One is an Original...

[Erik T. Burns]

One is an original. The other, evidently, a copy. But René Magritte
was a Surrealist, and the truth behind The Flavour of Tears suggests
he was enjoying a huge – and probably lucrative – joke.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/its-so-surreal-the-artist-who-forged-himself-2296526.html

It's so Surreal... the artist who forged himself

A new exhibition shows how Margritte could copy. But was it clever
irony or just desperation?

By Andrew McCorkell

Sunday, 12 June 2011

One is an original. The other, evidently, a copy. But René Magritte
was a Surrealist, and the truth behind The Flavour of Tears suggests
he was enjoying a huge – and probably lucrative – joke.

The canvases – both dated 1948 – come together for the first time in
Britain later this month as part of The Pleasure Principle, Tate
Liverpool's exhibition of the Belgian artist's work, and the story
behind them throws light on the artist's early struggles.

When the artist painted the original, he had survived the Second World
War in German-occupied Belgium, but was unknown and broke. He had just
come to the end of what is called his Renoir period, which lasted from
1943-1947.

Darren Pih, the exhibition's co-curator explained: "He was very
serious about these works, but he was not a rich man in the 1940s.
Only in the 1950s did his reputation soar, his work really begin to
sell, and his quality of life improve."

Experts are now certain that the paintings are both Magritte
originals, and believe he faked his own work to raise cash.

The question of forgery only arose in 1983 when one of the paintings
came up for auction in New York. Until then, the art world had been
unaware of the existence of both pictures because one had been shipped
to the United States while the other remained in Europe.

The Flavour of Tears was produced around the time Magritte's close
friend Marcel Mariën claimed Magritte was creating forgeries. In his
1983 autobiography, Le Radeau de la Mémoire, Mariën said Magritte was
making money by selling and producing forgeries of works by Picasso,
Titian, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico and Meindert Hobbema.

Phi says: "When Marcel Mariën published this text, he was taken to
court by Magritte's widow. She contested the claim. Marië* was a close
friend of Magritte: they met in 1937 and he wrote the first biography
[of Magritte], and he was someone who really understood the artist's
thinking. But they did fall out in the 1960s. We can't say that there
were other forgeries, although there is some proof and correspondence
that Mariën cited."

Phi believes that two collectors saw The Flavour of Tears
independently in Magritte's studio. "We can only assume Magritte
painted two identical versions of the same painting. Their similitude
is such that even the inscriptions on the back of the canvases are the
same. It's a real mystery as to how this came about."

Mariën says the replica had been faithfully reproduced, "right down to
the holes made by a caterpillar".

Pih believes that Mariën was describing the way in which Magritte
created variations of his work. "This was really informed by the art
market, producing works for collectors, he said. "He is known to have
produced multiple versions of the same work. In most cases he would
evolve, improve and refine the image, but this is the only example
where they are almost identical works."

Pih also points to the fact that forgery and plagiarism are often
considered as central themes in Surrealism. The original and the
"forgery" shed light on the painter himself, according to Phi. "He had
a very anarchic sense of humour. That sense of an anonymous, bourgeois
man in a grey suit wearing bowler hat. His humour and his work are
subversive."

When art copies art

The Flavour of Tears is established as a bona fide original, but René
Magritte and his fellow Surrealists were no strangers to the dark arts
of forgery. Magritte made a living during the Nazi occupation of
Belgium by forging Picassos and Renoirs. Fellow artist Marcel Mariën
would sell them on to private collectors.

The Surrealist movement explores the tension of the real and the
unreal, and Magritte may well have seen his forgeries as part that
conflict. Playing a joke on the aficionados, he hung his forgery of
Max Ernst's The Forest in place of the original in 1943.

Fellow Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, in his later years, produced
what he called "self-forgeries" of his earlier, more popular style. He
would backdate them to fool the critics; ironic revenge for their
attacks on his later works.