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- Title
La Reproduction interdite: Magritte's Reproduction of Pym.
- Authors
Weinstein, Cindy
- Abstract
This essay links the representation of faces in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym —their disfigurement, unrecognizability, self-estrangement—with the absent face in René Magritte's La Reproduction interdite. A triadic relation exists among three figures in the painting: Poe, Magritte, and the (unseen) man in the mirror, Edward James. For example, Poe's writings inspired Magritte, whose oeuvre includes several versions of Le Domaine d'Arnheim ; Magritte's interest in language, particularly apparent in Ceci n'est pas une pipe and La Clef des songes , intersects with Poe's linguistic sleights of hand; and James, who supported many Surrealist artists and writers, including Magritte, Dalí, and Breton, was himself a Surrealist author. Little is written about the enormously wealthy James, but recovering available biographical details and using them to interpret the painting, especially the irreproducibility of his face, is one of this article's key contributions. I explain how the presence of Pym in Magritte's painting is an invitation to examine how Poe's semantic wordplay, aesthetic predispositions, and deconstructive tendencies ("Poe" is fictional in Pym , Pym is real) anticipate many of the artistic foundations of Surrealism, which James, through his patronage, ensured would find an audience.
- Subjects
MAGRITTE, Rene, 1898-1967; MAGIC tricks; SURREALISM; PATRONAGE; PLAYS on words; AESTHETICS
- Publication
Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation, 2022, Vol 55, p32
- ISSN
1947-4644
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/poe.2022.a864936