1. Metaphor and metonymy in Magritte
Daniela Medalla
Julia Tinoco
Marita Abbud
Roberta Fabri

2. • Randa Dubnick’s article “Visible poetry: metaphor
and metonymy in the paintings of René Magritte”
(1980)
• Her work is based on Roman Jakobson’s work

3. metaphor
La Trahison des Images
• similarity
• dissimilarity
• metaphor as the secondary reading

4. metonymy
Les affinités electives
•contiguity
• metonymy as a local process of transfer

5. metaphor and metonymy in visual arts
La cascade
Painting is poetry and always written in verse
with plastic rhymes, never in prose.
—Picasso, from a letter to Francoise Gilot

6. C.S.Pierce:
"Iconic signs take a visually similar form to the thing
they stand for, thus have a meteaphorical
relationship to the referent".
Example: the picture of an airplane. The referent is
an aircraft and it actually stand for an airplane.
When we see an airplane in a picture refering to an
airport it is based on casuality, association or
contiguity and the index and the referent have a
metonymic relationship.
Clé des songes

7. Inspired by Peirce’s concepts of similarity and
contiguity, Roman Jakobson viewed metaphor
and metonymy as two major modes of
association, triggering and interacting in most
meaning-making processes, be they ordinary
or artistic.
He argued that certain poets and art schools
exhibit a tendency for either the metonymic
or metaphoric style. Cubism, for instance,
appears to be inherently metonymic in
nature, whereas Surrealism has a tendency
for metaphorical symbolism.
Le chatêau des pyrenées

8. René Magritte
(1898 – 1967)
• ordinary objects in an unusual context
• poetic imagery
• not a thing; an image of the thing
“It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of
the world. Art for me is not an end in itself, but a
means of evoking that mystery.” ”
— René Magritte on putting seemingly
unrelated objects together in juxtaposition

9. La durée poignard
• Similarity or dissimilarity → metaphor
• Spatial or temporal relationship; contiguity → metonymy

10. subtle association based either on contiguity or
similarity
Les vacances de Hegel
(Hegel’s Holiday)

11. La legende dorée
(The Golden Legend)
• changes in scales
• negation of normal spatial relationship

12. techniques of realism -> undermine reality
Les promenades d’Euclide