Wish You Were Here Storm Thorgerson + RenĂŠ Magritte The Shed, New York May 2021
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1. __The Exhibition 3. ____Storm Thorgerson 3. ______RenĂŠ Magritte 4. ________Similarities 5. _________Surrealist Elements
Content:
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This exhibition is to showcase the surrealist work of album cover designer Storm Thorgerson. Storm focuses on designing the covers through the medium of photography, and he is very well known for his work with the band Pink Floyd. This exhibition showcases comparisons between his album covers to paintings by Belgian painter René Magritte, one of the greatest surrealist artists of the 20th Century. Thorgerson’s approach to designing album covers is of a surrealist nature. In this exhibition we hope to explain what the main elements of surrealist work are, through analysing and discussing similar compositions with differing symbols between the two artists. Many similarities can be seen in both their work.
Storm Thorgerson is well known for his dream-like album covers, he’s also known for “No fakery, no Photoshop, or no deal. That is his stipulation, and he sticks to it.” Although surreal, all of his photos and the sculptures within them are manufactured and are very real items, there is no Photoshop involved. Aubrey Powell and Storm started Hipgnosis studios in 1968, they stated that they were young and carefree and this helped in their approach for designing covers. They were “fond of surrealism, partly because it is easy to render in photography.” Thorgerson was heavily influenced by René Magritte, he even titled one of his books ‘Walk Away René.’
The Exhib
bition
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Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
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Salvador DalĂ
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The most important element of surrealist art is the ability to somehow break reality, by turning it on its head and creating bizarre dreamlike situations. Once reality has been broken in a surrealist piece we must look at the components that brought it to this point, this includes the unique and completely illogical juxtapositions we see in surrealist art. Through scale and emphasis on certain everyday objects, a relationship is formed between them, it is normally a quite unusual assemblage of ordinary things.
Then we can look at the meaning behind the objects chosen, as quite often the imagery in surrealist art is very symbolic, and this is another big element of surrealist art. It is also possible that these objects have no meaning whatsoever, or the meaning will never be found and only speculated. Another big part of surrealist art is unlocking the unconscious mind to bring about spontaneous imagery, creating a collection of random objects they might not even be conscious of.
Surrealist
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Elements
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Storm Th
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Storm Thorgerson is a graphic designer who is responsible for some of the most famous rock album covers ever made. He was born in Potters Bar, England. Thorgerson received his BA in Philosophy and English from Leicester University in 1966. Thorgerson moved on to the Royal College of Art after graduation, and he earned a MA in Television and Film Production in 1969. He is considered to be part of the modern Surrealism movement, and has named René Magritte (Belgian, 1888–1967) as one of his biggest influences. The artist’s training in film and television production has allowed him to create music videos for many bands as well. Pink Floyd’s High Hopes was his latest directorial work in 1994. He was also responsible for the video for Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes and Street of Dreams by Rainbow. Thorgerson’s work was the focus of a retrospective show at London’s OXO Tower in 2009.
The artist cofounded the Hipgnosis studio with Aubrey Powell during 1968. Thorgerson has attracted a number of bands looking for photography and graphic design that fit the surreal lyrics of their songs. One of his first major works was the cover for Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets album. Thorgerson created a lively collage featuring comic book pages and swirling planetary systems. He went on to design most of the album covers for the band. Other bands that requested design work from the artist include Styx, Ween, Genesis, The Cranberries, and Biffy Clyro. His most well-known work is the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Thorgerson’s design for the cover was drafted by George Hardie, a fellow member of the Hipgnosis studio.
horgerson
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René Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Leopold Magritte, who was a tailor and textile merchant, and Regina (nee Bertinchamps), a milliner until her marriage. Little is known about Magritte’s early life. He began lessons in drawing in 1910. Magritte’s earliest oil paintings, which date from about 1915, were Impressionistic in style. From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, under Constant Montald, but found the instruction uninspiring. The oil paintings he produced during the years 1918-1924 were influenced by Futurism and by the offshoot of Cubism practiced by Metzinger. Most of his works of this period are female nudes.
On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Leopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. She was later discovered a mile or so down the nearby river, dead. According to a legend, 13-yearold Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but recent research has discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse. Supposedly, when his mother was found, her dress was covering her face, an image that has been suggested as the source of several oil paintings Magritte painted in 1927-1928 of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants.
René Mag
gritte
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12 Wish You Were Here Storm Thorgerson Back Cover (1975) Storm completely erases the man’s limbs on show, keeping only the ridges of his face without the features. Similar to the movie trope, where menacing burglars wear a stocking mask to conceal their identity. This theory that the man is a thief of some kind, because of his mask, bodes well with the supposed meaning behind this album cover. Storm focused a lot on making symbolic images in his album covers. It is said that the album has two meanings based on the theme of absence. “Wish You Were Here” refers to someone not being there but wishing that they could be, this could be referring to the band member Syd Barrett that left prior to this album, getting lost in his own dream world with the use of acid. The fact that only parts of the man are missing could mean that he was physically there, but emotionally absent.
The other idea behind this album is the critiquing of the music industry, how it steals artists creativity over time. The reason why the band members felt so detached and absent of emotions was because the music industry took this ability away from them, with focus more on fame and money than happiness. The man in Storm’s image is handing the viewer a transparent vinyl album and standing one foot on his briefcase filled with stickers of visited cities. He looks like a travelling salesman that got lost in the desert trying to sell his lies.
Wish You W
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Were Here
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Son of Man René Magritte (1964)
René Magritte’s subject is invisible in another way. His face exists with features like normal, but they are covered by one very unusually placed green apple, leaving but one eye peeking out. Is this apple hovering in the air? Or is it a part of this man’s face? The apple could have so many possible meanings but the one that makes the most sense is that the apple is the fruit from the tree of knowledge, the man behind it or attached to it depending on how you look at it, he represents humanity and he took the fruit from the tree. This is the religious approach, which coincides with the title of the piece “Son of Man.” What’s interesting about this surrealist piece is Magritte and his thoughts on the symbolism of this painting. The apple is a visual pun, it was not chosen to have a meaning, the whole point of this painting is human desire.
When looking at it, we can’t get past the idea that there is a face beyond that apple, and we can’t see it. It’s that curiosity that brings us back to reality, realising there is nothing behind that apple besides canvas and a frame. We will always want to see what is hidden, it is our desire to wonder of the other possibilities, “this interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.” Another very subtle hidden item is the man’s elbow (on our right), which appears to be facing the wrong way due to the shading of the overcoat. This lets us know that we are facing away from this reality, as we stare at this faux one.
Son of Ma
an
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Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd Storm Thorgerson Back Cover (1975)
Son of Man RenĂŠ Magritte (1964)
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Humans don’t come equipped with camouflage, but we can copy nature’s tricks. In our most basic efforts, we simply cover ourselves with material that matches our environment. Thus do duck hunters hunt ducks, and thus did Birnam wood come to Dunsinane. Post-Macduff, militaries got more sophisticated; by the early twentieth century, the British Navy was painting ships with bold alternating patterns of light and dark, which are not remotely invisible up close but, from a distance, break up familiar outlines and make shape recognition difficult. That technique is useful, but, as Ball points out, it illustrates a fundamental limitation of camouflage: it is, by definition, context-specific. You can blend in on a sunny day at noon or on a gray day at dusk, when seen from nearby or from afar, but you cannot do all of these at once—and you can’t repaint your battleship four times a day.
These men wear their suits and ties and bowler hats in a similar fashion, and both men are at the center of each composition. The scenery behind the men are completely different lands, but contain the same quality of bleak, melancholic emptiness, this coincides with the theme of absence. These pieces are both very similar in that they both contain what could be considered, an ‘invisible man.’ Both artists have their own unique approach to making this man invisible.
Similarities
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Both pieces can be considered surrealist works because they contain the main elements of surrealist art, the realities these men live in are made up, both living in similar landscapes of vast emptiness. The men are both partially invisible, or unidentifiable due to their lack of features or objects perfectly blocking them. Both artists have succeeded in breaking reality with these objects. There is deep symbolism in each piece, and they both have an exit sign of this reality. Storm can click his fingers and bring us back to the reality that we know, instead of this fake one he conjured up in the desert.
Once you notice the tear beneath the photo, you see sand pouring out from the crack. It is interesting to note on the front cover of this album, the image is burning away as if the fire in this reality is real. In Magritte’s we notice the elbow facing the wrong direction. This gives the design layers upon layers of realities to immerse yourself in. This is what makes them truly outstanding pieces of surrealist work.
Surrealist
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Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd Storm Thorgerson Front Cover (1975)
Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd Storm Thorgerson Back Cover (1975)
Elements
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Francis Th
21 The Mars Volta Storm Thorgerson (2004) In the album cover we see from the perspective of the passenger in an old style car, the driver of said car is wearing a red velvet hood, hiding his vision of where he is going. Outside of the car we see another person driving by with a red hood also over their head. It’s a quite bizarre reality where people seem functional but are in some way blinded as they do these tasks, because these people are unidentifiable, it makes them essentially just a person in general. It’s also easier this way for a bigger audience to be able to relate to hooded figures, as they could literally be anyone.
To try and understand this we must look at what the songs on the album are about. This record was to be the soundtrack to a film that was never made. One of the films main themes was addiction. Storm picked up on this idea, “the idea that the addicted party thinks he’s alright and is in control.” The hoods weren’t meant to symbolise hiding your identity, they were simply devices to “surreally prevent them from seeing.” Red is often seen as the colour of danger. The common phrase ‘seeing red’ indicates that the anger within them starts to control them, like they are in autopilot. Yet the drivers seem unaware of this danger of colliding with one another while their vision is blocked, Storm refers to it as a “velvet delusion”, a dream of sorts.
he Mute
22 The Lovers II René Magritte (1928) In Magritte’s painting the lovers have this fabric barrier between them, it doesn’t prevent them from kissing, but it is a very real thing blocking them from being completely intimate with each other, even if it is only represented as a thin veil of material here. The background is unimportant and plain, to create the illusion that we are a spectator in this room, peering in on this intimate act without our veil on. The man wears a suit just like the others, and the woman is in a red dress echoing the red we see in the right wall and Thorgerson’s velvet hoods.
The tension in this painting is focused around their faces, as the veil is pulled tight here and relaxes to the back of their necks. It seems like a dangerous embrace, it leads us to wonder why these lovers are being denied full intimacy. It resembles a white wedding veil, it is possible that these two lovers are just that, only lovers, denied and frustrated due to chastity before marriage. In this case the lover’s desire for each other, and this act cannot be fully acted out. It is a sad reality.
The Lover
rs II
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Francis The Mute - The Mars Volta Storm Thorgerson (2004)
The Lovers II RenĂŠ Magritte (1928)
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These pieces have similarities in imagery but slight differences in symbolism. Comparing Storm’s cover for the band The Mars Volta, in particular the album ‘Frances the Mute’ (2004), to Magritte’s ‘The Lover’s’ oil on canvas (1928). The people in this case are not invisible but their identities are still unknown, they each have a hood placed over their heads. This deems them merely blind, even though these people can’t see, they are still doing their daily activities, completely unaware of their surroundings.
The red hooded figures are driving their cars, possibly heading to work or the supermarket. While the lovers kiss each other through their hoods. Another similarity is that both men in each case are wearing a suit, just like the two invisible men were. The main symbols here are the public’s needs and desires.
Similarities
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These two pieces can also be considered surrealist works because of the made up reality of unidentifiable characters, represented by hooded figures. Driving cars, and committing acts of love, all through a hooded veil. The landscapes are unimportant, it is the figures that our attention is on, backgrounds are just there to situate us in this new reality as the spectators.
There is yet again deep symbolism in each case, the public’s desire for unhealthy relationships. One being the relationship with addiction and the other about acts of love before marriage. These pieces aren’t as bizarre as the possibility of an invisible man, they seem much more nightmarish than dream-like, this just shows the possibilities of surrealist art.
Francis The Mute - The Mars Volta Storm Thorgerson (2004)
Surrealist
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The Lovers II RenĂŠ Magritte (1928)
Elements
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Welcome Welcome Welcome Welcome Welcome
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Look twice and the Interpretation becomes quite
different.
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Storm Thorgerson
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PHOTOGRAPHY: Provided by StormStudios ARTWORK: Provided by Moma EDITORIAL CONTENT: Emily Kelly EXHIBITION CURATOR ERIN GLEESON. ALL OTHER CONTENT SUPPLIED BY SPELLBROOK FOUNDATION FOUNDER, GARY STAFFORD, THE ARTISTS AND GALLERIES. DESIGN: Definitionofirony Studios Copyright © 2010 by Emily Kelly All rights reserved. This catalogue or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in an exhibition review. Printed in the United States of America First Printing, 2020 ISBN 0-9000000-0-0 Falling Anvil Publishing 123 Mesa Street Scottsdale, AZ 00000
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