Popular panorama 1926

René Magritte painted ‘Popular panorama’ using oil on canvas and some pretty strange ideas. It’s this combination of the ordinary, like a house, a forest and a beach, with the unreal, with elements cut out in strange ways that gets me. The textures in this painting are all so flat and opaque and yet everything is rendered with the kind of care you might expect in a realist painting. There’s no hint of gesture or any evidence of how the artist applied the paint to the surface. But it’s the composition, the way Magritte has jigsawed the landscape together, that captures your attention. I’m especially drawn to how the dark trees abruptly end where the building begins, like some kind of stage set. Magritte reminds me a lot of Giorgio de Chirico, especially in how they both make use of dream-like imagery, but Magritte's paintings have a wit and playfulness that's all his own. Art is like a conversation, always referencing and riffing off of what came before.