ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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As a communist artist, what was he trying to do?
A biography in which Magritte’s thinking is ignored and subjected instead to commodification and the shameless appropriation of his imagery, argues ANGUS REID
POLITICS IGNORED: Poster for the Vigilance Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals, 1937: ‘The True Face of Rex’ a poster of Leon Degrelle, the founder of the Belgian far right Rexist Party (Rex) - after WWII Degrelle, convicted of treason in absentia and sentenced to death, took refuge in Francoist Spain; The Red Model, 1934, possibly inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes, 1886
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
ON THE back cover of Alex Danchev’s new biography Magritte — A Life it asks: “Artist, Surrealist, Provocateur — who was Rene Magritte?”
Answer (although you don’t find it the book): Magritte was a communist, like Andre Breton, who founded the Surrealist movement, and the poet Paul Eluard, the film-maker Luis Bunuel and the theoretician Paul Nouge.
Nouge was Magritte’s closest collaborator and he was a founding member of the Belgian Communist Party in 1919.
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