Rene Magritte

René François Ghislain Magritte (Lessines, November 21, 1898-Brussels, August 15, 1967) was a Belgian surrealist painter. Known for his witty and provocative imagery, his work aimed to change the preconditioned perception of reality and force the viewer to become hypersensitive to his environment.

Magritte endowed surrealism with a conceptual charge based on the play of ambiguous images and their meaning denoted through words, questioning the relationship between a painted object and a real one.

Biography

Magritte in 1922.

Little is known about Magritte's early years. He was born in Lessines, province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest of the children of Léopold Magritte, a tailor and cloth merchant, and Regina (née Bertinchamps). He began his drawing lessons in 1910. On March 12, 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning in the Sambre River. This was not her first attempt, as she had been trying to take her life for years, forcing her husband Léopold to lock her in her bedroom. One day she escaped and was lost for days. She was later discovered, dead, down the river. According to legend, Magritte, then 13, was present when the body was recovered from the water, but recent research has discredited the story. The image of his mother floating, her dress covering her face, may have influenced a series of paintings from 1927 to 1928, including one of his best-known works, Les Amants , but Magritte himself rejected this interpretation of the painting.

He took his first painting courses in Châtelet. In 1915 he began to make his first works along the lines of Impressionism. Between 1916 and 1918, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. He exhibited for the first time at the Brussels Art Center in 1920, together with Pierre-Louis Flouquet, with whom he shared a studio. After his military service, he temporarily works as a designer in a paper mill. In 1923 he participated with Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger and Paul Joostens in an exhibition at the Círculo Real Artístico.

His work from the period 1920-1924, due to his treatment of the themes of modern life, his brilliant color and his investigations into the relations of the three-dimensional form with the flat surface of the painting, show influences of Cubism, Orphism, Futurism and Purism.

In 1922 he sees a reproduction of The Love Song, a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, which deeply impresses him, and from 1926 he becomes independent of previous influences and bases his style on that of this painter. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger, a friend from his youth, who served as a model for some of his works.

In works such as The Adventure Tunic (1926), he expresses his sense of the mystery of the world through the irrational juxtaposition of objects in a silent atmosphere.

In The Threatened Assassin (1926), the perspective space derives from De Chirico and the sets of early film melodramas. In this same year he joined other Belgian musicians, writers and artists, in an informal group comparable to that of the Surrealists in Paris.

In 1927 he settled in the outskirts of Paris and participated, for the next three years, in the activities of the surrealist group (above all, he related to Éluard, Breton, Arp, Miró and Dalí). He brings to Parisian surrealism a revival of illusionism. Unlike Dalí, Magritte does not use painting to express his private obsessions or his fantasies, but expresses himself with wit, irony and a spirit of debate.

In 1928 he participated in the surrealist exhibition at the Goemans gallery in Paris.

In 1930 he returned to Brussels fleeing the controversial Parisian environment, and there he spent the rest of his days in peace.

Magical realism

From 1926, Magritte's style (also called "magical realism") changes little; between 1928 and 1930 he investigated the ambiguous relationships between words, images and the objects they denote. In The Perfidy of Images (1928-1929) he meticulously portrays a pipe, and below, with equal precision, he puts the legend Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe), questioning pictorial reality.

The Fake Mirror (1928) explores the same idea: the eye, like a fake mirror, reflecting the realistically painted white clouds and blue sky; In this painting he introduces the theme of the illusionistic landscape, interpreted in a pictorial key, far from any naturalistic intention. Magritte explores in all of his work the problem of real space as opposed to the spatial illusion, which is the transcript of painting itself. From the psychoanalytic point of view, the mirror represents the confusion of identity of the false self. This confusion occurs in the viewer at the moment of contemplating the work, not knowing if "he is seeing a reflection of the sky or if he looks at the sky through his eye"; or "if the eye of the painting looks at us or at the sky".

He makes many variations on this theme, perhaps the clearest of all is Euclid's Walks (1955), where he shows an easel with a painting in front of a window, through which see a landscape; the painted scene corresponds exactly to the fragment of landscape on which the painting is situated, taking the problem of painting, as a nature-illusion confrontation, to the fourth dimension. There he proposes a game of looks between the original perspective of a street next to a tower reflecting on the three dimensions of space but in the two dimensions of a canvas that occupies almost the size of the window and where what is supposed to continue is painted. a precise way with the panorama that the window offers us, taking advantage of raising a focus on the originals and the imitation.

In 1933 he had a solo exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels and in 1936 his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.

In that same year his work is present in the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In the 1940s, Magritte's work adopted a palette and brushstroke more typical of Impressionist painters, abandoning the precision and realistic appearance of his best-known paintings; Later, in 1947-1948, he developed a style close to Fauvism, with thick and impasto brushstrokes and vibrant colors. However, the critical response was generally hostile towards these works, and Magritte reverted to his earlier style. Characteristic of the fifties are the paintings in which both interior figures and landscapes and objects appear turned into rock.

Magritte Museum

"The basic shapes and themes, however, continue the fantasy of the commonplace during the sixties. A nighttime urban scene superimposed on a blue sky with floating sunset clouds; jockey races in cars and rooms; or an elegant horsewoman walking through a forest while being segmented by the trees. But Magritte's world always contains the mysterious man invisible in bowler hat and black coat alone or in groups, as in Golconda (1953), where a crowd of them descends on the city" (Arnason).

Throughout the forties he exhibited regularly at the Dietrich gallery in Brussels.

In the two successive decades he received numerous commissions for the execution of mural paintings in Belgium.

Since 1953, he has exhibited frequently at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York, Paris and Geneva. Retrospectives on his work are organized in 1954 at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels, and in 1960 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Dallas and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

He traveled to the United States for the first time in 1965, on the occasion of a retrospective dedicated to him by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the following year he travels to Israel.

He died in Brussels on August 15, 1967, a few days after the opening of a major exhibition of his work at the Boymans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

Style

Although he maintained a certain relationship with Breton and the surrealists, there were sometimes rifts between them. Magritte was always very independent, maintaining his ideas and artistic principles above fashion or group interests.

In his paintings it is very common to see games of duplications, absences and representations within representations; In addition, Magritte manipulated everyday images as a game with which to explore the limits of perception. More than the theoretical disquisitions and the automatism of the surrealists of the Paris group, Magritte is interested in irony, the subversion of the optical values of traditional painting, and puns. His paintings generally lack the complexity, drama, or convulsive appearance of other Surrealist works, often with nods or references to traditional painting. They are common to the other surrealists, however, the dreamlike appearance of his paintings, the taste for the & # 34; double image & # 34; or the fragmented image, and the iconoclastic irony.

One of the obsessions or recurring motif in his painting is the encounter of opposites, of contrasting realities that come together, resulting in paradoxical and strange. Thus, night landscapes illuminated by clear skies with clouds (The Empire of Lights series), boots that have the appearance of bare feet, heavy rocks or metal balls floating weightlessly in the air.

Outstanding works

• The Threatened Killer1926. New York Museum of Modern Art.
• The voice of the winds, 1928
• Lovers1928. Private collection, Brussels.
• This is not a pipe.1929. Los Angeles, County Museum.
• Collective invention, 1934
• Rape, 1934
• Human condition, 1935
• Clairvoyance, 1936
• The key to the fields1936. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.
• Prohibited reproduction, 1937
• The time pierced1939
• Golconda1953. Houston, Texas, Menil Collection.
• The Empire of Lights1953-54. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
• This isn't an apple.1954
• The castle of the Pyrenees (Le Château des PyrénéesOil on canvas, 200 × 145 cm, 1959, Museum of Israel of Jerusalem. It is cited as one of the most representative works of the painter.
• The Great Family1963
• The son of man1964. It represents a man with the apple on the face, that the lid almost entirely, on the bottom one appreciates an ocean and a cloudy sky. Oil on canvas of 78 × 58 cm. It's part of a private collection.
• The happy donor1966.
• The two mysteries1966.

Magritte Museum

History

The Magritte Museum is a section of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium housed in the Hôtel du Lotto, a building that is part of Belgium's vast neoclassical architectural complex on the Place Royale in Brussels.

The museum building dates from the late 18th century century, and is part of an architectural complex built after the fire in the Coudenberg Palace in 1731. Over the centuries, successive owners have transformed it into a hotel, a jewelry store, and eventually a museum.

The Place Royale and the buildings that surround it are a historical testimony of the Belgium of the Old Regime and its independence. In this square, the enthronement ceremony of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, King of the Belgians, took place on July 21, 1831, fifty years after its construction. The building was then transformed into a hotel for travelers for over a century, before being sold to a jeweler in the early 20th century.

In 1951, the façades and porticos bordering the Place Royale were recognized for their architectural and historical interest and were definitively protected from any alteration by a classification order on the Belgian heritage list.

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium took over the premises in 1962 and the Hotel Altenloh was transformed into a museum. In the 1980s major renovation works were carried out and the interior of the building was completely rebuilt.

Collection of the Magritte Museum

The importance of the collection of works by René Magritte and his international reputation deserve a space dedicated to the exhibition of the artist and his work. In 2007 the project for a future Magritte museum in the old Hotel Altenloh was born; The works began the following year and ended in 2009.

The collection of works by René Magritte at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium is the largest in the world, covering all periods of the artist's life; Furthermore, it is highly diversified, with paintings, drawings, gouaches, posters, publicity works, letters, photographs, sculptures, films and other documents.

Most of the collection comes from donations from the following people: Georgette Magritte, Irène Scutenaire-Hamoir, Germaine Kieckens, first wife of the famous draftsman Hergé, the painter Maurice Rapin and Mirabelle Dors, the Magritte Foundation, the University free of Brussels (ULB), as well as private loans.

The legacy of Irène Louis Scutenaire-Irène Hamoir to the museum includes numerous works by the painter: more than twenty paintings, twenty gouaches, forty drawings, etc. These works hung on the walls of the museum. These works were hung on the walls of his house located on Rue de la Luzerne. They are in particular:

• Portrait de Nougé1927.
• The Voleuse1927.
• Discovery1927.
• Character meditating on madness1928.
• Portrait of Irene Hamoir1936.
• The Lecture défendue1936.
• Bel Canto1938.
• The Great Hopes1940.
• Fifth station1943.
• The smile1943.
• The harvest1943.
• Good Fortune1945.
• The Natural Encounters1945.
• A thousand and a night1946.
• Intelligence1946.
• Le Lyrisme1947.
• Lola de Valence1948.

The Museo Magritte collection also includes more than 300 prints of photographs tracing Magritte's life: his family, his formative years, his friends, and his wife Georgette. Photography was essential to his art and these images were used to create his paintings.

Since 2010, there has been an exchange policy with the de Menil Foundation in Houston (Texas, USA) and some works have been loaned to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) for four months. In March 2012, a series of works on loan from a private collector of English origin were exhibited.

Writings of Magritte

• René Magritte, Manifestes et autres écrits, with avertissement of Marcel Mariën, Les Lèvres Nues, Bruxelles, 1972,
• Quatre-Vingt-Deux Lettres de René Magritte à Mirabelle Dors et Maurice Rapinwith letters from Noël Arnaud and Georgette Magritte, Paris, 1976.
• René Magritte, Écrits complets, edition made and annotated by André Blavier, Flammarion, Paris, 1979, 766 pages, ISBN 208064128X.
• René Magritte, Les Mots et les images, selection of writings, Labor, Bruxelles, 2000.