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Life
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Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium in 1898. In 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. Magritte was present when her corpse was fished out of the water, and the image of his mother floating, dress obscuring her face, was to be prominent in his amant series. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for two years until 1918. During this time he met Georgette Berger, whom he married in 1922.
Magritte worked in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926 when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time.
In 1926, Magritte produced his first surrealist painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.
When Galerie la Centaure closed and the contract income ended, he returned to Brussels and worked in advertising. Then, with his brother, he formed an agency, which earned him a living wage.
During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. At the time he renounced the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, though he returned to the themes later.
His work showed in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.
Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels.
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Philosophical and artistic gestures
A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects, or an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, 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, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)
Note that Magritte pulled the same "stunt" in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an "internal" caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. It might be true that Magritte's point in these Ceci n'est pas works is that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas. But that interpretation trivializes Magritte's insight -- for it is true of any painting, and every artist and child would admit it, that what the painting does is only present an image of a thing, and the thing itself is not on or in the canvas.
It might be more plausible to interpret Magritte as commenting on Freudian psychoanalysis -- a topic not very far removed from many of his surrealistic works, anyway. Sigmund Freud, especially in his dream analysis, continually asserted that what clearly and obviously seemed to be an X in a dream was not really an X, that it was an X only patently, on the surface, but not latently or deeply, that the X in the dream represented or was a metaphor for some other thing, Y. The dream-image train is really a penis, for example. So when Magritte says "This is not a pipe," what he means is that it may be possible to think that it is only an image that stands for something else, that the phenomenal reality of the pipe obscures or hides the true reality lying underneath. The difficult question, if we go this far, is whether Magritte intended to provide support for or to illustrate sympathetically Freudian dream analysis -- the treachery of dreams -- or, instead, was mocking it: "You mean this image, which is obviously a pipe-image, is not really a pipe-image? Tell me another!"
His art shows a more representational style of surrealism compared to the "automatic" style seen in works by artists like Joan Miró. In addition to fantastic elements, his work is often witty and amusing. He also created a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings.
René Magritte described his paintings saying,
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.
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In popular culture
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In the UK TV series Sapphire & Steel, (in the untitled fourth serial), the appearance of the faceless spirit, and of the photos he hides inside, are based on Magritte's works.
In the 1992 film Toys, using Magritte-inspired imagery, Robin Williams and Joan Cusack make a fake music video of "The Mirror Song" by Trevor Horn and Bruce Wooley. The song was acted in the video by Williams and Cusack using the pseudonyms "Yolanda and Steve." They wore bowler hats and overcoats while the video imagery referenced The Son of Man and Golconda. For the latter, the little bowler-hatted figures were shown slowly descending.
Indie pop/rock band Recover titled their 2002 album "Ceci n'est pas." The album cover features a picture of the band on a background similar to The Treachery of Images; "Ceci n'est pas Recover" is written under the picture in a font similar to that of the painting.
The cover of Australian band Expatriate's "lovers le strange" E.P. * is also based on "The Lovers".
On the set of the television show Good Eats, there is a painting over a fireplace of a turkey floating in front of a sky background with a bowler hat floating above it, an obvious reference to Magritte's painting "The Son of Man".
On his 2003 album Hobo Sapiens, John Cale (former member of The Velvet Underground) included a song titled "Magritte". The song pays homage to the artist, through such lines as "And how often we forgot Magritte / How we remembered him then / And worshipped at his feet / Pinned to the edges of vision."
The cover of Jackson Browne's 1974 album, Late for the Sky, is inspired by Magritte's L'Empire des Lumieres.
Paul McCartney is a life-long fan of Magritte and owns many of his paintings. His wife Linda bought him Magritte's easel for a birthday present. He claims that Magritte's Apple painting inspired him to the name Apple for the company that dealt with the Beatle's business.
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Selected list of works
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1925 The Bather and The Window
1926 The 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 the Clouds and The Encounter
1927 The Meaning of Night, Let Out of School, The Murderer Threatened, The Man from the Sea, The Tiredness of Life, The Light-breaker, A Passion for Light and The Muscles of the Sky
1928 The Lining of Sleep, Intermission, The Flowers of the Abyss, Discovery, The Lovers I & II * *, The Daring Sleeper, The Acrobat’s Ideas, The Automaton, The Empty Mask and Attempting the Impossible
1930 Pink Belles, Tattered Skies, The Eternally Obvious, The Lifeline, The Annunciation and Celestial Perfections
1931 The Voice of the Air, Summer and The Giantess
1932 The Universe Unmasked
1933 The Human Condition and The Unexpected Answer
1935 The Discovery of Fire, The Human Condition, Revolution, Perpetual Motion, Collective Invention, The False Mirror and The Portrait
1936 Clairvoyance, The Healer, The Philosopher’s Lamp, Spiritual Exercises and Forbidden Literature
1937 The Future of Statues and The Black Flag
1938 Time Transfixed and Steps of Summer
1940 The Return, The Wedding Breakfast
1941 The Break in the Clouds
1942 Misses de L’Isle Adam and The Misanthropes
1943 Universal Gravitation and Monsieur Ingres’s Good Days
1944 ? The Domain of Arnheim
1945 Treasure Island and Black Magic
1947 The Cicerone, The Liberator, The Fair Captive and The Red Model
1948 Blood Will Tell, Memory, The Mountain Dweller, The Art of Life, The Pebble, The Lost Jockey (1948) and Famine
1949 Megalomania, Elementary Cosmogany and Perspective, the Balcony
1950 Making an Entrance, The Legend of the Centuries, Towards Pleasure, The Labors of Alexander and The Art of Conversation
1951 David’s Madame Récamier, The Song of the Violet, The Spring Tide and The Smile
1954 The Invisible World and The Empire of Light
1956 The Sixteenth of September
1957 The Fountain of Youth
1959 The Castle in the Pyrenees, The Battle of the Argonne, The Anniversary and The Glass Key
1960 The Memoirs of a Saint
1962 The Great Table, The Healer, Waste of Effort and Mona Lisa (circa 1962)
1963 The Great Family, The Open Air, The Beautiful Season, Princes of the Autumn, Young Love and The Telescope
1965 Carte Blanche and Ages Ago
1966 The Shades, The Happy Donor, The Gold Ring, The Pleasant Truth and The Mysteries of the Horizon
1967 Good Connections, The Art of Living and several bronze sculptures based on Magritte’s previous works.
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See also
The Exorcist, film poster and shot inspired by The Empire of Light (L'Empire des lumières)* *
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