist critics, but also with the aesthetic of the sublime and its iconography of colossal, indifferent nature. Sublimity may be interpreted psychoanalytically as nostalgia for the scale of childhood experience – for the world viewed as an enormous room in which small objects assume monumental physical and symbolic proportions.

Literature, art and the pursuit of decay in twentieth-century France

Illustrations Acknowledgements Prologue: form and decay 1. Looking and loving: Harlequins in Apollinaire and Picasso 2. Signs and the imaginary: the pleasures of discontent in Roland Barthes 3. Dreams, schemes and wordplay: the surrealism of Robert Desnos 4. Sterility and power: on some paintings by Rene Magritte 5. The offerings of decay: Jean Fautrier, Les Otages 6. Clothed intimacy: theatre and sex in Marguerite Duras, Les Yeux Bleus Cheveux Noirs 7. 'Des Milliers de Parisiens': conflict, community and collapse in Jean Genet, Les Paravents Epilogue List of works consulted List of illustrations Index.

The Educational Researcher as Artist Working Within

This article discusses the complexity of arts-based educational research and arts-based autoethnography and presents a concrete example of an installation tableau that investigates the regulation of the human body and human sexuality in a junior high classroom of a Roman Catholic school in the 1960s. In this article, the modern abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock serves as an example of an artist using the unconscious to direct his work. Pollock’s interest in surrealism and Michel Foucault’s discussion of the work of the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte figure prominently in the theoretical foundation for this article. Pollock provides a parallel to the process of the arts-based educational autoethnographer as researcher working within.

Rene Magritte and the Paradox of Representation

Rene Magritte and the Paradox of Representation

The golden avant-garde: idolatry, commercialism, and art

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in Dance Around the Golden Calf (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.

The ideal, real and surreal in school–university partnerships: reflections of a boundary spanner

Few would argue with the concept that a school–university partnership has the potential of creating positive outcomes for both universities and schools. The practice, however, is far harder to achieve, and explaining the processes as well as the outcomes is often hardest of all. The purpose of this paper is to describe the role of the “boundary spanner” who facilitates the development of school–university partnerships. As a university-based boundary spanner, the author finds it useful to liken the processes and outcomes of partnering to the surreal art of Rene Magritte. First the author describes the ideal school-university partnership, then offers some examples of the real issues that emerge while building partnerships, and finally, analyzes the surreal aspects of boundary spanning. In the conclusion, the author offers specific suggestions for developing school–university partnerships as one accepts the necessarily surreal quality of the work.

Window/Picture: L'assassin menace and Artist Descending a Staircase

It only when imagination dragged away from what eye sees that a picture becomes interesting. Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending a Staircase 39 It a commonplace of Stoppard criticism that Tom Stoppard writes by engaging in what Susan Rusinko neatly dubbed creative (96). With 1972 publication of After Magritte, Stoppard extended his plagiarism from verbal to visual. Critics have pointed out not only conceptual similarities between that play and Rene Magritte's painting but also a visual similarity between opening of play and a specific Magritte painting, L'assassin menace. [1] title of Stoppard's Artist Descending a Staircase rewardingly led critics to examine relationship between that play and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. [2] But it also led them away from seeing a much stronger relationship between that play and, once again, L'assassin menace. Artist Descending a Staircase, a play about artists, turns on a particular painting that one of central characters made in 1920 and on love of a blind girl, Sophie, for its creator. Beauchamp, a sound artist in play, might describing Stoppard's project in writing it when he speaks of liberation of the visual from limitations of visual art... to create images--pictures--which are purely mental (36). [3] When play was commissioned by a consortium of European broadcasting companies, Stoppard set himself challenge of writing a play that to be for radio rather than stage (qtd. in Mayne 34). [4] He self-reflexively set blind Sophie in audience's position. The first duty of artist, Beauchamp says, as if commenting on play, is to capture radio (20). In 1990, Elissa S. Guralnick argued that Artist Descending a Staircase not only captured radio station but was perhaps Stoppard's finest play: prejudice against drama for radio had led scholars to see work as minor (286-87). wittiness of Stoppard's response to L'assassin menace manifest in his use of aural medium and in both structure and content of play. As Magritte critic Suzi Gablik observed, L'assassin has all character of one of those psychological games in which one supposed to make up one's own story from image (49). And it would seem that Stoppard done so twice, first in After Magritte and then, in much more detail and more elaborately, in Artist Descending a Staircase. While no scene in Artist Descending a Staircase directly comparable to that in painting, play can understood to tell story of L'assassin. painting at center of Stoppard's play may itself a witty inversion of window at center of Magritte's painting. Magritte, most notably in La condition humaine, calls into question Renaissance concept of painting as a window on reality by setting a painting in front of a window. We assume from continuity of painting with view through window that painting a representation of that view. But because painting largely occludes view, we cannot sure. Indeed, we become aware that all of La condition humaine a painting; there no view through a window. Thus Magritte points out that perception inevitably a function of representation, of human creation. Stoppard's play similarly about entrapment of humans in their representations. characters believe they are seeing reality as if through a window, but what they see their pictures of reality. In play, Stoppard also considers responsibility of artist to attempt to conscientiously repr esent reality. L'assassin highly suggestive of a play in a proscenium theater, one that a playing area at either side in front of proscenium, a main playing area within proscenium, and at rear center, an inner stage--the center rear window. …

The Uses of Foucault's History of Sexuality in the Visual Arts

This is philosophy not as thought, but as theater. -a different thought, the thought of difference-a In these two passages of his essay Theatrum Philosophicum, Michel Foucault characterized what he believed to be an important achievement of Gilles Deleuze's book Difference and Repetition.' The achievement was to write a philosophical work that broke with existing forms in life and thought, and therefore was a creative act-was theater or pure event. It was an achievement to which Foucault himself continually aspired. Like his other books, the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, published in 1976 (six years after the essay on Deleuze), is meant to be such a creative act. The creative act was Foucault's alternative to theory, to which he objected because he felt it was reductionist and abstract.2 As a creative act, The History of Sexuality is best understood if examined in its entirety, taking into account how its form and its content interact with each other to produce meaning. If we focus on certain parts of the book at the expense of others, we risk seriously distorting what Foucault is saying. It would be like analyzing a painting through looking at only one detail of the composition. Given his complex approach to producing meaning, and given his avoidance of theory, applying Foucault's thoughts to studies in particular disciplines is a difficult challenge. Yet so compelling is The History of Sexuality-for what it says but also, for some scholars, because it is hip or at least in wide circulation that thinkers in virtually every field of the humanities and social studies have found occasion to use it to either support their own arguments or, contrarily, in order to disagree with it. In the field of study with which I am affiliated, art history, uses of The History of Sexuality, which are plentiful, have their own history in addition to the history they share with other fields. Foucault had a strong interest in visual art, and incorporated discussions of art into several of his writings, the two best known of these being a provocative analysis of Diego Velazquez's famous painting Las Meninas, in The Order of Things, and a consideration of the relationship between words and images in Rene Magritte's paintings, in the slim volume This Is Not a Pipe. The discussion of Las Meninas, especially, prompted passionate debates among art historians from around 1980 onward about the meaning of Velazquez's painting, and, more importantly, about what art history is.3 Therefore, when art historians in England and the United States began in the mid1980s to cite The History of Sexuality--it was translated into English in 1978-there already existed within the field a tradition of taking into account Foucault's work, and his work for many art historians had come to represent an alternative to conventional art history. Thus, when I enthusiastically set out to research the present overview of the ways art historians have cited Foucault's book, I was initially surprised-and disappointed-to discover two separate but in some cases related phenomena. First, I found that fairly often art historians had misunderstood Foucault's book due in large part to their failure to comprehend the book in its totality, as a creative act. Second, I realized that some art historians whom I had expected to make fruitful positive use of the book instead attacked sections of it forcefully. For a while, these two realizations upset me, because I did not anticipate writing, nor want to write, an essay that focuses on my disagreements with the thought processes of other art historians. I am still not pleased with this predicament, but at least I can make clear from the outset that my disagreements usually are with the authors' interpretations of Foucault, and not with what they say about the visual imagery about which they write; this point will be evident in my discussions of specific art-historical writings. …