Magritte’s “The Menaced Assassin”

Rene Magritte’s 1927 painting “The Menaced Assassin” exudes the modernist period of painting through a depiction of mystery. We saw another of Magritte’s works, the famous “The Treachery of Images,” painted in 1928, in which Magritte raised the question of modern painting, “if it is not a pipe, then what is it?” Magritte’s intellectual history informs us of the origins of his work. His mother committed suicide at a young age. As a boy, he fell into painting, and pursued an art education in his home country of Belgium. Yet he struggled after graduating, and took to painting wallpaper to support himself and his wife. His early career was under the influence of Picasso, but after moving to Paris in the early 1920s, he became befriended Andre Breton, founder of the surrealist movement. Thus currents of Freudianism and Marxism, interest in the subconscious and the working class, bend through his paintings. Magritte would become tremendously popular in France by the 1950s, before dying in 1967 at the age of 69.

“The Menaced Assassin” hangs at the Museum of Modern Art. The piece features seven figures in four groups. At the focal point, a woman on a divan, a kind of fainting couch reminiscent of the rooms of the psychoanalysts office. She is completely nude with blood trailing from her mouth which is agape. That slight detail makes her the most expressive body in the painting. To the right a man without his coat on stands over a record player. Closest to the viewer, and hidden behind a wall from the coatless man, are two figures in bowler hats with a club and net respectively. The last group are three men looking into the room from an otherwise unsettled background often seen in Renaissance painting.

The work is an exemplar of modernism because, unlike dramatic depictions of tragic scenes as one would see in Baroque paintings such as “Judith beheading Holofernes,” or life like depictions such as the paintings of Thomas Cole, Magritte compels the reader to question the narrative of the painting. Where Baroque and Classical work compels the viewer emotionally, showing them a mimesis of some grand thematic act, and realist painting had served to depict life in a world prior to photography, modernism as exemplified in Magritte can entice the reader through uncertainty and doubt. It seems immediately obvious that there is a dead woman laying a room, but upon further inspection of the characters that surround her, the very scene comes into question. The painting becomes like a mystery novel, where one must apply a thesis and see if the pieces work, in a way that painting had resisted prior to this. Where other modernist works such as Dali or even future works of Magritte demonstrated a dream like sequence, this work demonstrates the mental image of of the detective’s imagination. A raw and uncertain perspective, where faces are washed, but murder weapons and the scene of death, which the detective would no doubt have the clearest idea of, can be placed into the imagination with certainty.

I would ask narrative questions – Who is the murderer here? Most readings assign the man over the record player as the killer, and conjecture that the men surrounding him are the “menacers.” This doesn’t seem so obvious to me however, considering that he’s not the one in the room with the weapons. Another question, is it a mark on Magritte to paint a scene of violence towards a woman in such a way? It seems to me to be a repetition of tired tropes in western art, one that could use less dramatic depiction.

The Menaced Assassin, 1927