René Magritte
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| René Magritte | |
 Portrait of Magritte by Lothar Wolleh, 1967 |
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| Birth name | René François Ghislain Magritte |
| Born | November 21, 1898 Lessines, Belgium |
| Died | August 15, 1967 (aged 68) Brussels, Belgium |
| Nationality | Belgian |
| Field | Painter |
| Movement | Surrealism |
| Works | The Treachery of Images On the Threshold of Liberty The Son of Man |
René François Ghislain Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. His intended goal for his work was to challenge the observer's preconditioned perceptions of reality and force the viewer to become hypersensitive to their surroundings.
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[edit] Early life and career
Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, who was a tailor and textile merchant,[1] and Régina (née Bertinchamps), a milliner until her marriage. Little is known about Magritte's early life. He began lessons in drawing in 1910. On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Léopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. She was later discovered a mile or so down the river, dead. According to a legend, 13 year old Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but recent research has discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse.[2] The image of his mother floating, her dress obscuring her face, may have influenced a 1927–1928 series of paintings of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants, but Magritte disliked this explanation.[3]
Magritte's earlist paintings, which date from about 1915, were Impressionistic in style.[2] From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but found the instruction uninspiring. The paintings he produced during the years 1918–1924 were influenced by Futurism and by the offshoot of Cubism practiced by Metzinger.[2] Most of his works of this period are female nudes.
In 1922 Magritte married Georgette Berger, whom he had met as a child in 1913.[1] Before they were married, Magritte went overseas to serve in the Belgian infantry in Leopoldsberg, Austria, and Antwerp, Belgium from 1921 to the first half of 1922. He worked as a draughtsman 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 surreal 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.
Galerie la Centaure closed at the end of 1929, ending Magritte's contract income. Having made little impact in Paris, Magritte returned to Brussels in 1930 and resumed working in advertising.[4] He and his brother, Paul, formed an agency which earned him a living wage.
Surrealist patron Edward James allowed Magritte, in the early stages of his career, to stay rent free in his London home and paint. James is featured in two of Magritte's pieces, Le Principe du Plaisir (The Pleasure Principle) and La Reproduction Interdite.[5]
During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. He 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. In 1946, renouncing the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, he joined several other Belgian artists in signing the manifesto Surrealism in Full Sunlight.[6] During 1947–48—Magritte's "Vache Period"—he painted in a provocative and crude Fauve style. During this time, Magritte supported himself through the production of fake Picassos, Braques and Chiricos—a fraudulent repertoire he was later to expand into the printing of forged banknotes during the lean postwar period. This venture was undertaken alongside his brother Paul Magritte and fellow Surrealist and 'surrogate son' Marcel Marien, to whom had fallen the task of selling the forgeries.[7] At the end of 1948, he returned to the style and themes of his prewar surrealistic art.
His work was exhibited 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 15 August 1967 in his own bed, and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels.
Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art.[8] In 2005 he came 9th in the Walloon version of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian); in the Flemish version he was 18th.
The Magritte Museum opened to the public on 30 May, 2009 in Brussels. Housed in the neo-classical Hotel Altenloh, on the Place Royale, it houses some 250 original Magritte works.[9]
[edit] Philosophical and artistic gestures
Magritte's work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in 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. It does not "satisfy emotionally"—when Magritte once was asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco.[10]
Magritte used the same approach 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. In these Ceci n'est pas works, Magritte points out that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself.
Among Magritte's works are a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings. Elsewhere, Magritte challenges the difficulty of artwork to convey meaning with a recurring motif of an easel, as in his The Human Condition series (1933, 1935) or The Promenades of Euclid (1955) (wherein the spires of a castle are "painted" upon the ordinary streets which the canvas overlooks). In a letter to André Breton, he wrote of The Human Condition that it was irrelevant if the scene behind the easel differed from what was depicted upon it, "but the main thing was to eliminate the difference between a view seen from outside and from inside a room."[11] The windows in some of these pictures are framed with heavy drapes, suggesting a theatrical motif.[12]
Magritte's style of surrealism is more representational than the "automatic" style of artists such as Joan Miró. Magritte's use of ordinary objects in unfamiliar spaces is joined to his desire to create poetic imagery. He described the act of painting as "the art of putting colors side by side in such a way that their real aspect is effaced, so that familiar objects—the sky, people, trees, mountains, furniture, the stars, solid structures, graffiti—become united in a single poetically disciplined image. The poetry of this image dispenses with any symbolic significance, old or new.”[13]
René Magritte described his paintings as "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."[14]
Magritte's constant play with reality and illusion has been attributed to the early death of his mother. Psychoanalysts who have examined bereaved children have said that Magritte's back and forth play with reality and illusion reflects his "constant shifting back and forth from what he wishes—'mother is alive'—to what he knows—'mother is dead' "[15]
[edit] Artists influenced by Magritte
Contemporary artists have been greatly influenced by René Magritte's stimulating examination of the fickleness of images. Some artists who have been influenced by Magritte's works include John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Vija Celmins, Marcel Broodthaers and Martin Kippenberger. Some of the artists' works integrate direct references and others offer contemporary viewpoints on his abstract fixations.[16]
Magritte's use of simple graphic and everyday imagery has been compared to that of the Pop artists. Magritte's influence in the development of Pop art has been widely recognized,[17] although Magritte himself discounted the connection. He considered the Pop artists' representation of "the world as it is" as "their error", and contrasted their attention to the transitory with his concern for "the feeling for the real, insofar as it is permanent."[17] The 2006-2007 LACMA exhibition “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images" examined the relationship between Magritte and contemporary art.[18]
[edit] In popular culture
The 1960s brought a great increase in public awareness of Magritte's work.[19] Thanks to his "sound knowledge of how to present objects in a manner both suggestive and questioning", his works have been frequently adapted or plagiarized in advertisements, posters, book covers and the like.[20] Examples include rock album covers such as the 1969 album Beck-Ola by the Jeff Beck group (reproducing Magritte's The Listening Room),[citation needed] Jackson Browne's 1974 album, Late for the Sky, with artwork inspired by Magritte's L'Empire des Lumières,[citation needed] and the Firesign Theatre's album Just Folks . . . A Firesign Chat based on The Mysteries of the Horizon.[citation needed]
Paul Simon's song "Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War" appears on the 1983 album Hearts and Bones.
Numerous films have included imagery inspired by Magritte.[citation needed] According to Ellen Burstyn, in the 1998 documentary The Fear of God: 25 Years of "The Exorcist", the iconic poster shot for the film The Exorcist was inspired by Magritte's L'Empire des Lumières.
[edit] Selected list of works
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- 1920 Landscape
- 1922 The Station and L'Écuyère
- 1923 Self-portrait, Sixth Nocturne, Georgette at the Piano and Donna
- 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, Popular Panorama, Landscape and The Encounter
- 1927 Young Girl Eating a Bird, The Oasis (started in 1925), ″Le Double Secret", The Meaning of Night, Let Out of School, The Man from the Sea, The Tiredness of Life, The Light-breaker, A Passion for Light, The Menaced Assassin, Reckless Sleeper, La Voleuse, The Fast Hope, L'Atlantide and The Muscles of the Sky
- 1928 The Lining of Sleep (started in 1927), Intermission (started in 1927), The Flowers of the Abyss, Discovery, The Lovers I & II[1] [2], The Voice of Space, The Daring Sleeper, The Acrobat's Ideas, The Automaton, The Empty Mask, Reckless Sleeper, The Secret Life and Attempting the Impossible
- 1929 The Treachery of Images (started in 1928), Threatening Weather and On the Threshold of Liberty
- 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 Elective Affinities, The Human Condition and The Unexpected Answer
- 1934 The Rape
- 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, Portrait of Irène Hamoir, La Méditation and Forbidden Literature
- 1937 The Future of Statues, The Black Flag, Not to be Reproduced, Portrait of Edward James and Portrait of Rena Schitz, On the Threshold of Liberty
- 1938 Time Transfixed, The Domain of Arnheim and Steps of Summer
- 1939 Victory
- 1940 The Return, The Wedding Breakfast and Les Grandes Espérances
- 1941 The Break in the Clouds
- 1942 Misses de L'Isle Adam, L'Ile au Tréson, Memory, Black Magic and The Misanthropes
- 1943 Universal Gravitation and Monsieur Ingres's Good Days
- 1944 The Good Omens
- 1945 Treasure Island, Les Rencontres Naturelles and Black Magic
- 1946 L'Intellience and Les Mille et une Nuits
- 1947 The Cicerone, The Liberator, The Fair Captive, La Part du Feu and The Red Model
- 1948 Blood Will Tell, Memory, The Mountain Dweller, The Art of Life, The Pebble, The Lost Jockey, God's Solon, Shéhérazade, L'Ellipse and Famine and The Taste of Sorrow
- 1949 Megalomania, Elementary Cosmogany, and Perspective, the Balcony
- 1950 Making an Entrance, The Legend of the Centuries, Towards Pleasure, The Labors of Alexander, The Empire of Light II, The Fair Captive and The Art of Conversation
- 1951 David's Madame Récamier (parodying the Portrait of Madame Récamier), Pandora's Box, The Song of the Violet, The Spring Tide and The Smile
- 1952 Personal Values and Le Sens de la Pudeur
- 1953 Golconda, The Listening Room and a fresco for the Knokke Casino
- 1954 The Invisible World, The Explanation and The Empire of Light
- 1955 Memory of a Journey and The Mysteries of the Horizon
- 1956 The Sixteenth of September
- 1957 The Fountain of Youth and The Enchanted Domain
- 1958 The Golden Legend, Hegel's Holiday, The Banquet and The Familiar World
- 1959 The Castle in the Pyrenees, The Battle of the Argonne, The Anniversary, The Month of the Grape Harvest and The Glass Key
- 1960 The Memoirs of a Saint
- 1962 The Great Table, The Healer, Waste of Effort, Mona Lisa (circa 1962) and L'embeillie (circa 1962)
- 1963 The Great Family, The Open Air, The Beautiful Season, Princes of the Autumn, Young Love, La Recherche de la Vérité and The Telescope
- 1964 Evening Falls, The Great War, The Son of Man and Song of Love
- 1965 Carte Blanche, The Thought Which Sees, Ages Ago and The Beautiful Walk (circa 1965)
- 1966 The Shades, The Happy Donor, The Gold Ring, The Pleasant Truth, The Two Mysteries, and The Mysteries of the Horizon
- 1967 Les Grâces Naturelles, La Géante, The Blank Page, Good Connections, The Art of Living and several bronze sculptures based on Magritte's previous works.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b Meuris 1991, p 216.
- ^ a b c Calvocoressi 1990, p. 9.
- ^ International Paintings and Sculpture | Les Amants [The lovers]
- ^ Meuris 1991, p. 217.
- ^ "Professor Bram Hammacher", The Edward James Foundation souvenir guide, edited Peter Sarginson, 1992.
- ^ Meuris 1991, p. 218.
- ^ http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ceci-nest-pas-an-artist-1147477.html
- ^ Calvocoressi 1990, p. 26.
- ^ "Two New Museums for Tintin and Magritte". Time. 30 May 2009.
- ^ Spitz 1994, p.47
- ^ Sylvester 1992, p. 298
- ^ Spitz 1994, p. 50
- ^ Frasnay, Daniel. The Artist’s World. “Magritte.” New York: The Viking Press, 1969. pp. 99-107.
- ^ "Flanders - New Magritte Museum Brussels". www.visitflanders.us. http://www.visitflanders.us/index.php?page=NewMagritteMuseumBrussels. Retrieved on 2009-03-29.
- ^ Collins, Bradley I. Jr. "Psychoanalysis and Art History". Art Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2, College Art Association. pp. 182-186.
- ^ Amra Brooks (December 27, 2006), Los Angeles: Magritte by Baldessari, Road Trips and Rock 'n' Roll, ARTINFO, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/24140/los-angeles-magritte-by-baldessari-road-trips-and-rock-n-roll/, retrieved on 2008-04-24
- ^ a b Meuris 1991, p. 202.
- ^ Stephanie Brown (2006), Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, Los Angeles county Museum of Art and Ludion
- ^ Calvocoressi, 1990, p. 26.
- ^ Meuris 1991, pp. 199–201.
[edit] References
- West, Shearer (1996). The Bullfinch Guide to Art. UK: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. ISBN 0-8212-2137-X.
- Calvocoressi, Richard (1990). Magritte. New York: Watson-Guptill. ISBN 0-8230-2962-X.
- Meuris, Jacques (1991). René Magritte. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-0546-7.
- Roisin, Jacques (1998). Ceci n'est pas une biographie de Magritte. Bruxelles: Alice Editions. ISBN 2-930182-05-9.
- Kaplan, Gilbert E. and Baum, Timothy (1982). The Graphic Work of René Magritte. Two Editions. ISBN 0-6863-9199-3.
- Spitz, Ellen Handler (1994). Museums of the Mind. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-3000-6029-7.
- Sylvester, David (1992). Magritte. Abrams. ISBN 0-5000-9227-3.
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: René Magritte |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: René Magritte |
- Foundation Magritte
- René Magritte Museum at Brussels
- Magritte at Artcyclopedia
- Patricia Allmer, "La Reproduction Interdite: René Magritte and Forgery" in Papers of Surrealism, Issue 5, Spring 2007.
- University of Iowa Art Gallery
- Musée Magritte Museum at Brussels
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