CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/30/2013

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary

This weekend, The Museum of Modern Art opened Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, this year's blockbuster survey of what New York Times critic Holland Cotter deems the artist's only "consistently fresh and interesting decade… when he was inventing the artist he wanted to be and when his art was all over the place in a good way: witty, nasty, brilliant and bad at the same time." Cotter continues, "He was a sophisticated trickster, a bourgeois gentilhomme with a geek inside, hacking into everyday life and planting little weirdness bugs: legs sprouting from shirt collars, rain falling upward, words having lives of their own." The 1928 painting "The Lovers" is reproduced from MoMA's excellent exhibition catalog.