Birth Year : 1898
Death Year : 1967
Country : Belgium
René Magritte, the famous Belgian Surrealist, developed his signature
techniques early in his career while working as a commercial artist-designing
wallpapers, posters, sheet-music covers and collage illustrations for furriers'
catalogs. When he moved to Paris from Brussels, in August 1927, to join
the Parisian Surrealists, Magritte began his investigation of pictorial
language in a burst of activity that was to produce sixty pictures in one
year, some quite large. When Magritte left Paris in 1930, he abandoned
the Surrealist milieu where the painters tended to be subordinate to the
writers, and in particular to André Breton. Although Magritte was
not adverse to the company of writers-indeed Paul Eluard was his closest
friend in Paris and many of his writer friends helped produce titles for
his paintings-he was adverse to Breton's organizing, and returned to Brussels
where he was regarded as the center of the avant-garde circle. He remained
in Belium, save for a few trips, until his death.
Magritte's works are conceived of as riddles. In them, he explores the
mysteries lurking in the unexpected juxtaposition of everyday things, involving
the viewer in a self-induced disorientation. His paintings exclude symbols
and myths; everything is visible. Magritte worked from several sources,
which he repeated with variations: anatomical surprises, such as the hand
whose wrist is a woman's face; the mysterious opening, where a door swings
open onto an unexpected vista; metamorphic creatures, such as a stone bird
flying above a rocky shoreline. He animates the inanimate, as a shoe with
toes; he enlarges details, as an immense apple filling a room. he makes
an association of complementaries, as the leaf-bird, or the mountain-eagle.
His titles accompany the paintings in the way that names correspond to
objects, without either illustrating or explaining them. There is always
a kind of logic to Magritte's images but when asked about analysis of the
content of his paintings, Magritte replied, "If one looks at a thing with
the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer
seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised."
The interpretation of the image was a denial of its mystery, the mystery
of the invisible. His images are to be looked at, not into.
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Rene
Magritte
Voice
of Space, The
Rene
Magritte
Surprise
Answer, The
Rene
Magritte
Empire
of Lights
Rene
Magritte
Son
of Man, The
Rene
Magritte
Golconde
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all Rene Magritte
Books about Rene
Magritte |
