The scatalogical subversive
Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev (Profile, £30)
Christopher Bray is the author of 1965: The Year Modern Britain was Born
SURREALISM AND COPROPHILIA WENT together. Joan Miró painted a picture called Man And Woman In Front Of A Pile Of Excrement (1935). “Even shit,” Picasso once counselled Michel Leiris, “is pretty.” Just ask Salvador Dalí. His work is covered in the stuff. Only think of his Lugubrious Game (1929), that dreamy blue vision of onanistic joy and shame that’s finished off, in its lower right corner, by the sight of a chap who’s defecated down his leg in excitement.
No such scatological horrors attended the career of René Magritte. Unchangingly dressed in dark suit and tie and bowler hat, he looked like painting’s answer to T.S. Eliot — the insurrectionary aesthete dressed as a bank manager. Little wonder Magritte never really got on with his fellow surrealists, whose railing against Catholicism
