ABOUT MAGRITTE’S MARVELOUS HAT
One bright day in the dark of night you look at your reflection in a window and see the back of your head. You try on a hat that floats in the air and leads you to a place where anything is possible and everything is impossible.
This is not the “real” world. You have entered a “surreal” world of visual surprises. In this world, a boulder floats in the sky. Look closely at everything to see what is hidden. Ordinary things appear in unlikely places, and the familiar is suddenly very strange. Imagine what it might be like if sky and clouds are down below instead of overhead, if you lived in a house inside a house that’s inside a house. What if it only rains under your umbrella? Or the sun shines through your window, though outside it is night? Can it be both day and night?
The world I create in Magritte’s Marvelous Hat is inspired by the paintings of Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967). Magritte studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, and with his wife, Georgette, moved to Paris in 1927 where he became friends with a group of painters known as “surrealists.” They were not just painters but poets, photographers, filmmakers, and musicians too, including the painters Joan Miró and Max Ernst, the writer André Breton, and the painter/photographer Man Ray.
Each in his own way wanted to change how we see the world. They met in cafés, where they played drawing games to free the imagination and drew whatever came to mind no matter how senseless. Though Magritte is considered one of the great surrealists, along with Ernst and Salvador Dali, his paintings do not shock the viewer by appearing random, unearthly, or disturbing. Rather, he painted everyday objects (a hat, an egg, an apple, a pipe) and combined them in ways that are mysterious and surprising—the more ordinary they are, the greater the spark to the imagination.