It is pretty easy to regard René Magritte as a better image-maker and inventor of visual and verbal mysteries than he was a painter. Surely, a couple of his oeuvres look way better in reproduction than they do in the flesh, if flesh it is.

A lumbering and seldom self-regarding technical blandness blights many of the surrealists: Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and the awful, glossy Yves Tanguy. Actual encounters w/ their paintings are often a letdown. The astonishing image is the thing. In surrealism, radical and upsetting imagery goes hand-in-hand with pictorial conservatism.

René's paint does its job perfectly, no more, no less. It records and describes, if it is a windowsill, a view, a room and the people and things in it, a steam train emerging from a fireplace and the clock on the mantelpiece stuck at 12:40. It must be lunchtime, unless it's gone midnight. Sometimes in Magritte it is kinda hard to tell. The lamps are lit in the darkened suburbs, but there's broad daylight in the sky above.

With Mag, even the dull Belgian sky becomes something other: a sky dreaming of itself in the plainest blue, in his favourite greys and white. One painting of an inoffensive sky is called The Curse. Magritte is asking us not what is in the sky, but what unseen thing is impending. He coaxes it in to the viewer's mind.

His decision to paint in a conventional, slightly inexpressive, even illustrational manner was as conscious and cautious as his dress and habits: the bowler hat, the overcoat, his affectation of the suburban lifestyle of the French-speaking Belgian petit bourgeois. In fact he was always a political rebel, an anti-fascist. After the second world war he joined the Belgian communist party. The artist's best disguise was being himself.

Sometimes something abrubt – even for a surrealist – slipped out, notably during and just after the war. It was then he embarked on a kind of sickly pseudo-impressionism, with depictions of women licking and fondling themselves, followed by his repulsive and wonderfully coarse "Vache" paintings. These were a joke about the Fauve painters, who thought of themselves as wild beasts. They were a retort to the Parisian art world and to surrealism itself, from whose ranks René felt he had been excommunicated.
The Vache paintings erupt from Magritte's work, as they do from Tate Liverpool's exhibition, like a fart in church. Daft, slightly cartoonish and lumpen, they have a particular Belgian humour. They also allow Magritte to laugh at himself. In Ellipsis, a green-headed guy wearing a Magritte bowler w/ an eye in its crown has a rifle for a nose, ping-pong eyeballs and one hand that seems to be disembodied. Somehow, this is not surrealism. The Vache paintings, long out of fashion, as well as beyond the pale, have been admired by younger artists for several years. Ad interim, while the Magritte every-single-body knows remains untouchable, an influence only on advertisers, philosophers and essay-writing psychoanalysts keen to unravel his dazzling mysteries.
To be continued.