René Magritte
The master of the Surrealist riddle.
Magritte painted everyday objects in impossible contexts in a cool, clear style. He wanted to make us doubt images and words.
René Magritte was born in 1898 in Lessines, Belgium. When he was thirteen his mother took her own life by drowning herself in the River Sambre. The story that he saw her pulled from the water with her nightgown over her face is often told but is uncertain. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and for a long time earned his living as a wallpaper designer and commercial artist. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger, who became his lifelong companion and model.
His encounter with Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting around 1923 gave him his direction. He became a leading figure in Belgian Surrealism and lived in Paris from 1927 to 1930, where he mixed with André Breton and the other Surrealists. He was not happy there, however, and returned to Brussels, where he led a bourgeois life in a suit and bowler hat, the same clothes his famous figures wear.
Magritte did not paint dreams in the wild manner of Dalí. His style is matter-of-fact, almost like advertising or textbook illustrations, but the objects are placed in impossible contexts. The Treachery of Images of 1929, a pipe with the words “This is not a pipe”, is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The point is that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe. The Human Condition of 1933, a painting on an easel in front of a window, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Other famous pictures are The Empire of Light, a series from the 1950s with a house in the darkness of night beneath a bright daytime sky, Golconda of 1953, with men in bowler hats floating like rain, and The Son of Man of 1964, in which an apple hides a face. During and after the Second World War he tried for a time a brighter, Impressionist style and then a deliberately vulgar one, but returned to his clear manner.
Magritte died in 1967 in Brussels, where the Magritte Museum opened in 2009. His way of playing with the relationship between image, word and reality had a great influence on Pop Art and conceptual art, and his motifs have been borrowed extensively by advertising, album covers and film.