René Magritte

in memory of René François Ghislain Magritte

"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."

'When I was a child, a little girl and I used to play in the old disused cemetry of a provincial town. We would explore the vaults, whose heavy iron trapdoors we were able to lift, and would climb up again into the daylight, where an artist from the city would be painting in a picturesque walk with broken stone columns scattered among the dead leaves. It seemed to me then that the art of painting was vaguely magical and the painter endowed with superior powers.'*
[*Magritte quoted in Louis Scutenaire 1947]

René Magritte describing some early memories; he was the kind of artist who would have been pleased to have met Alice through her looking-glass in a world where 'a place for everything and everything in its place' becomes a paradox - a seemingly absurd statement or self-contradictory - but nevertheless still really founded on truth. His vision of the world was one in which the peoples around him, like Lot's wife, could quite easily turn into pillars of salt, where French bread could drift across starlit blue skies as light as clouds, and where real clouds were made of granite; where trees were leaves, and mountains yearned to fly like soaring eagles; where bowler-hatted commuters precipitated from clear skies like April showers, and locomotive express trains screamed out of open fireplaces; where shoes grew toes, and mermaids became practical, growing legs where their tails should be, in exchange for gills where their breasts once were: a painter of visual riddles, which on first impression appear to be simply born out of the chance encounter between unrelated objects. In the skilful hands of Magritte, illogical ideas, hitherto unconnected in the mind, are opened up with new meanings which had been hidden, lost and forgotten through over-familiarity with things which we just take for granted. The work of René Magritte acts as an antidote for the old adage that familiarity always breeds contempt.
[Eddie Wolfram]

life

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.
{Presence of mind 1960}