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René Magritte. La Période vache
30 October 2008 - 4 January 2009

Römerberg
60311 Frankfurt, Germany
phone: (+49) 69 29 98 82-0
fax: (+49) 69 29 98 82-240
welcome [​at​] schirn.de
www.schirn.de WITH "LA PÉRIODE VACHE," THE SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT SHOWS AN ALMOST UNKNOWN GROUP OF WORKS BY RENÉ MAGRITTE
René Magritte numbers not only among the most important, but also among the most popular twentieth-century artists. Often against the grain of the artistic tendencies of his time, the Belgian Surrealist painter developed a unique and unmistakable pictorial language. His work's continuing crucial influence on later generations of artists and his impact on today's visual culture are almost without par. Many of his enigmatic and equally hard-to-forget solutions have been reproduced in the millions and become famous icons far beyond the world of art.

However, a fascinating period of the artist's landmark oeuvre has remained nearly unknown: his so-called Période vache. In 1948, Magritte made a group of paintings and gouaches distinctly different from the rest of his work for his first solo exhibition in Paris. Relying on a new, fast and aggressive style of painting - and particularly inspired by popular sources such as caricatures and comics, but also interspersing his works with stylistic quotations from artists like James Ensor or Henri Matisse - Magritte, within only a few weeks, produced about thirty entirely uncharacteristic works that caused an outrage in Paris. The artist deliberately conceived the exhibition as a provocation of and an assault on the Parisian public. Painting in an unexpectedly crude, playful, and intentionally "bad" manner, he reflected his own work and painting in general. While only sporadically included in most retrospectives of Magritte's oeuvre, his works from the Période vache will be assembled in the exhibition at the Schirn outside France and Belgium for the first time. Especially against the background of the last thirty years' art, this concentrated presentation will shed new, surprising light on an extraordinary artist whose work is often mistakenly regarded as far too familiar and easy to grasp.

The fact that Magritte's first solo presentation in Paris did not take place before 1948 is of crucial relevance for the genesis of his Période vache. Paris was not only the center of the art world, but also the capital of the Surrealist movement, and Magritte, as the central figure of Belgian Surrealism, had been in close contact with the circle around André Breton since the 1920s. Yet, it was not only his attempt to establish himself in the French metropolis that failed after only a three-year stay (1927-1930); even after his international recognition had grown in the 1930s, he was denied an adequate appreciation of his work in Paris. In addition, Magritte came into direct conflict with Paris after the war when his redefinition of Surrealism met with the disapproval of the Surrealist group's protagonists returning home from exile.

This was the context in which Magritte regarded his invitation to Paris in 1948 less as an overdue chance of success in the French metropolis but rather as an opportunity for taking revenge - for the arrogance of the capital's art scene and the ossified attitude of a Surrealism that had outlived itself and become far too socially acceptable - by pulling off a surprising coup.

The term "vache" used by Magritte for his new group of works is mostly understood as an ironical allusion to the historical movement of the Fauves, whose exaggerated coloring Magritte's works parodied as much as their decoratively pleasing character. Yet in French, "vache" does not only mean "cow," but also as much as "mean" or "nasty"; "vacherie" signifies a mean trick. Thus, the term hints at the aggressive and deliberately crude quality characteristic of the pictures.

Regarding both their motifs and their style, the works of Magritte's Période vache do not constitute a consistent ensemble but rather present themselves as a patchwork of different pseudo-styles borrowing more or less openly from other artists and drawing on the artist's own earlier works. These elements are transformed into something comic, trivial, or grotesque by being blended with aspects of popular visual culture. With numerous art historical references - like to James Ensor, whose grotesque physiognomies are given another turn of the screw, to Henri Matisse, whose colorful ornaments are degraded to wallpaper-like décor, or to Joan Miró, who, as we know, was not held in high regard by the artist - Magritte ridicules traditional cultural values and aesthetic norms and distances himself from an art scene lusting for innovation. By presenting motifs taken from his own previous pictures in a new manner of painting, he turned into his own caricaturist, as it were. Contrary to his "classical" works, their cool, precise and realistic approach, and the conceptual consideration behind them, the works of Magritte's Période vache strike us as colorful, two-dimensional, quickly painted, and radiating an astounding directness and spontaneity.

The exhibition in Paris turned out the expected failure. Not one picture was sold. The press reacted frostily. The public was appalled. The Paris Surrealists kept their distance. Only one of the vache works was exhibited again during Magritte's lifetime, i.e. until 1967. For exhibition makers as well as art dealers and art historians, this group of works constituted an alien element in an otherwise extraordinarily consistent oeuvre. In addition, it did not fit in with the image of an artist who had, above all, been presented as a pioneer of Pop art and Concept art since the 1960s. It was not before thirty years after their making that these hitherto forgotten works began to be gradually reevaluated and appreciated starting with the "Westkunst" exhibition in Cologne. In the context of the 1980s' Post-Conceptual painting, the strategies Magritte had relied on for subverting the prevailing standards of painting in the medium itself appeared both exemplary and highly topical. Today, about forty years after Magritte's death, contemporary artists such as John Currin or Sean Landers often come to understand his oeuvre by making themselves familiar with the works of his Période vache at first. The works' humor, spontaneous style, and daring bad taste provide an example for a form of painting deriving its momentum from the apparent meaningless of its subjects in order to refute the clichés of today's world of images. With his manifesto-like protest against all varieties of arrogance and reprimands in the arts, Magritte has become a model for the artist's triumph over the workings of an art scene that seem to be more overpowering today than they ever were.

CATALOGUE: "René Magritte 1948. La Période vache." Edited by Esther Schlicht and Max Hollein. With a preface by Max Hollein and texts by Michel Draguet, Robert Fleck, Florence Hespel, and Esther Schlicht. German and English, 176 pages, ca. 90 illustrations, Ludion, ISBN 978-90-5544-768-8.

DIRECTOR: Max Hollein

CURATOR: Esther Schlicht (Schirn)

OPENING HOURS: Tue., Fri.-Sun. 10 a.m. -7 p.m., Wed. and Thur. 10 a.m. - 10 p.m.

INFORMATION: www.schirn.de

PRESS CONTACT: Dorothea Apovnik, phone: (+49-69) 29 98 82-118, fax: (+49-69) 29 98 82-240, e-mail: dorothea.apovnik@schirn.de, www.schirn.de (texts and images for download under PRESS).

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René Magritte. La Période vache 30 October 2008 - 4 January 2009 Römerberg 60311 Frankfurt, Germany phone: (+49) 69 29 98 82-0 fax: (+49) 69 29 98 82-240 welcome [​at​] schirn.de www.schirn.de WITH "LA PÉRIODE VACHE," THE SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT SHOWS AN ALMOST UNKNOWN GROUP OF WORKS BY RENÉ MAGRITTE René Magritte numbers not only among the most important, but also among the most popular twentieth-century artists.

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     Rene and Georgette Maritte with their Dog After the War           

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     Rene and Georgette Maritte with their Dog After the War           

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This animation is inspired by the paintings of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. I really wanted to show what I like most about his paintings, the way of looking differently at normal things. The music is from Paul Simon.

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Surrealism- a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

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Surrealism- a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

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noun, ( sometimes initial capital letter) 1. a style of art and literature developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc.

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Magritte at Tate Liverpool: Secrets and surrealism - video

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Magritte at Tate Liverpool: Secrets and surrealism - video

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As a major new retrospective opens, Adrian Searle investigates The Secret Player - a work as wilfully surreal as anything Magritte painted, and yet which contains buried clues to the artist's own life

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Magritte at Tate Liverpool: Secrets and surrealism - video

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As a major new retrospective opens, Adrian Searle investigates The Secret Player - a work as wilfully surreal as anything Magritte painted, and yet which contains buried clues to the artist's own life

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The Human Condition (Magritte) - Wikipedia

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The Human Condition (La condition humaine ) generally refers to two similar oil on canvas paintings by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. One was completed in 1933 and is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The other was completed in 1935 and is part of the Simon Spierer Collection in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Magritte, Rene - the lovers - Canvas Painting For Sale

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Magritte, Rene - the lovers - Hand painted oil painting on canvas.

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Rene Magritte is great artist in surreal art.

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Rene Magritte Paintings, Art, Rene Magritte Painting 020.jpg

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René Magritte. The Lovers. Paris 1928 | MoMA

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Jean Bastien, Brussels, by 1953 [1]. [E.L.T. (Edouard Léon Théodore) Mesens (1903-1971), Brussels and London] [2]. Fernand Graindorge (1903-1985), Liège, by 1955 [3]; to Hecker Jensen, Basel [4]; sold to Richard L. Feigen Gallery, Chicago, by 1958 [5]; sold to Richard S.

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Rene Magritte was inspired by Giorgio de Chirico, he was born to Italian parents in Volos, Greece, on July 10, 1888. In his art, he sought to evoke the hidden meanings behind everyday life, and his enigmatic scenes of empty cities, menacing statues, mysterious shadows and strange combinations of everyday objects inspired the artists of the Surrealist movement in the 1910s. His important "metaphysical" works from these years include "The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon," "The Soothsayer's Recompense" and "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street." After a long career, de Chirico died in Rome, Italy, on November 19, 1978.

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Rene Magritte was inspired by Giorgio de Chirico, he was born to Italian parents in Volos, Greece, on July 10, 1888. In his art, he sought to evoke the hidden meanings behind everyday life, and his enigmatic scenes of empty cities, menacing statues, mysterious shadows and strange combinations of everyday objects inspired the artists of the Surrealist movement in the 1910s. His important "metaphysical" works from these years include "The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon," "The Soothsayer's Recompense" and "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street." After a long career, de Chirico died in Rome, Italy, on November 19, 1978.

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"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."

"Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences."

"My painting is 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."

"We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world."

"Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

Nafeesah Muhammad

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Summary of René Magritte

Surely the most celebrated Belgian artist of the 20 th century, René Magritte has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. To support himself he spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this most likely shaped his fine art, which often has the abbreviated impact of an advertisement. While some French Surrealists led ostentatious lives, Magritte preferred the quiet anonymity of a middle-class existence, a life symbolized by the bowler-hatted men that often populate his pictures. In later years, he was castigated by his peers for some of his strategies (such as his tendency to produce multiple copies of his pictures), yet since his death his reputation has only improved. Conceptual artists have admired his use of text in images, and painters in the 1980s admired the provocative kitsch of some of his later work.

Accomplishments

Magritte wished to cultivate an approach that avoided the stylistic distractions of most modern painting. While some French Surrealists experimented with new techniques, Magritte settled on a deadpan, illustrative technique that clearly articulated the content of his pictures. Repetition was an important strategy for Magritte, informing not only his handling of motifs within individual pictures, but also encouraging him to produce multiple copies of some of his greatest works. His interest in the idea may have come in part from Freudian psychoanalysis, for which repetition is a sign of trauma. But his work in commercial art may have also played a role in prompting him to question the conventional modernist belief in the unique, original work of art.

The illustrative quality of Magritte's pictures often results in a powerful paradox: images that are beautiful in their clarity and simplicity, but which also provoke unsettling thoughts. They seem to declare that they hide no mystery, and yet they are also marvelously strange. As Magritte biographer David Sylvester brilliantly described, his paintings induce "the sort of awe felt in an eclipse."

Magritte was fascinated by the interactions of textual and visual signs, and some of his most famous pictures employ both words and images. While those pictures often share the air of mystery that characterizes much of his Surrealist work, they often seem motivated more by a spirit of rational enquiry - and wonder - at the misunderstandings that can lurk in language.

The men in bowler hats that often appear in Magritte's pictures can be interpreted as self-portraits. Portrayals of the artist's wife, Georgette, are also common in his work, as are glimpses of the couple's modest Brussels apartment. Although this might suggest autobiographical content in Magritte's pictures, it more likely points to the commonplace sources of his inspiration. It is as if he believed that we need not look far for the mysterious, since it lurks everywhere in the most conventional of lives.

The Life of René Magritte

A "splendid misapprehension," was how Magritte described his waking from a dream when, looking at the birdcage in his room, he saw an egg, instead of the bird, in the cage. Out of the experience he began altering ordinary objects, transforming them into paintings that "challenge the real world."

Important Art by René Magritte

Bather

This elegant work is a fine example of Magritte's early attempts to find a restrained, illustrative style. It bears comparison with contemporary Belgian Expressionism and also with the classicizing modernist styles that were then popular throughout Europe. We can recognize many of the elements that characterized his later paintings, such as the prominence of the sea and the mysterious sphere in the background. This work also bears the influence of Magritte's professional forays into the world of fashion advertising, and his interest in the works of Fernand Léger. Bather can be compared to his painting The Bather between Light and Darkness (1935-36), which explores the same scene in the artist's mature style. In 1930, the artist gifted the picture to his sister-in-law, Leontine Berger.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Familiar Objects

Here, the viewer is confronted by five men - or perhaps five views of the same man - each corresponding to a seemingly random object. These bland portraits with indistinct clothes, features, and expressions are characteristic of Magritte. The objects, on the other hand, are unique and command more attention than the figures who stare blankly at them. Several pictures that predate this attest to Magritte's interest in depicting objects in his work, but this is the first in which the objects appear alongside figures and are associated with the mental states of those figures. In this regard it shows the artist's growing interest in the Surrealist idea of the unconscious. Magritte's way of placing the objects in relation to the figures also enabled him to partially occlude their faces, a strategy which he would often employ in later work.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

The Treachery of Images

The Treachery of Images cleverly highlights the gap between language and meaning. Magritte combined the words and image in such a fashion that he forces us to question the importance of the sentence and the word. "Pipe," for instance, is no more an actual pipe than a picture of a pipe can be smoked. Magritte likely borrowed the pipe motif from Le Corbusier's book Vers une architecture (1923), since he was an admirer of the architect and painter, but he may also have been inspired by a comical sign he knew in an art gallery, which read, "Ceci n'est pas de l'Art." The painting is the subject of a famous book-length analysis by Michel Foucault. One might also compare it with Joseph Kosuth's handling of a similar problem of image, text, and reality in his 1965 installation One and Three Chairs.

Oil on canvas - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Ocean

The bright colors and casual brushwork of The Ocean typifies a series of satirical pictures Magritte painted in the style of late Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose pictures were intended to mock the conservative tastes of the French public. The pose of the river god in this picture borrows directly from a late work by Renoir. As the Second World War drew to a close, he turned away from the more macabre subjects of Surrealism and embraced a radiant palette and, as he put it, "bewitching subjects." The artist wrote that he wanted to paint pictures "that will arouse what remains of our instinct for pleasure." Three years later in 1946, he signed the manifesto Surrealism in Full Sunlight that his Belgian friends had written to outline such principles. But the pictures in this style attracted considerable criticism from his Surrealist friends.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

The Pebble

The Pebble was included in Magritte's first Paris exhibition in 1948, where he shocked critics and public alike with an uncharacteristic group of his "vache" works. This group of around thirty pictures was painted rapidly in only a few weeks. It borrowed from the sketchy style of comics and caricatures, but some elements were also derived from Édouard Manet and Fauvism (the background in this picture may come from Henri Matisse). It also borrows the Venus de Milo motif that Magritte had used before. Perhaps unfortunately for the artist, the exhibition achieved its perverse effect, and was both financially and critically devastating to him. However, he remained attached to the work, and later gave this piece to his wife.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Empire of Light

The Empire of Light exemplifies the sort of simple paradox that characterizes Magritte's most successful works. Dusk has fallen in the bottom half of the picture and a streetlamp glows peacefully. Above, cheerful white clouds hang in a baby-blue sky. Although both elements of night and day are calming and lovely considered on their own, their juxtaposition is eerie and unnerving. As Magritte once said of Max Ernst's and Giorgio de Chirico's work, the darker statement similarly applies to strains of Magritte's own work: "the spectator might recognize his own isolation and hear the silence of the world." The overall impression of this scene is one that powerfully stays in the mind of the viewer.

Overall, Magritte's rather 'straightforward' rendition of the uncanny - one that resembles reportage in its simplicity - certainly owes something to the artist's experience working in commercial art. The style, and the handling of the paint - restrained and illustrative - may also have been inspired by the emphasis on clarity and impact in commercial art.

Oil on canvas - The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

Biography of René Magritte

Childhood

René Magritte was the eldest of three boys, born to a fairly well-off family. His father is thought to have been in the manufacturing industry, and his mother was known to be a milliner before her marriage. Magritte's development as an artist was influenced by two significant events in his childhood; the first was an encounter with an artist painting in a cemetery, who he happened across while playing with a companion. Magritte later wrote, "I found, in the middle of some broken stone columns and heaped-up leaves, a painter who had come from the capital, and who seemed to me to be performing magic." The second pivotal event was the suicide of his mother in 1912 when Magritte was 14. According to the apocryphal account, Magritte was present when her body was fished out of a river, her face covered completely by her white dress. While current scholars believe this to be no more than a myth propagated by his nurse, the image of a head uncannily concealed by a contour-hugging cloth reoccurs throughout the artist's oeuvre.

Early Training

Magritte first began to paint in 1915 and enrolled in the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels the following year. However, he was fairly uninspired by his classes, and his attendance suffered as a result. He did become close friends with a fellow student, Victor Servranckx, who introduced Magritte to Futurism, Cubism, and Purism. In particular, Magritte was drawn to the work of Jean Metzinger and Fernand Leger, both of whom had much influence on Magritte's early work, as is evident from his experiments with Cubism such as his 1925 piece Bather.

Mature Period

In 1921, Magritte performed his obligatory military service and returned home in 1922 to marry Georgette Berger, a girl he had known since childhood. He also began work under Servranckx's supervision as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory. This job lasted about a year, after which Magritte became a freelance designer of posters and publicity. In 1926, he signed a contract with the Galerie le Centaure in Brussels and was able to make his living as a fine artist for a brief spell. This early period was marked by profound changes in Magritte's work. Around 1925 he first saw the work of Giorgio de Chirico and began to work more distinctly within the Surrealist idiom. Not only were Magritte's images from the mid-1920s reminiscent of the desolate and mysterious mood that de Chirico created in his work, but the younger artist also went so far as to actually transpose many of de Chirico's favorite objects such as spheres, trains, and plaster hands onto his own canvases.

From 1927 to 1930, Magritte lived in Paris and forged strong connections with André Breton's coterie of Parisian Surrealists that at that time included artists such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. He began incorporating more ambiguously organic forms in his work and experimenting with quintessentially Surrealist subject matter such as madness and hysteria. However, Magritte was increasingly disillusioned by the "dark" subjects of his fellow Surrealists. Perhaps most significantly, it was in Paris that Magritte began to experiment with the use of words and language in his paintings.

By 1930, his contract with the Galerie le Centaure had ended, and, later that year, the gallery shut its doors altogether. Magritte returned to Brussels to take up work in commercial advertising once again. Scholars dispute whether Magritte also supplemented his income during this time by producing faked paintings of established artists and even perhaps forged currency. Regardless, from 1930 to 1937, Magritte had little time to devote to his own art. By the late 1930s however, the growing interest of international collectors, including Edward James in London, led to Magritte's increased financial independence, and he was at last able to give up commercial work almost completely.

Late Period

Just as Magritte was achieving success and recognition, the Second World War broke out. Although he continued to develop his signature style, he also increasingly deployed a bright, impressionistic palette as a subversive response to the bleakness of the war. He wrote, "The sense of chaos, of panic, which Surrealism hoped to foster so that everything might be called into question was achieved much more successfully by those idiots the Nazis... Against widespread pessimism, I now propose a search for joy and pleasure." In 1946, Magritte signed a manifesto called Surrealism in Full Sunlight, and broke with Breton. This phase was followed by Magritte's brief experiment with an intentionally provocative "savage" style he called "vache" ("cow") that was characterized by vulgar subjects, crude coloring, and is generally regarded as parodying the Fauves. As Magritte expected, his works in this style were phenomenally unpopular. For the remainder of the 1950s and '60s, Magritte returned to his characteristic style and set of subjects. By the end of his life, he enjoyed great success and there were six major retrospectives of his oeuvre in the 1960s alone.

The Legacy of René Magritte

Magritte's work had a major impact on a number of movements that followed his death, including Pop, Conceptualism, and the painting of the 1980s. In particular, his work was hailed as a harbinger of upcoming trends in art for its emphasis on concept over execution, its close association with commercial art, and its focus on everyday objects that were often repeated in pictorial space. It is easy to see why artists such as Andy Warhol, Martin Kippenberger, and Robert Gober cite Magritte as a profound influence.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on René Magritte

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

Similar Art

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Surely the most celebrated Belgian artist of the 20 th century, René Magritte has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. To support himself he spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this most likely shaped his fine art, which often has the abbreviated impact of an advertisement.

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Rene Magritte was one of the most well known and famous surrealist painters of all time, yet it was not until his 50s, when he was finally able to reach some form of fame and recognition for his work. He was extremely 	                    influential in the transformation of surrealism art, to the pop art movement, with the work he created, and the distinct style which he took with the creations that he made during the course of his career. Much of the work 	                    created by Rene Magritte, takes everyday, normal objects, and he would simply rearrange the figures, and locations, forcing the viewer to take a deeper look at what was in front of them, and at what the image truly represented.

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Rene Magritte was one of the most well known and famous surrealist painters of all time, yet it was not until his 50s, when he was finally able to reach some form of fame and recognition for his work. He was extremely 	                    influential in the transformation of surrealism art, to the pop art movement, with the work he created, and the distinct style which he took with the creations that he made during the course of his career. Much of the work 	                    created by Rene Magritte, takes everyday, normal objects, and he would simply rearrange the figures, and locations, forcing the viewer to take a deeper look at what was in front of them, and at what the image truly represented.

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Collective Invention, 1934 - Rene Magritte - WikiArt.org

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Collective Invention, 1934 by Rene Magritte, Brussels pre-war and war years. Surrealism. symbolic painting. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany

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The Surrealist art movement combined elements of its predecessors, Dada and cubism, to create something unknown to the art world. The movement was first rejected, but its eccentric ideas and unique techniques paved the way for a new form of art

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The Surrealist art movement combined elements of its predecessors, Dada and cubism, to create something unknown to the art world. The movement was first rejected, but its eccentric ideas and unique techniques paved the way for a new form of art

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This animation is inspired by the paintings of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. I really wanted to show what I like most about his paintings, the way of looking differently at normal things. The music is from Paul Simon.

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Rene Magritte: 100 Famous Paintings Analysis, Complete Works, & Bio

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During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II, Magritte remained in Brussels, which led to a break with fellow artist Andre Breton. After the fallout with Breton, Rene Magritte 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.

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Rene Magritte is great artist in surreal art.

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Synopsis

René Magritte was born in Belgium in 1898. After attending art school in Brussels, he worked in commercial advertising to support himself while he experimented with his painting. In the mid 1920s he began to paint in the surrealist style and became known for his witty and thought-provoking images and his use of simple graphics and everyday objects, giving new meanings to familiar things. With a popularity that increased over time, Magritte was able to pursue his art full-time and was celebrated in several international exhibitions. He experimented with numerous styles and forms during his life and was a primary influence on the pop art movement. He died in 1967.

A Difficult Crossing

René François Ghislain Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, on November 21, 1898, the oldest of three boys. His father's manufacturing business at times allowed the family to live in relative comfort, but financial difficulties were a constant threat and forced them to move about the country with some regularity. Magritte's young world was dealt a far more destructive blow in 1912, when his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in a river.

Magritte found solace from the tragedy in films and novels and especially through painting. His earliest surviving works from this era were accomplished in the impressionist style. However, in 1916 he left home for Brussels, where for the next two years he studied at Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Although he was ultimately unimpressed with the institution, he was nonetheless exposed to emerging styles such as cubism and futurism, which significantly altered the direction of his work. Indeed, many of Magritte's paintings from the early 1920s owe a clear debt to Pablo Picasso.

The Treachery of Images

In 1921 Magritte began his one year of compulsory military service before returning home and marrying Georgette Berger, whom he had known since he was a boy and with whom he would stay for the rest of his life. After a brief stint in a wallpaper factory, he found work as a freelance poster and advertisement designer while he continued to paint. Around this time Magritte saw the painting The Song of Love by Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and was so struck by its imagery that it sent his own work off in the new direction for which he would become known.

Placing familiar, mundane objects such as bowler hats, pipes and rocks in unusual contexts and juxtapositions, Magritte evoked themes of mystery and madness to challenge the assumptions of human perception. With early works such as The Lost Jockey and The Menaced Assassin Magritte quickly became one of the most important artists in Belgium and found himself at the center of its nascent surrealist movement. But when his first one-man show-in 1927 at the Galerie le Centaure-was poorly received, a disheartened Magritte left his homeland for France.

On the Threshold of Liberty

Settling in the Perreux-sur-Marne suburb of Paris, Magritte quickly fell in with some of surrealism's brightest lights and founding fathers, including writer André Breton, poet Paul Éluard and artists Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Joan Miró. Over the next few years he produced important works such as The Lovers and The False Mirror and also began to experiment with the use of text, as seen in his 1929 painting The Treachery of Images.

But despite the progress Magritte was making in his art, he had yet to find significant financial success, and in 1930 he and Georgette returned to Brussels, where he set up an ad agency with his younger brother Paul. Though the demands of their studio left Magritte little time for his own work over the next few years, interest in his paintings began to grow and soon he was selling enough to leave his commercial work behind.

Surrealism in Full Sunlight

In the late 1930s Magritte's newfound popularity resulted in exhibitions of his work in New York City and London. But the onset of World War II would soon alter the course of his life and art. His decision to remain in Belgium following the Nazi occupation caused a split between him and André Breton, and the suffering and violence caused by the war led him away from the often dark and chaotic moods of surrealism. "Against widespread pessimism," he said, "I now propose a search for joy and pleasure." Works from this period, such as The Return of the Flame and The Clearing, demonstrate this shift, with their brighter palettes and more impressionistic technique.

After the war, Magritte finalized his break with Breton's branch of surrealism when he and several other artists signed a manifesto titled "Surrealism in Full Sunlight." A period of experimentation during which Magritte's created garish and provocative paintings followed before he returned to his more familiar style and subject matter, including a 1948 reimagining of his Lost Jockey, painted the same year as his first one-man exhibition in Paris.

The Enchanted Domain

With the arrival of the 1950s, Magritte enjoyed ongoing international interest in his work and continued his prolific output. In 1951 he was commissioned to paint a cycle of murals for the casino at Knocke-le-Zoute, a town on the Belgian coast. Completed in 1953 and titled The Enchanted Domain, they were a celebration of some of his best-known images. More commissions around Belgium followed, as did major exhibitions of his work in Brussels and the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Some of his most important works from this period include the paintings Golconda and The Glass Key. He also introduced the now-iconic apple into his work, most recognizably in 1964's The Son of Man.

Despite having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1963, Magritte was able to travel to New York City for a 1965 retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. Magritte also explored other media during this time, making a series of short films that featured his wife, Georgette, as well as experimenting with sculpture. After a period of prolonged illness, on August 15, 1967, René Magritte died at the age of 68. His work proved to be a primary influence on pop artists such as Andy Warhol and has since been celebrated in countless exhibitions around the world. The Magritte Museum opened in Brussels in 2009.

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René Magritte was born in Belgium in 1898. After attending art school in Brussels, he worked in commercial advertising to support himself while he experimented with his painting. In the mid 1920s he began to paint in the surrealist style and became known for his witty and thought-provoking images and his use of simple graphics and everyday objects, giving new meanings to familiar things.

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Posted by Nicole Stodard on September 20, 2011 · 1 Comment Influences on playwrights and theatre practitioners run the gamut. Everyday life experiences are an obvious influence. History, another. Politics, psychology, religion, science, too. Whether we care to acknowledge it or not, other playwrights, practitioners, and companies inevitably influence the theatre we create.

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The double secret, 1927 - Rene Magritte - WikiArt.org

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The double secret, 1927 by Rene Magritte, Surrealist Paris years. Surrealism. symbolic painting

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