René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle

Tate Liverpool's fascinating summer exhibition is not a retrospective but an appreciation of a comparatively complex artist, who, for all his allegiance to surrealism, could just as well have been a dadaist, a pop artist, a post-structuralist or a proto-conceptualist. Forever the ad-man, as well as the subversive, Magritte was firmly in the deception business. But, whether convincing us of the co-existence of night and day in his wonderful series 'The Dominion of Light', or fooling our tongues into calling a shoe the moon in 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1952), Magritte knew that in order to be deceived, first we have to believe. (OW)