Magritte and Ruscha

Of all the surrealists and near-surrealists, Magritte was the painter least interested in the subconscious. So it's ironic that Ed Ruscha and several other artists in the show mostly deny a direct Magritte-ian influence, instead indirectly suggesting that Magritte's influence on them was... subconscious.

In his LAT review Christopher Knight quoted extensively from a gripping Ruscha-Lynn Zelevansky interview in the show's must-own catalogue and after seeing the exhibit I understand why: It's a Ruscha show inside a Magritte show. Even though there are only six Ruschas on view (bested among his contemporaries only by Marcel Broodthaers' seven) the Ruschas dominate. And it sure seems like it's because they're the paintings most directly indebted to Magritte.

But: "He wasn't a source for me," Ruscha told Zelevansky. "Only later on did I see something simpatico there, something that I might have shared with him." And later: "His imagery involving writing never grabbed me... His inscriptions on his paintings, whenever they become dominant, don't really have much of an impact on me."

I'm always wary of putting to much stock in what artists say about their own work - like magicians they have an interest in remaining illusionists. But the Ruscha-Magritte links sure seem strong. Let's look at one of my favorite Ruschas, Lion in Oil (above).

Just as The Treachery of Images questions the relationship between text, the painted image, and reality, so too does Lion in Oil. Ruscha's palindrome has a range of meanings, ranging from classic kitsch painting (just try Googling lion in oil sometime!), to a homonym that hints at swinger-era pornotopia. And of course the phrase "lion in oil" fails to directly describe the mountainscape behind the words (though the palindromic text reveals the key to how Ruscha made his mountain).

But there are parallels: Magritte used neutral, contemporary sign-painters' cursive; Ruscha used neutral, contemporary billboard-like sans serif. In Magritte the words challenge the image, so too in the Ruscha. And in both paintings the phrase lingers in the mind longer than does the painted pipe or mountain. Quick and without scrolling: What does Magritte's pipe look like? (The blue area near the base of Ruscha's palindromic mountain even appears to be an upside-down Rorschach inkblot, thus hinting at the treachery of ascribing any particular meaning to the image.)

So Ruscha says that Magritte wasn't a direct influence. Fine. But I think he has a very active subconscious.