Rene Magritte
Rene
Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, on 21 November 1898. At the age
of twelve he began taking art classes in Chatelet, where he and his family
had just moved to. Painting had always seemed "vaguely magical"
to Magritte, who was an average student in school. After quitting high
school, he enrolled in 1916 at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels
where he followed the classes of drawing, Decorative Painting and Ornamental
Composition. Landscapes showing the Sambre river in which his mother had
killed herself in 1912, were among his first works.
Magritte's best
friend at the time was the young poet Pierre Bourgeois, of whom he made
several portraits. They became interested in modernity and the Italian
Futurists and invited Theo van Doesburg to give a lecture on
the Dutch movement 'The Style'.
In 1920, Magritte's first Futurist-inspired paintings were exhibited along
with works by the painter Pierre Flouquet. Pure geometric abstraction,
which had its roots in the Northern countries, seemed too radical to Magritte
who began to search for a different pictorial language, this time finding
it under the influence of Cubism and Futurism.
The year of 1922 meant a lot for Magritte. In 1922 Magritte got married with Georgette Berger, whom he had met at the age of fifteen and met again at in 1920. Magritte was inspired by Georgette and she became his model. He also became friendly with Victor Servranckx, who had developed a very personnel geometric-abstract style. This was the beginning of a new direction for Magritte.
His
first really outstanding works date from 1922-1923 and are characterized
by Cubo-Futurist reminiscences and the pleasure of a very sensual representation
in which women and colors are the dominant elements. He had realized that
resorting to abstraction had not enabled hum to 'make reality manifest.'
What he wanted was to establish a disturbing relationship between the
world and objects. Therefore, toward 1925, he decides "
only
to paint objects with all their visible details". By placing them
in situations which were unfamiliar to the spectator, he would "challenge
the real world". Magritte abandoned the plastic qualities of pictorial
art in favor of a more remote, colder style that portrayed images from
which all aestheticism had to be banished.
One of the first
works to display this change was Nocturne (1925). The work contains
element from the
iconography that Magritte created at the time and which he used throughout
his life: the painting within a painting, the bird in flight, and fire,
adding to the stage curtain an to the wooden bilboquet. These last two
elements are also at the heart of The
last Jockey (1926) which, according to Magritte, was a critical
milestone in his entry into Surrealism.
It gave him a mysterious feeling, an anxiety without reason.The feeling
of anxiety, which manifested itself in dark tonalities, lugubrious shapes
and mysterious juxtaposition of objects, invaded a large number of works
from these years.
In 1927 Magritte and Georgette moved to Paris to be closer to where it all happens. He started to take part in the activities of the Surrealists and he becomes friends with Andre Breton. In 1929 he even went to Cadaques to stay with the Surrealists Salvador Dali, Juan Miro and Paul Eluard for a holiday.
During
the same period (1925-1930), Magritte began combining words and images
in his paintings. These word-pictures were not mere illustrations of an
object or a concept. On the contrary, his work was intended to gently
destabilize our mental habits of representation. Magritte elaborated a
didactic classification of this type of painting, the simplest which consisted
of denying an images through words, or vice versa. The most celebrated
example of this is The Treachery
of Images (1929): 
This
is not a pipe since we can not smoke it. It is only a representation
of one. Another technique used by Magritte was to represent a familiar
object and to attribute to it a name other than its conventional one.
Through this gallery of word-paintings, Magritte plays on the discrepancies,
paradox, clarity and obscurity of common sense. The question remains as
to whether the words actually represent what we think. As a result, the
painting becomes a type of language.
Even
when he lived in Paris, Magritte did not have a single one-man exhibition.
In 1930, the effect of the economic crisis were apparent. His friend Goemans
was forced to close his Paris gallery and collectors and galleries were
bankrupt. Magritte no longer had a steady income and his relationship
with Breton had deteriorated as a result of a mutual independence of mind.
Discouraged he returned to Brussels and turned to commercial work.
With the support
of a network of friends and sponsors who enabled him to sustain his daily
life and to exhibit on several occasions 
at
the Palais des Beaux Arts, Magritte was able to pull through these difficult
years (1930-1940). At the same time he was earning a reputation abroad
and his work was being exhibited in one-man shows or in group shows with
other Surrealists in London, New York and Paris.
Magritte
shared the Surrealist concept of the power of desire and eroticism to
'change life' and wanted to translate this idea through unconventional
images. He continued involving metamorphosis in his work. In Black
Magic a naked woman leaning on a rock gradually merges into the
blue sky. The painter was, nevertheless, distrustful of the obvious seduction
of 'pretty colors'. In The
Rape he even pushed it to the point of obsession with the features
of a woman's face replaced by sexual attributes: breasts, belly button
and pubic hair. To avoid a scandal this painting was hidden by a velvet
curtain at the Minotaure exhibition in Brussels.
In 1940, Magritte
was going through a crisis resulting from the German Occupation, his precarious
financial situation and his dissatisfaction with his painting. From then
on, he 
decided
that a feeling of pleasure and an atmosphere of happiness had to predominate
over the sense of anxiety and suffocation which had previously inhabited
his work. In order to show the 'bright side of life', Magritte first thought
about changing his iconography and began to paint the leaf-birds which
we see in two works from 1942, Treasure
Island and The Companions of Fear.
In
1943, he was struck by a reproduction of Pierre Auguste Renoir's Bathers
which led to a decisive transformation in his work. Enticed by the
sensuality of the colors, he opted for a more luminous palette. While
continuing to draw objects and figures with the meticulousness for which
he was known, he added to them a touch clearly inspired by Impressionism,
unleashing color in new, warmer and more cheerful tonalities. Magritte
called this period his 'Sunlit' period.
Alexander
Iolas, who became Magritte's principal dealer in the United States, successfully
exhibited the artist's work in New York in 1947. Iolas therefor suggested
that Magritte forge
t
Renoir and focus his production on images which overwhelmingly appealed
to the public, like Treasure Island. Obligated to come to terms with the
necessities of life, Magritte created new combinations out of old images.
Megalomania (
1948) reveals similarities with The Marches of Summer (1938-1939):
a female torso (now in three parts), weightless cubes, blue sky with clouds
and a parapet. More works followed. For example The
Domain of Arnheim (1949), was originally painted in 1936.
Magritte
enjoyed the game of juxtaposing and manipulating motifs. An image could
exercise such powers of seduction that the painter felt compelled to reproduce
it many times. Rather than falling into
repetitive indifference, he devoted himself to particularly evident in
The dominion of Light
(1949), an evocation of the simultaneous presence of day and night, a
magnetization of the contradictions dear to the Surrealists. There are
sixteen versions of this work.
Among the works
by Magritte which, beginning in the mid-1950's, definitively ensured his
international recognition, one was the subject of extraordinary infatuation.
In Golconda (1953),
Magritte brilliantly united different motifs from his repertory: small
men in overcoats and bowler hats float weightlessly in a blue sky in front
of facades of houses.
Present since 1927, this bowler-hatted figure finally finds his true dimension.
He becomes Magritte's emblem par excellence. He is present in many works
after the 1950's, such as The intimate Friend (1958) and The
Great War (1964).
In 1965 a large retrospective of Magritte's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a manifestation of his worldwide recognition. Magritte referred to his work of the latest period (1958-1965) as his 'found children'. The iconographic elements, between them, in a reverting manner, finished by tying everything together in the last ten years of Magritte's life.
On 15 August 1967, Rene Magritte died in Brussels.
To the Magritte Gallery