Explicit illustrations by Belgian artist reflect laddish sense of humour
A loan from a very private collector of rare drawings, which have never been exhibited in Britain before, is causing headaches for Tate Liverpool. The problem might surprise those who know René Magritte only as the artist of bowler hats and umbrellas, the most buttoned up and respectable member of the surrealist movement.
The drawings, which in Magritte's native Belgium have been seen only once in a small exhibition, could be politely described as erotic. Although beautifully drawn, and with an impeccable literary pedigree, they are undeniably first cousin to the kind of graffiti that might be found on a bike shed wall.
"We might make them a little boudoir of their own," said Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool and joint curator of the most comprehensive exhibition of Magritte's work staged in Britain. "We don't want to cordon them off or put them behind a curtain – but we don't want to force everyone who comes to the show to walk right into them."
The Tate will exhibit all six explicit drawings, including a tiny man walking towards a giant vagina, and a winged phallus flying across a dawn sky. Magritte produced them in the 1940s for a proposed illustrated edition of Madame Eduarda, an erotic novella by the French philosopher and surrealist Georges Bataille. In the event, the book was never published.
They reflect an unexpectedly laddish sense of humour in an artist who painted in a three-piece suit. ("It was a very old and not so perfect suit," says André Garitte, curator of a museum in the Brussels house where Magritte lived in a ground-floor flat for 24 years.)
The collections in the house, some recovered from a bin bag full of papers found dumped on the pavement after his wife's death, include equally erotic illustrations for a story by the Marquis de Sade.
The exhibition will bring together many of Magritte's most famous works, painted in the small back kitchen of the flat, now worth millions and borrowed from private and museum collections all over the world. The umbrellas and clouds, cypress trees and birds, bowler hats and pipes are instantly recognisable because they have been pirated so often in advertising and graphic design.
However the sober childless household and the life of suburban dullness of the man who tipped his hat to neighbours who had no idea he was an artist as he walked his dog every evening, was never the entire truth about Magritte. Many surrealist nudes will be in the exhibition, with the naked body turning into wood or marble, sprouting drawers or chopped into sections.
They were reputedly posed for by his wife Georgette. However, at the huge new Musée Magritte in Brussels, created in the wake of the sensational success of a centenary exhibition in 1998 for the city's famous son, curator Frederik Leen said darkly: "You will meet people even now in Brussels who will tell you that Georgette was not his only model."
Magritte maintained a rollicking correspondence with his great friend, the poet Louis Scutenaire, who supplied haunting titles for many of his paintings. Magritte wished "Scut" and his wife Irene "happy orgasms" and "excellent erections".
He wrote from Paris of his gallery owner's wife: "I told her I would very much like to play with her and it's true. Because of the atmosphere and its psychological or Freudian effects, I get regular, respectable erections here. It would be interesting to see if that would continue once I was used to living here?"
There are, as visitors to Liverpool will see, regular, respectable erections in the six drawings.
The gallery, which did something similar in 2008 for the most explicit images in a Gustav Klimt exhibition, will display them in a separate room.
"We want to allow people to avoid them if they wish – but we think most of our visitors will find them very interesting," Grunenberg said.
René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle is at Tate Liverpool from 24 June to 16 October