CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/20/2018

Late Magritte: the missing link between James Ensor and Zap Comix

Magritte's sunlit surrealist and vache paintings are "deeply, thoroughly weird," Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes in the new SFMOMA exhibition catalog, René Magritte: The Fifth Season, "not only in their iconography but also in their departure from Magritte's long-established style, palette, and facture… With their penis-nosed grotesques, lurid colors, and bodily eruptions, the vache paintings have been described as 'look[ing] like nothing so much as the missing link between James Ensor and Zap Comix.'" Featured image is "The Cripple" (1948).