As You Will Like It

Rene Magrittes As You Will Like It from 1967 is an etching in black on buff wove paper that exemplifies the Belgian Surrealist painters engagement with the print medium as a vehicle for disseminating his philosophical investigations of the relationship between images, language, and reality. The title, which puns on the Shakespeare play As You Like It by inserting the conditional will, suggests that meaning is a matter of desire rather than fact, that we see what we want to see rather than what is actually there, a theme that runs throughout Magrittes work from his earliest Surrealist paintings to his final gouaches and prints. The etching medium, with its capacity for precise Linear definition and flat tonal areas, allows Magritte to create the clear, unambiguous images that are the vehicle for his philosophical provocations, producing the same combination of visual realism and conceptual disorientation that characterizes his oil paintings. The year 1967, the year of Magrittes death, places this etching among his final works, and the title As You Will Like It has the quality of a last testament, a final statement of the principle that meaning is constructed by the viewer rather than inherent in the object. The buff wove paper, laid down on a white wove paper support, gives the etching the physical presence of a finished work rather than a mere reproduction, reinforcing the status of the print as an original work of art rather than a copy of a painting.

Magrittes prints are significant contributions to the history of Surrealist printmaking, and As You Will Like It demonstrates the combination of visual clarity and conceptual provocation that characterizes his best work. The etching influenced the development of conceptual printmaking and the broader tradition of art that addresses the constructed nature of meaning.

A 1967 etching by Magritte on buff wove paper titled As You Will Like It, punning on Shakespeare to investigate the principle that meaning is constructed by desire rather than inherent in the object, a final statement from the last year of his career in the precise Linear medium that serves his philosophical provocations.