René François Ghislain Magritte (French:[ʁənefʁɑ̃swaɡilɛ̃maɡʁit]; 21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was aBelgiansurrealist 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.[1] His imagery has influencedpop art,minimalist art, andconceptual art.[2]
René Magritte was born inLessines, in the province ofHainaut in Belgium, in 1898. He was the oldest son of Léopold Magritte, atailor and textile merchant,[3] and Régina (née Bertinchamps), who was amilliner before she got married. Little is known about Magritte's early life. He began lessons in drawing in 1910.[3]
On 24 February 1912, his mother died bysuicide by drowning herself in theRiver Sambre atChâtelet.[4] It was not her first suicide attempt. Her body was not discovered until 12 March.[4] According to a legend, 13-year-old Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but recent research[when?] has discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse.[5] 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 1927–1928 of people with cloth obscuring their faces, includingLes Amants.[6]
From December 1920 until September 1921, Magritte served in the Belgian infantry in theFlemish town ofBeverlo nearLeopoldsburg. In 1922, Magritte married Georgette Berger, whom he had met as a child in 1913.[3] Also during 1922, the poetMarcel Lecomte showed Magritte a reproduction ofGiorgio de Chirico'sThe 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 eyessaw thought for the first time".[9] The paintings of the Belgian symbolist painterWilliam Degouve de Nuncques have also been noted as an influence on Magritte, specifically the former's paintingThe Blind House (1892) and Magritte's variations or series onThe Empire of Lights.[10]: 64–65 pp.
In 1922–1923, Magritte worked as adraughtsman in awallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie Le Centaure inBrussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting,The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first solo exhibition in Brussels in 1927.[7] The exhibition was poorly reviewed.[11]
Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends withAndré Breton and became involved in theSurrealist 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.[12] In 1929, he was put under contract at Goemans Gallery in Paris along withJean Arp andYves Tanguy.[13]
On 15 December 1929, Magritte participated in the last publication, No. 12, ofLa Révolution surréaliste, with his essay "Les mots et les images", where words play with images in sync with his workThe Treachery of Images.[14]
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.[15] He and his brother, Paul, formed an agency which earned him a living wage. In 1932, Magritte joined theCommunist Party, which he would periodically leave and rejoin for several years.[15] In 1936 he had his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Julien Levy Gallery inNew York, followed by an exposition at the London Gallery in 1938.[16]
Between 1934 and 1937, Magritte drew film posters under the pseudonym 'Emair' for the German sound film distributorTobis Klangfilm. The Leuven City Archive preserves seven posters designed by Magritte.
During the early stages of his career, the British surrealist patronEdward James allowed Magritte to stay rent-free in his London home, where Magritte studied architecture and painted. James is featured in two of Magritte's works painted in 1937,Le Principe du Plaisir (The Pleasure Principle) andLa Reproduction Interdite, a painting also known asNot to Be Reproduced.[17]
During theGerman occupation of Belgium in World War II he 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 that came with living in German-occupied Belgium.[18]
In 1946, renouncing the violence andpessimism of his earlier work, he joined several other Belgian artists in signing the manifestoSurrealism in Full Sunlight.[19] During 1947–48, Magritte's "Vache period", he painted in a provocative and crudeFauve style. During this time, Magritte supported himself through the production of fake Picassos,Braques, and de Chiricos—a fraudulent repertoire he was later to expand into the printing of forged banknotes during the lean postwar period. 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.[20] At the end of 1948, Magritte returned to the style and themes of his pre-war surrealistic art.[21]
In France, Magritte's work has been showcased in a number of retrospective exhibitions, most recently at theCentre Georges Pompidou (2016–2017). In the United States his work has been featured in three retrospective exhibitions: at theMuseum of Modern Art in 1965, at theMetropolitan Museum of Art in 1992, and again at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. An exhibition entitled "The Fifth Season" at theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018 focused on the work of his later years.[22]
Politically, Magritte stood to the left, and retained close ties to the Communist Party, even in the post-war years. However, he was critical of the functionalist cultural policy of the Communist left, stating that "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.[23][24] Spiritually, Magritte was an agnostic.[25]
Magritte married Georgette Berger in June 1922. Georgette was the daughter of a butcher in Charleroi, and first met Magritte when she was 13 and he was 15. They met again seven years later in Brussels in 1920[26] and Georgette, who had also studied art, became Magritte's model, muse, and wife.[27]
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.[28]
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[30]
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 is typified in his painting,[31]The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images), which shows apipe 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"),[32] which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is animage of a pipe. It does not "satisfy emotionally"; when Magritte was once asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe—just try to fill it with tobacco.[33]
Magritte's work has been described bySuzi Gablik as "a systematic attempt to disrupt any dogmatic view of the physical world".[34] Therefore, when Magritte painted rocks—which are commonly understood to be heavy, inanimate objects—he often painted them floating cloud-like in the sky, or painted scenes of people and their environment turned to stone.[35]
Among Magritte's works are a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings, such asPerspective I andPerspective II, which are copies ofDavid'sPortrait of Madame Récamier[36] andManet'sThe Balcony,[37] respectively, but with the human subjects replaced by coffins.[38] Elsewhere, Magritte challenges the difficulty of artwork to convey meaning with a recurring motif of an easel, as in hisThe Human Condition series (1933, 1935) orThe Promenades of Euclid (1955), wherein the spires of a castle are "painted" upon the ordinary streets which the canvas overlooks. In a letter to André Breton, he wrote ofThe 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".[39] The windows in some of these pictures are framed with heavy drapes, suggesting a theatrical motif.[40]
Magritte's style of surrealism is more representational than the"automatic" style of artists such asJoan Miró. Magritte's use of ordinary objects in unfamiliar spaces is joined to his desire to create poetic imagery. He described the act of painting as "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."[41]
René 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."[42]
Magritte's constant play with reality and illusion has been attributed to the early death of his mother. Psychoanalysts who have examined bereaved children have hypothesized that Magritte's back-and-forth play with reality and illusion reflects his "constant shifting back and forth from what he wishes—'mother is alive'—to what he knows—'mother is dead'".[43]
More recently, Patricia Allmer has demonstrated the influence of fairground attractions on Magritte's art—from carousels and circuses to panoramas and stage magic.[44]
Magritte's use of simple graphic and everyday imagery has been compared to that of thepop-artists. His influence in the development of pop art has been widely recognized,[46] although Magritte himself discounted the connection. He considered the pop artists' representation of "the world as it is" as "their error", and contrasted their attention to the transitory with his concern for "the feeling for the real, insofar as it is permanent."[46] The 2006–2007LACMA exhibition "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images" examined the relationship between Magritte and contemporary art.[47]
According to the 1998 documentaryThe Fear of God: 25 Years of "The Exorcist", the iconic poster shot for the filmThe Exorcist was inspired by Magritte'sThe Empire of Light.
In the 1992 movieToys, Magritte's work was influential in the entire movie but specifically in a break-in scene, featuring Robin Williams and Joan Cusack in a music video hoax. Many of Magritte's works were used directly in that scene. In the 1999 movieThe Thomas Crown Affair starringPierce Brosnan,Rene Russo andDenis Leary, the Magritte paintingThe Son of Man was prominently featured as part of the plot line.
In John Green's novel (2012) and movie (2014),The Fault in Our Stars, the main character Hazel Grace Lancaster wears a tee shirt with Magritte's,The Treachery of Images, (This is not a pipe.) Just prior to leaving her mother to visit her favorite author, Hazel explains the drawing to her confused mother and states that the author's novel has "several Magritte references", clearly hoping the author will be pleased with the reference.
The official music video ofMarkus Schulz's "Koolhaus" under his Dakota guise was inspired from Magritte's works.[54]
A location in Brussels has been namedCeci n'est pas une rue (This is not a street).[55]
The copy of Magritte'sThe Human Condition, on the facade of the New Middle School in Liebenau, Freistadt district.
The Magritte Museum opened to the public on 30 May 2009 inBrussels.[57] Housed in the five-level neo-classical Hotel Altenloh, on the Place Royale, it displays some 200 original Magritte paintings, drawings and sculptures[58] includingThe Return,Scheherazade andThe Empire of Light.[59] This multidisciplinary permanent installation is the biggest Magritte archive anywhere and most of the work is directly from the collection of the artist's widow,Georgette Magritte, and fromIrene Hamoir Scutenaire, who was his primary collector.[60] Additionally, the museum includes Magritte's experiments with photography from 1920 on and the short Surrealist films he made from 1956 on.[60]
Another museum is located at 135 Rue Esseghem in Brussels in Magritte's former home, where he lived with his wife from 1930 to 1954.Olympia (1948), a nude portrait of Magritte's wife reportedly worth about US$1.1 million, was stolen from this museum on the morning of 24 September 2009 by two armed men.[61][62][63] It was returned to the museum in January 2012, in exchange for a 50,000-Euro payment from the museum's insurer. The thieves reportedly agreed to the deal because they were unable to sell the painting on theblack market due to its fame.[64]
TheMenil Collection in Houston, Texas holds one of the most significant collections of dada and surrealist work in the United States, including dozens of oil paintings, gouaches, drawings, and bronzes by René Magritte.John de Menil andDominique de Menil initiated and funded thecatalogue raisonné of Magritte's oeuvre, published between 1992 and 1997 in five volumes, with an addendum in 2012. Major oil paintings in the Menil Collection include:The Meaning of Night (1927),The Eternally Obvious (1930),The Rape (1934),The Listening Room (1952), andGolconda (1953) which are typically exhibited a few at a time on a rotating basis with other surrealist works in the collection.[65]
1923Self-portrait,Sixth Nocturne,Georgette at the Piano andDonna
1925The Bather andThe Window
1926The Lost Jockey,The Mind of the Traveler,Sensational News,The Difficult Crossing,The Vestal's Agony,The Midnight Marriage,The Musings of a Solitary Walker,After the Water my Butts,Popular Panorama,Landscape andThe Encounter
1927Young Girl Eating a Bird,The Oasis (started in 1925),Le Double Secret,The Meaning of Night,Let Out of School,The Man from the Sea,The Tiredness of Life,The Light-breaker,A Passion for Light,The Menaced Assassin,Reckless Sleeper,La Voleuse,The Fast Hope,L'Atlantide andThe Muscles of the Sky
1928The Lining of Sleep (started in 1927),Intermission (started in 1927),The Adulation of Space (started in 1927),The Flowers of the Abyss,Discovery,The Lovers I & II,[6]The Voice of Space,The False Mirror,The Daring Sleeper,The Acrobat's Ideas,The Automaton,The Empty Mask,Reckless Sleeper,The Secret Life andAttempting the Impossible
1936Surprise Answer,Clairvoyance,The Healer,The Philosopher's Lamp,The Heart Revealed a portrait of Tita Thirifays,Spiritual Exercises,Portrait of Irène Hamoir,La Méditation andForbidden Literature
1947La Philosophie dans le boudoir,The Cicerone,The Liberator,The Fair Captive,La Part du Feu andThe Red Model
1948Blood Will Tell,Memory,The Mountain Dweller,The Art of Life,The Pebble, The Lost Jockey,God's Solon,Shéhérazade,L'Ellipse andFamine andThe Taste of Sorrow
1949Megalomania,Elementary Cosmogony, andPerspective, the Balcony
1950Making an Entrance,The Legend of the Centuries,Towards Pleasure,The Labors of Alexander,The Empire of Light II,The Fair Captive andThe Art of Conversation,The Survivor
1951David's Madame Récamier (parodying thePortrait of Madame Récamier),Pandora's Box,The Song of the Violet,The Spring Tide andThe Smile
1952Personal Values andLe Sens de la Pudeur andThe Explanation
1956The Sixteenth of September;The Ready-made Bouquet
1957The Fountain of Youth;The Enchanted Domain
1958The Golden Legend,Hegel's Holiday,The Banquet andThe Familiar World
1959The Castle in the Pyrenees,The Battle of the Argonne,The Anniversary,The Month of the Grape Harvest andLa clef de verre (The Glass Key)
1960The Memoirs of a Saint
1962The Great Table,The Healer,Waste of Effort,Mona Lisa (circa 1962) andL'embeillie (circa 1962)
1963The Great Family,The Open Air,The Beautiful Season,Princes of the Autumn,Young Love,La Recherche de la Vérité andThe Telescope and " The Art of Conversation"
1964Le soir qui tombe (Evening Falls),The Great War,The Great War on Facades,The Son of Man andSong of Love
1965Le Blanc-Seing,Carte Blanche,The Thought Which Sees,Ages Ago andThe Beautiful Walk (circa 1965),Good Faith
1966The Shades,The Happy Donor,The Gold Ring,The Pleasant Truth,The Two Mysteries,The Pilgrim andThe Mysteries of the Horizon
1967Les Grâces Naturelles,La Géante,The Blank Page,Good Connections,The Art of Living,L'Art de Vivre and several bronze sculptures based on Magritte's previous works
^Jacques Meuris (1994).René Magritte, 1898-1967. Benedikt Taschen. p. 70.ISBN9783822805466.We shall not at this juncture risk analyzing an agnostic Magritte haunted perhaps by thoughts of ultimate destiny. "We behave as if there were no God" (Marien 1947).
^Stephanie Brown (2006). "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images". Los Angeles county Museum of Art and Ludion.{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal= (help)
Allmer, Patricia (2017)This Is Magritte London: Laurence King.ISBN9781780678504
Allmer, Patricia (2009).René Magritte - Beyond Painting. Manchester: Manchester University Press.ISBN978-0-7190-7928-3.
Allmer, Patricia (2007). 'Dial M for Magritte' in "Johan Grimonprez - Looking for Alfred", eds. Steven Bode and Thomas Elsaesser, London: Film and Video Umbrella.
Allmer, Patricia (2007). 'René Magritte and the Postcard' in "Collective Inventions: Surrealism in Belgium Reconsidered", eds. Patricia Allmer and Hilde van Gelder, Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Allmer, Patricia (2007). 'Failing to Create - Magritte, Artistry, Art History' inFrom Self to Shelf: The Artist Under Construction, ed. William May, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Allmer, Patricia (2006). 'Framing the Real: Frames and the Process of Framing in René Magritte's Œuvre', inFraming Borders in Literature and Other Media, eds. Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
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