Perhaps the presence on one's walls of a canvas showing the cloudy sky was intended to imply that the viewer had already stumbled into an epiphany, somehow appearing within the disjointed universe within Magritte's paintings. In several works from the preceding years, and again in works that would punctuate the remainder of his career, Magritte had included sky-paintings within his pictures, and yet had not produced sky-paintings per se. This had begun when 'panels' of sky, strange and incongruous areas within a work's composition, appeared in pictures such as L'usage de la parole, L'idée fixe (in the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin) and Au seuil de la liberté (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam), all of 1928; actual paintings-within-paintings showing the sky 'framed' occurred around this time in works including La vie secrète and Le salon de Monsieur Goulden of the same year; and Magritte then appears to have chosen to paint a group of sky-pictures similar to those featuring as paintings-within-a-painting in those two works, when he created the four-panelled Les perfections célestes in 1930. In that work, as in La malédiction, there is the implication that some element from within Magritte's own universe has leapt into our dimension, has crossed the boundary of the canvas. Or, instead, that we have entered Magritte's realm.
A more complicated problem of cultural analysis arises when the same work of art plays an important role in very different societies. Sub-Saharan African sculpture, for example, profoundly influenced modern Western artists. Yet, as Frank Willett explained, people from each society would see the works very differently: “A great deal of satisfaction can indeed be found in looking at African sculpture without background information, . . . but one is not necessarily sharing in the sculptor’s experience or enjoying the sensation he intended to convey.” 96 Not only is the original meaning lost, but mood and expression, qualities that deeply interested modern artists, are very likely to be misread. Furthermore, the constraints of the original context are completely unknown to the modern viewer. In fact, “there were two forces at work in the creation of traditional African sculpture: the established artistic style appropriate to the type of the object being made, and the individual vision of the carver himself.” 97 These are not things that can be understood by looking at a single work, or generalizing from one work to others.
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