Magritte’s Words and Images

Abstract

During Magritte’s "linguistic period," completed in Paris (1927-1930), the first inscriptions of words appear in his paintings. But this period should not be arbitrarily isolated from the rest of the painter’s production and from the totality of his preoccupations. Magritte’s experiments with words and images are preceded by other experiments with his surrealist friends in Brussels, notably the production of advertising brochures which demanded the association of the name of the product with the image of it. His first inscription of words in a painting, "naked woman" written on a tree trunk, seems to stem from a preoccupation of Magritte and of male surrealists: How to represent woman? This obsession gives a key to understanding the "inscriptions" series: because they fail to adequately represent women, Magritte treats both images and words as mere representations, subject to an equally radical splitting from the "real" thing they are supposed to represent.