cross-posted at skippy and a veritable cornucopia of other community blogs.

ce n’est pas un kangarou

mr. and mrs. skippy went to one of the final days of the magritte: treachery of images show at the los angeles county museum of art.

mrs. skippy remarked earlier that magritte was “the original photoshop,” and in many ways she is absolutely correct.

magritte spent most of his career dealing with the relationship of the image to the object the image represents, with a little side trip into the similar relationship that words have with the objects they describe.

in blogging, we call this “meta.”

– – more after the jump – –

painting in a more realistic manner than dali would in later years, magritte played with our expectations as viewers, as art afficianodos, and as speakers of language.

the show at lacma presented several famous magritte works, and the works of other artists who came after and who, admittedly or not, were influenced by the ground-breaking territory magritte covered earier.

mounted by artist john baldessari (who slipped in a couple of his pieces), the show is unique to lacma and will not be traveling. aside from tons of big apples flying in front of people’s faces, there was some warhol, some jasper johns and ed ruscha, celmins and gober.

another exquisite touch:  a series of record album covers whose art work was influenced by (or in some cases, directly ripped off from) magritte!

among the great touches to the museum space in which the show was established was a rug with a pattern of magritte’s famous cloudy sky, and a ceiling covered in ariel views of los angeles freeways. plus all the security guards wore bowler hats.

we’d recommend everyone go see it, but, alas, it closes tomorrow!