Step into his world LATimes

MAGRITTE is back.

Not that the natty guy in the black bowler ever really left. He fell out of fashion long before his death, in 1967, but graphic designers and illustrators never stopped mining the Belgian Surrealist's work for visual shock and dreamy wit. Despite perpetually changing styles, new generations of painters, sculptors and filmmakers continue to assimilate his ideas in disjunctive images and enigmatic combinations of pictures and words. Nearly every floating phrase, levitating boulder and morphing body owes something to René Magritte, whose work has seeped into popular culture and still sparks irreverent inquiries into the nature of artistic representation.
"Magritte is part of the postmodern landscape," says artist Eleanor Antin.

Such familiarity tends to breed boredom, if not contempt. But the Los Angeles County Museum of Art isn't taking Magritte for granted. The big fall and winter show in the Anderson Building, opening next Sunday, is "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images."

It will offer 65 drawings and paintings by the Surrealist master, whose bourgeois persona masked a wild imaginaton, and an equal number of works by 31 artists who have paid tribute to him or infused his spirit into their art.

And that's not all. John Baldessari, a pioneering conceptualist represented in the show, has designed an installation intended to turn the galleries — and visitors' experience — upside down. The entrance will re-create "The Unexpected Answer," a Magritte painting of a door with a cutout silhouette of a ghostly figure.

Visitors will walk through the open silhouette into galleries carpeted with a woven version of a Magritte-style blue sky with fluffy white clouds. The ceiling, where the sky should be, will be papered with images of freeway intersections. A big square window will be covered with a transparency of the New York skyline. The guards will wear derby hats.

Not the usual Magritte exhibition, but it was inspired by institutional logic.

Not just another retrospective

"IT stems in great part from the fact that we have two remarkable Magritte canvases," says Stephanie Barron, LACMA's senior curator of modern art, who organized the show with Michel Draguet, director of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in cooperation with the Magritte Foundation.

"The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe)," one of the museum's most prized possessions, depicts a pipe with a line of French text, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or "This is not a pipe," reminding viewers that they are not looking at a pipe but a painting of a pipe. The other painting, "The Liberator," portrays a seated man with a straw hat but no head, holding a jeweled bauble in the shape of a woman's face.

"We felt that it was time to not do just another Magritte retrospective," Barron says. "We wanted to look freshly at his work. The inscrutable nature of Magritte's work has intrigued several subsequent generations of artists. If you look through the catalogue raisonné on Magritte, you see how many artists over time have owned his works. It's not insignificant: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, Saul Steinberg, Pierre Alechinsky. Many of them still own his works. In fact, artists were generous lenders to the exhibition. I was interested in what it was in Magritte that spoke to a number of artists."

Some pieces are direct quotations or dialogues with particular Magrittes that set up incongruous juxtapositions and startling shifts of scale or turn ordinary things into objects of contemplation and equivocal meaning. Vija Celmins' 6 1/2 -foot-tall enamel-on-wood comb was inspired by an oversized comb sitting on a bed in Magritte's painting "Personal Values." Koons' steel sculpture "J.B. Turner Engine" is based on a Jim Beam bourbon bottle, but it resembles the train steaming out of a fireplace in Magritte's "Time Transfixed."

Most of the contemporary works have more subtle or suggestive relationships with Magritte, who enjoyed great success in his own day.

Edward Ruscha's interest in wordplay is related to but not directly derived from the Belgian artist's use of puzzling labels and titles.

Robert Gober's obsessively crafted sculptures of body parts and ordinary objects don't look like Magritte's paintings, but the ambiguity and vaguely ominous tone have Magrittean echoes.

Martin Kippenberger's aggressively expressionistic paintings reflect the loose style and disturbing tenor of Magritte's relatively little-known paintings from the 1940s.

Pairing two artists in an exhibition is tricky, and pairing one with a multitude is particularly dicey, Barron says. She and LACMA Director Michael Govan came up with asking an artist to design the installation. The first name that popped into both of their heads was Baldessari, an éminence grise in the world of open minds and odd ideas.

He agreed and proposed several alternatives.

"The one we ended up going with was the most provocative," says Barron, who laid out the show in Baldessari's setting. "It's definitely an intervention, but it's also something that speaks on its own almost as a piece by John."

The exhibition will not travel to other museums, partly because of the difficulty of securing loans for multiple venues and partly because the installation was designed specifically for LACMA, Barron says. But museum officials decided to capitalize on theirs being the only place to see this particular take on Magritte.

"It's an astonishing installation, and it's up till March," Barron says. "Let people come here and see it."