René François Ghislain Magritte (; 21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.
Early life René Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut in Belgium, in 1898. He was the oldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor and textile merchant,Meuris 1991, p 216. and Régina (née Bertinchamps), who was a milliner before she got married. Little is known about Magritte's early life. He began lessons in drawing in 1910.
On 24 February 1912, his mother drowned herself in the River Sambre at Châtelet. It was not her first suicide attempt. Her body was not discovered until 12 March, 16 days later.Abadie 2003, p. 274. It was suggested that 13-year-old Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but later research discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse.Calvocoressi 1990, p. 9. Supposedly, when his mother was found, her dress was covering her face, an image that has been suggested as the source of several of Magritte's paintings in 1927–28 of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants.
Career Magritte's earliest paintings, which date to about 1915, were Impressionistic. In 1916–18, he studied at the in Brussels, under Constant Montald, but found the instruction uninspiring. He also took classes at the Académie Royale from the painter and poster designer Gisbert Combaz.Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque and Frederik Leen (Ed.), Magritte, 1898-1967, Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, Ludion Press, 1998, p. 308 The paintings he produced between 1918 and 1924 were influenced by Futurism and the figurative Cubism of Metzinger.
From December 1920 to September 1921, Magritte served in the Belgian infantry in the Flemish town of Beverlo near Leopoldsburg. In 1922, he married Georgette Berger, whom he had met as a child in 1913. Also in 1922, the poet Marcel Lecomte showed Magritte a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's The Song of Love (painted in 1914). The work brought Magritte to tears; he described this as "one of the most moving moments of my life: my eyes saw thought for the first time". The paintings of the Belgian symbolist painter William Degouve de Nuncques have also been noted as an influence on Magritte, specifically The Blind House (1892) and Magritte's variations or series on The Empire of Lights.Cassou, Jean (1984) The Concise Encyclopaedia of Symbolism. Chartwell Books, Inc. Secaucus, New Jersey. 292 pp.
In 1922–23, Magritte worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and he was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu).
In 1927 Magritte held his first solo exhibition, in Brussels. It had poor reviews; depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris, where he became friends with André Breton and became involved in the Surrealist group. An illusionistic, dream-like quality is characteristic of Magritte's version of Surrealism. He became a leading member of the movement and remained in Paris for three years. In 1929, he was put under contract at Goemans Gallery in Paris along with Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy.
On 15 December 1929, Magritte participated in the last publication, No. 12, of La Révolution surréaliste, with his essay "Les mots et les images", where words play with images in sync with his work The Treachery of Images.
Galerie Le Centaure closed at the end of 1929, ending Magritte's contract income. Having made little impact in Paris, Magritte returned to Brussels in 1930 and resumed working in advertising.Meuris 1991, p. 217. He and his brother, Paul, formed an agency, which earned him a living wage. In 1932, Magritte joined the Communist Party, which he periodically left and rejoined for several years. Between 1930 and 1932, Magritte had no exhibitions and sold no work. During this period, he was financially supported by a monthly stipend arranged by Belgian playwright Claude Spaak, the husband of Suzanne Spaak. In 1934, Suzanne Spaak's sister, Alice Lorge, purchased Magritte's La Magie Noire. This was the first of a series of 11 paintings that depicted Magritte's wife, Georgette Berger, in a classical nude pose. Claude Spaak also commissioned portraits of his wife and children from Magritte.
In 1936, Magritte had his first solo exhibition in the United States, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, followed by an exposition at the London Gallery in 1938.Meuris 1991, p. 221.
Between 1934 and 1937, Magritte drew film posters under the pseudonym 'Emair' for the German sound film distributor Tobis Klangfilm. The Leuven City Archive preserves seven posters designed by Magritte.
During the early stages of his career, the British surrealist patron Edward James allowed Magritte to stay rent-free in his London home, where Magritte studied architecture and painted. James is depicted in two of Magritte's 1937 paintings, Le Principe du Plaisir (The Pleasure Principle) and La Reproduction Interdite, also known as Not to Be Reproduced."Professor Bram Hammacher", The Edward James Foundation souvenir guide, edited Peter Sarginson, 1992.
During the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, Magritte remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. He briefly adopted a colorful, painterly style in 1943–44, an interlude known as his "Renoir period", as a reaction to his feelings of alienation and abandonment living under German occupation.Meuris 1991, p. 56.
In 1946, renouncing the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, he joined several other Belgian artists in signing the manifesto Surrealism in Full Sunlight.Meuris 1991, p. 218. During 1947–48, Magritte's "Vache period", he painted in a provocative and crude Fauve style. During this time, he supported himself by producing fake Picassos, Braques, and de Chiricos—a fraudulent repertoire he later expanded into the printing of forged banknotes during the lean postwar period. (Ironically, Belgium issued a 500-franc banknote celebrating Magritte on his centenary.) This venture was undertaken alongside his brother Paul and fellow Surrealist and "surrogate son" Marcel Mariën, to whom had fallen the task of selling the forgeries. At the end of 1948, Magritte returned to the style and themes of his pre-war surrealistic art.Meuris 1991, p. 61.
In France, Magritte's work has been showcased in a number of retrospective exhibitions, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2016 and 2017. In the U.S., his work has been displayed in three retrospective exhibitions: at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art again in 2013. The 2018 exhibition, "The Fifth Season" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, focused on the work of his later years.Marler, Regina (25 October 2018). "Every Time I Look at It I Feel Ill". The New York Review of Books. pp 8–12.
Politically, Magritte stood to the left, and retained close ties to the Communist Party, even in the postwar years. But he was critical of the functionalist cultural policy of the Communist left, saying, "Class consciousness is as necessary as bread; but that does not mean that workers must be condemned to bread and water and that wanting chicken and champagne would be harmful. [...] For the Communist painter, the justification of artistic activity is to create pictures that can represent mental luxury." While remaining committed to the political left, he thus advocated a certain autonomy of art. Magritte was an agnostic in religious belief.
Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist, and conceptual art.Calvocoressi 1990, p. 26. In 2005, he was ninth in the Walloon version of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian); in the Flemish version he was 18th.
Personal life In June 1922, Magritte married Georgette Berger, the daughter of a butcher in Charleroi. They had first met when she was 13 and he was 15; they met again in Brussels in 1920 and Georgette, who had also studied art, became Magritte's model, muse, and wife.
In 1936, Magritte's marriage became troubled when he met a young performance artist, Sheila Legge, and began an affair with her. Magritte arranged for his friend Paul Colinet to entertain and distract Georgette, but this led to an affair between Georgette and Colinet. Magritte and his wife did not reconcile until 1940.
Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on 15 August 1967, aged 68, and was interred in Schaerbeek Cemetery, Evere, Brussels.
Philosophical and artistic gestures
Magritte's work frequently displays a collection of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The use of objects as other than what they seem typifies his work The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), which seems a contradiction but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. It does not "satisfy emotionally"; asked about this image, Magritte said that of course it was not a pipejust try to fill it with tobacco.Spitz 1994, p.47
Magritte's work has been described by Suzi Gablik as "a systematic attempt to disrupt any dogmatic view of the physical world".Gablik 1970, p. 98. Therefore, when Magritte painted rockswhich are commonly understood to be heavy, inanimate objectshe often painted them floating cloud-like in the sky, or painted scenes of people and their environment turned to stone.Gablik 1970, pp. 98–99.
Among Magritte's works are a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings, such as Perspective I and Perspective II, which are copies of David's Portrait of Madame Récamier and Manet's The Balcony, respectively, with the human subjects replaced by coffins.Meuris 1991, p. 195. Elsewhere, Magritte challenges the difficulty of artwork to convey meaning with a recurring motif of an easel, as in his The Human Condition series (1933, 1935) or The Promenades of Euclid (1955), wherein the spires of a castle are "painted" upon the ordinary streets the canvas overlooks. In a letter to Breton, he wrote of The Human Condition that it was irrelevant if the scene behind the easel differed from what was depicted upon it, "but the main thing was to eliminate the difference between a view seen from outside and from inside a room".Sylvester 1992, p.298 The windows in some of these pictures are framed with heavy drapes, suggesting a theatrical motif.Spitz 1994, p.50
Magritte's style of surrealism is more representational than the "automatic" style of artists such as Joan Miró. His use of ordinary objects in unfamiliar spaces is joined to his desire to create poetic imagery. He called painting "the art of putting colors side by side in such a way that their real aspect is effaced, so that familiar objects—the sky, people, trees, mountains, furniture, the stars, solid structures, graffiti—become united in a single poetically disciplined image. The poetry of this image dispenses with any symbolic significance, old or new."Frasnay, Daniel. The Artist's World. New York: The Viking Press, 1969. pp. 99-107
Magritte described his paintings as "visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."