René Magritte

René Magritte (born November 21, 1898, Lessines, Belgium—died August 15, 1967, Brussels) was a Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. His works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the apple, the castle, the rock, the window, and other ordinary objects, which were often set in unusual or unsettling situations.

Magritte’s father was a tailor, and his mother was a milliner who drowned herself in the River Sambre when Magritte was about 14 years old. Thereafter, he and his two brothers were raised by his grandmother. As a teenager, he met Georgette Berger, who would become his wife nearly 10 years later. After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916–18), Magritte became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches for advertisements. In 1922 he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Song of Love (1914), an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements (a classical bust and a rubber glove among them) in a dreamlike architectural space. The work had a great influence on Magritte’s artistic approach. For the next few years he developed a singular style that comprised carefully rendered everyday objects often placed in enigmatic juxtapositions.

In 1926 Magritte signed a contract with a Brussels art gallery, which allowed him to become a full-time painter. The following year the gallery held his first solo show, which included The Lost Jockey (1926), a collage that he regarded as his first Surrealist work. The exhibition, however, was not well received by the art critics of the day. In 1927 he and his wife moved to a suburb of Paris. There he met and befriended several of the Paris Surrealists, including poets André Breton and Paul Éluard, and he became familiar with the collages of Max Ernst. Magritte began to integrate text into some of his works, and during this time he painted one of his most famous pieces, The Treachery of Images (1929), in which a detailed representation of a pipe is combined with the cursive statement: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). The painting questioned the authority of both images and words.

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After three years, Magritte and his wife returned to Brussels, where he was active once again in the Belgian Surrealist movement and where he (except for the occasional journey) remained for the rest of his life. He had his first solo show in the United States at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1936 and in England at the London Gallery in 1938, gaining international popularity. He also received a fair amount of large commissions beginning in the late 1930s.

During the 1940s Magritte experimented with a variety of styles, sometimes incorporating elements of Impressionism, for example, in what has come to be called his “Renoir Period.” In such works as The Forbidden Universe (1943), Magritte painted a mermaidlike figure reclining on a sofa using broad brushstrokes and a soft palette reminiscent of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The paintings he produced in this period, however, were not successful by most accounts, and he eventually abandoned his experiments. For the rest of his life he continued to produce his enigmatic and illogical images in a readily identifiable style. In his last year he supervised the construction of eight bronze sculptures derived from images in his paintings.

As a child, Magritte was enthusiastic about the sea and wide skies, which figure strongly in his paintings. In Threatening Weather (1929) the clouds have the shapes of a torso, a tuba, and a chair. In The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959) a huge stone topped by a small castle floats above the sea. Other representative fancies were a fish with human legs, a man with a bird cage for a torso, and a gentleman leaning over a wall beside his pet lion. Dislocations of space, time, and scale were common elements. In Time Transfixed (1938), for example, a steaming locomotive is suspended from the center of a mantelpiece in a middle-class sitting room, looking as if it had just emerged from a tunnel. In Golconda (1953) bourgeois, bowler-hatted men fall like rain toward a street lined with houses.

Two museums in Brussels celebrate Magritte: the René Magritte Museum, largely a biographical museum, is located in the house occupied by the artist and his wife between 1930 and 1954; and the Magritte Museum, featuring some 250 of the artist’s works, opened in 2009 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.

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