This Is Not an Art Review

While this is appropriate and affords us a chance to see some great works of art, the high point of the show for me is the exception to this rule. In 1948, Magritte made a brief and radical break from his familiar style with a body of work referred to as his “vache” (“bovine”) period. These goofy, slapdash cartoons are completely out of left field — brimming with giddy life and completely in tune with the primitive European Zeitgeist that produced Asger Jorn and Dubuffet. In The Stop, a bald man in a yellow coat pisses on a fluorescent orange tree against a plaid citrus sky. The Cripple shows a bearded, bespectacled scholar checking his pocket watch, with five loosely rendered versions of Magritte’s signature pipe jutting from his mouth — one from his beard, another from his left eye, and one from his forehead.

These works are linked in “Treachery” to the emphatically improvisational paintings of Martin Kippenberger and Sigmar Polke but are split up throughout the show. The Crippleis in the “pipe imagery” section, and the the anomalously erotic Pebble is off in the corner with the giant apple and rock. After his Paris solo debut when this work was panned critically and failed to sell, Magritte beat a retreat to the comfortable exhaustion of his familiar and already popular symbolic poetics, where he served out the remainder of his sentence. There’s a not entirely disagreeable claustrophobia to Magritte’s best-known work (reinforced here by Baldessari’s installation) but the “vache” paintings are like little chinks in the prison wall, letting in a few flashes of light.

MAGRITTE AND CONTEMPORARY ART: THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES | Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. | Through March 4 | (323) 857-6000 or www.lacma.org