Magritte, René

Magritte, René (1898–1967). Belgian painter, sculptor, printmaker, and film-maker, one of the outstanding figures of Surrealism. He was born in Lessines, the son of a prosperous manufacturer (there is some doubt about his exact profession), and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1916–18, following an adolescence clouded by the suicide of his mother in 1912. After initially working in a Cubist-Futurist style, he turned to Surrealism in 1925 under the influence of de Chirico and by the following year had already emerged as a highly individual artist with The Menaced Assassin (MOMA, New York), a picture that displays the startling and disturbing juxtapositions of the ordinary, the strange, and the erotic that were to characterize his work for the rest of his life.

In 1927–30 Magritte lived in Paris, partici pating in Surrealist affairs, but like many others in the movement he fell out with André Breton, and he spent almost all of the rest of his life working in Brussels, where he lived a life of bourgeois regularity (the bowler-hatted figure who often features in his work is to some extent a self-portrait). Apart from a period in the 1940s when he experimented first with pseudo- Impressionist brushwork and then with a Fauve technique, he worked in a precise, scrupulously banal manner (a reminder of his early days of his career when he made his living designing wallpaper and drawing fashion advertisements) and he always remained true to Surrealism. Iconographically he had a repertory of obsessive images that appeared again and again in ordinary but incongruous surroundings. Enormous rocks that float in the air and fishes with human legs are typical leitmotifs. He loved visual puns and paradoxes and repeatedly exploited ambiguities concerning real objects and images of them (many of his works feature paintings within paintings), inside and out-of-doors, day and night. In a number of paintings, for example, he depicted a night scene, or a city street lit only by artificial light, below a clear sunlit sky. He also made Surrealist analogues of famous paintings—for example David's Madame Récamier and Manet's The Balcony—in which he replaced the figures with coffins. Late in life he also made wax sculptures based on such paintings, and some of them were cast in bronze after his death (Madame Récamier, Pompidou Centre, Paris). He also made prints and a few short comic films, using his friends as actors.

Magritte's work was included in many Surrealist exhibitions, but it was not until he was in his 50s that he began to achieve international success and honours; in the 1950s and 1960s he painted several large mural commissions (notably for the Casino at Knocke-leZoute, 1951–3) and he was given major retrospective exhibitions in Brussels (1954), New York (1965), and Rotterdam (1967). By the time of his death his work had had a powerful influence on Pop art, and it has subsequently been widely imitated in advertising. In the fertility of his imagery, the unforced spontaneity of his effects, and not least his rare gift of humour, he was one of the very few natural and inspired Surrealist painters. J. T. Soby summed this up felicitously in his book on the artist (1965) when he wrote: ‘In viewing Magritte's paintings … everything seems proper. And then abruptly the rape of commonsense occurs, usually in broad daylight.’