The second book that I have read is also called Magritte, written by Bernard Noel. When first starting it, I thought that I may have made a bad choice and picked up a book not only similar in name to the last, but also similar in content. However, as I read further I found it to be quite the opposite. Noel wrote about Magritte’s paintings with criticism, deeply analyzing and critiquing, and always returning to one specific example, Hegel’s Vacation. This provides me with another viewpoint concerning the artist, not contradicting the last author but challenging her, and will help in forming a well-researched opinion, and in turn, a better paper.
Noel dealt with analysis and criticism of the paintings, questioning their subject and style. With Hegel’s Vacation, featuring an umbrella balancing a glass of water on its top, he writes about the simplicity of the subjects and the irony in the composition, and if the viewer should take the painting at face value or look for further representation of something else. Magritte compositions were designed to invoke a sense of mystery and desire for meaning beyond the mash-up of random objects in unrelated settings.
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