Homeboys of the bourgeoisie.

SHOCKING the bourgeoisie is, of course, the stock-in-trade of the Modern movement. Artists may rise from the ranks of the middle class to their Parnassian empyrean, but they look back rarely, and then mainly to spit. In the case of Matisse and Magritte, however, something more complicated is going on. These artists were working from within the bourgeoisie itself, in order not to subvert it but to enrich it. They did this in very different ways. While Matisse, through gentlest persuasion, was making us see the visual world with new eyes, freed from the shackles of convention, Magritte was turning inward to the lunar landscape of dreams, revealing to banker, engineer, and housewife the visions of their sleep. Each artist is now the subject of an excellent and probably definitive exhibition, Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Magritte at the Metropolitan.

It would be hard to imagine an exhibition much better than the one at the Modern. It is a labor of almost pharaonic proportions. Compared by one curator to the D-day invasion, this exhibit brings together almost four hundred of Matisse's pre-eminent masterpieces, merchandise valued at over $1 billion. Close to a million visitors are expected to pay the ticket price of $12.50. According to the New York Times, this expense, the highest museum admission price ever, here or in Europe, was necessitated by staggeringly high insurance costs.

Matisse (1869-1954)was the greatest French-born painter of the century, and his art is sufficiently familiar that the current exhibition can only confirm and amplify what is already known. It tells of how the twenty-year-old law student, taken ill with appendicitis, discovered art; how, after much academic training, he, with the other Fauves, pioneered some of the most passionate painting in Western art; how he moved from Collioure to Morocco and finally to Nice, there to live out a belaureled old age. Matisse experimented much and changed much in the course of his long life. And yet, in the sixty-odd years of his copious productivity, he remained remarkably constant. His work is always calm and whole, yet warmed by an oddly sedentary passionateness. It is a domestic art of sunlit sailboats glimpsed through the flower-potted windows of well-furnished rooms, a lingering dream of fair women in white dresses and broad, Mediterranean hats. Matisse is a slightly abstracted realist. Beyond a manifest sympathy for all of his subjects, he does not comment upon them so much as he describes them. I confess to having always felt a slight dissatisfaction with this moderated engagement. His attention seems to go in several directions at the same time, as though unable to curl around a single core of passion. Thus even his simpler paintings often seem a few degrees more intricate than they need be, as though two, sometimes three, very fine paintings had quite illogically collided.

Simplicity of conception is surely the pre-eminent grace of Rene Magritte, that most charming, bizarre, and Belgian of painters. How is he Belgian? He is an incarnated compromise of cultures, a mixture of North and South, of Flanders and Gaul. Even in his dreams he inhabits a universe of cosseted comfortableness and effortless good manners, of grey, damp days that are neither too cool nor too inclement, of canvas raincoats, duffel bags, and a good pipe. Visitors to his paintings travel along streets that are always clean, to well-set tables of wine, cheese, or sliced ham. Magritte never raises his pictorial voice. Even his most bizarre images are deadpan, understated to the point of pointlessness.

But what can they mean, these images of Magritte? Why is a train charging out of a chimney in the famous Time Transfigured? How comes a boulder to be suspended in orange air, in a work meaninglessly titled The Active Voice? And why, in Son of Man, does a green apple, defying gravity, float before the face of a man in a bowler?

To appreciate and love the paintings of Magritte, you have to learn to live with the possibility of pointlessness. There is an overwhelming urge to discern meaning in these works, which appear to be saturated and overcharged with symbolism. The impulse must be resisted, for in fact there is nothing at all symbolic about these paintings. They are part of that veristic strain of Surrealism for which Salvador Dali is best known, and their object is to describe faithfully, indeed realistically, the inner visions of the subconscious mind. Whether or not the mind conceives these visions symbolically does not concern Magritte. He is there to expose the forms and to capture the mood of the sleeper's mind in the process of talking to itself. Usually it is the bizarrely illogical matterof-factness of dreams that fascinates the artist. He is not interested in nightmares or dreams of manifest passion. He is drawn instead to the cool, grey Belgianness of dreams, their bourgeois ordinariness. In the service of this interest, he deploys visual ingenuity with a precise touch. Though there is uneven work in this exhibition, few of his paintings fail to pack a visual punch, and some, like the depiction of a female nude in The Eternal Evidence, contain some of the best figure painting in modern art.

Like many of today's artists, Magritte favors irony and disengagement. Why then does his dreamy art seem so much more serious and inspired than that of our own contemporaries? The answer to that question, I suspect, goes to the very heart of the conflict between the Modern and post-Modern movements.