In the second season of the dramedy Boston Legal, in an episode called ‘Smile’, the show’s sleazeball-with-a-heart-of-gold protagonist, attorney Alan Shore (James Spader) tries to get a friend’s precocious nine-year-old daughter, Marissa, accepted by a prestigious private school. Despite acing all her tests, and being a gifted artist to boot, Marissa is rejected because she can’t smile: a childhood accident has left her with irreparable nerve damage. While discussing her case with Shore, little Marissa discovers that the two of them have a favourite painting in common — that of a smoking pipe with the French words “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe) written underneath it. “Gave me an idea,” she tells Shore. She then shows him her work, a self-portrait of stunning maturity and assurance, with the title ‘Happy Girl’.
The man who inspired Marissa’s self-affirmation was, of course, René Magritte (1898-1967), the Belgian surrealist master whose parodies of representational painting helped usher in pop as well as conceptual art. The painting that Boston Legal alluded to was the barnstorming 1929 work ‘La trahison des images’ (The treachery of images). Marissa’s moment of epiphany cuts to the heart of Magritte’s aesthetic: nothing is as it seems, words are arbitrarily bound to the things they describe, and the ‘real’ is necessarily otherworldly, a place that we build inside our heads, brick by notional brick.
That a Belgian surrealist from the ’30s and ’40s can insert himself seamlessly inside the world of an early 21st-century American legal dramedy is remarkable. That this happens without a hint of pretension or deus ex machina tells you about the timeless appeal of Magritte. It partially explains how Vincent Zabus and Thomas Campi’s graphic narrative Magritte: This is Not a Biography delivers on its titular promise: creating a compelling story that is, and is not about Magritte. The book is part of SelfMadeHero’s Art Masters series, and comes hot on the heels of Fabrizio Dori’s Gauguin: The Other World, about the French post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin, whose symbolism was criminally underrated while he was still alive.
Neither book is what you’d call a conventional biography ( This is Not a Biography is basically biographical cold cuts wrapped in the wholegrain bread of a fictional story), but both end up being revelatory portraits, in very different ways. In their lifetimes, Magritte and Gauguin both copped more than their fair share of criticism, both legitimate and ad hominem. Both had problematic, often dysfunctional relationships with women — and money. Luckily, neither book romanticises these flaws, especially the parts where Gauguin’s/ Magritte’s equations with the women in their lives are borderline exploitative.
This is Not a Biography is structured around a day in the life of Charles Singulier, who discovers that he has been cursed to wear Magritte’s (in)famous bowler hat. He cannot take it off until he can figure out the “mystery of Magritte” (The hat featured in several of Magritte’s paintings, including the 1964 ‘The Son of Man’). Singulier finds himself sucked into some key moments in the artist’s life, accompanied by a mystery woman who resembles Georgette, Magritte’s wife.
This narrative framework allows Zabus and Campi to offer straight-up commentaries on Magritte’s works. In a sequence that’s three bagfuls of fun, several paintings take turns to taunt Singulier, each insisting on its own pride of place in the Magritte oeuvre.
When Georgette takes Singulier to the inn where Magritte and the Surrealists liked to hang out, we learn a crucial piece of the puzzle. It explains a lot, not just about Magritte but also about having an avant-garde artist for a friend, a spouse or just an occasional sparring partner. On the wall nearest to Magritte’s table are these words written in the artist’s famously neat handwriting: “No one is as much a stranger to me as myself”. But this is no Sufi-like, mystical ‘know thyself’ musing. It is very much an anguished statement from a preternaturally gifted man, one who realises that for all his analytical and intuitive gifts, there’s a mystery he is fated never to solve. There is exactly one person who’ll remain a blind spot for his genius.
Even as Singulier notes these words, Georgette tells him: “It was typical of the Surrealists to like group activities. But being Magritte’s friend wasn’t all fun and games. He required a constant stream of ideas, especially titles for his paintings.” This is how the duality of Magritte’s life is explained. He was aware that the Surrealists were among the few people who accepted him for who he was. And yet, his cannibalisation of them was almost independent of Magritte; he just couldn’t help being ‘himself’, which, as the sentence on the wall indicates, remained a void — an inscrutable abstraction.
As the story hurtles towards its very Magritte-like ending — easier to appreciate than explain — we notice the line between Singulier and Magritte dissolving. The head, it appears, is beginning to fit the hat. An interesting point here is the disappearance of Georgette: just as Singulier comes close to ‘solving’ the mystery of Magritte, he loses sight of her.
This can be read as a feminist, ‘correctional’ technique: in canonical biographies of Magritte, her crucial role in his life and work would, obviously, be underplayed. In a weird way, her disappearance reminds us even more keenly that without her, Singulier could never hope to fully understand Magritte — and, by extension, without her, Magritte could never understand Magritte.
What tyrants fear
This theme — the Great Male Artist treating the women in his life shabbily and getting away with it via the largesse of fawning biographers — is also evident in Dori’s Gauguin: The Other World. There are considerable visual pleasures to be had here, as can be expected in a book that looks and feels as though Gauguin spliced his DNA with a 21st-century comics artist. Even more impressive is Dori’s commitment to a balanced portrayal. Millions of trees have surely been cut to wax eloquent about Gauguin and his unimpeachable place in the history of Western art. But how many of those books tried to tell — on an equal footing — the story of Teura, the Tahitian girl Gauguin married? Very few indeed, and Dori’s is one of them. For instance, at one point, Gauguin writes in a letter:
“I am deeply convinced that men have in them a limited amount of love at their disposal. Mine has mostly served to nourish the tyrant living inside me. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than giving others what remains. But there’s so little left.”
Dori’s judgement of this statement is far from kind. That’s because he is smart enough to understand what this really is: a great artist trying to justify his lack of real empathy by conveniently positing his art as the ‘tyrant’. News flash: art is not a tyrant; it is the thing tyrants fear, for it can liberate minds and topple regimes. Artists, on the other hand, are very often tyrants. They are used to working alone, answering only to their own whimsical minds and nurturing an inflated sense of their own worth.
This doesn’t derail Dori’s efficient deconstruction of how Gauguin arrived at his post-Tahiti style, the one that would define him for future generations. Every once in a while, Dori presents a panel that echoes a Gauguin canvas beautifully, leaping right off the page. Crucially, he also pinpoints the artist’s motivations for seeking refuge in Tahiti. As Gauguin himself wrote:
“I spent my life looking for a magic formula, a way to access that great primitive and mythical art. I sought to give a form to images of our origins, but by returning them to the language of modern man. I sought to restore to our era what it was missing, what we had lost.”
Time as space
The story of The Other World is framed around Death visiting Gauguin, resembling the artist’s own version from paintings like ‘Spirit of the Dead Watching’. Gauguin, of course, recognises the spectre for what it is, and the two strike up a conversation about the artist’s past. This is a common enough structure, but Dori breathes new life into it through his artful reconstruction of some of Gauguin’s most famous works. We are told that Teura first appeared to Gauguin in a dream, which featured a very LSD walk-through of Tahiti’s riotous colours. This sequence is fodder for Dori’s panelling exuberance, and shows us how closely he has studied Gauguin’s palette and colouring preferences. I also enjoyed the humorous, yet somehow deadly serious manner in which he skewers Gauguin’s youthful, slightly racist musings. A panel makes a literal interpretation of the thought “Every white man has a hole in his breast”, and it is glorious, if un-subtle.
The graphic narrative is particularly well-suited for biographical or autobiographical material, because it treats time as space (although this is not strictly true, it is accurate for the vast majority of comics, and discussing the exceptions is beyond the scope of this article). Seconds can be dilated to feel like hours, and days flash by in the blink of an eye — mimicking the unique treachery of memory, a phenomenon all of us are intimately familiar with. No wonder then that some of the most talked-about graphic narratives of recent times have been biographies or memoirs. The March trilogy, based on the experiences of civil rights activist and American senator John Lewis, is destined to be on college curricula in every continent. Alison Bechdel, one of the greatest comics creators of all time, has enriched the autobiographical form with her books Fun Home and, more recently, Are You My Mother?. Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and, in its brutal depiction of ‘mortality conversations’, went where most prose books don’t.
This is Not a Biography and Gauguin: The Other World are both twists on the genre. They are not ‘straight’ biographies because they can’t be, because — let’s face it — everybody likes their truth(s) multiple choice these days. In the post-truth era, the only way to convince people that you’re telling the truth is by loudly and repeatedly proclaiming that you’re not — this may even be the second inside joke in the Magritte book’s title. The other major implication of post-truth is this: if everybody’s words are a unique and special truth, it must follow logically that everybody is unique and special (yes, it takes time to wrap your head around this one, but anybody who has spent a day or two on Twitter knows what I am talking about). And so we have Magritte’s story being told by a Charles Singulier, French for “Charles the Singular”. Notice the cunning choice of words: ‘singular’ can mean the opposite of ‘plural’ but is also a synonym for ‘unique’. When we first meet him, Singulier is just one of the many Charleses on the street. But as his identity begins to merge with that of a master artist, we begin to notice unique and beautiful things about both of them. The irony is that it’s only now that Charles truly becomes special, incomparable, singular.
(Aditya Mani Jha is a commissioning editor with Penguin Random House. The article first appeared in The Hindu BusinessLine's BLInk.)