René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte (November 21, 1898 – August 15, 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He is well known for a number of witty and amusing images.
Life
Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor, and his wife Adeline, a milliner. He began drawing lessons in 1910. In 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, and the image of his mother floating, her 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. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger, whom he had met in 1913.[1]
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.
Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced Pop, Minimalist, and Conceptual art.[2] In 2005 he came 9th in the Walloon version of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian); in the Flemish version he was 8th.
Philosophical and artistic gestures
A consummate technician, his 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. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)
Magritte pulled the same stunt 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 seems to suggest that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas.
His art shows a more representational style of surrealism compared to the "automatic" style seen in works by artists like Joan Miró. In addition to fantastic elements, his work is often witty and amusing. He also created a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings.
René Magritte described his paintings by saying,
- 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.
In popular culture
- The Jeff Beck group reproduced Magritte's "The Listening Room" on the cover of their 1969 album Beck-Ola.
- Rock band Styx adapted Magritte's 1965 piece Carte Blanche for the cover of their album The Grand Illusion.
- The music video for Todd Rundgren's 1981 song "Time Heals" features in the background numerous paintings by Magritte and by Salvador Dalí.
- The covers of the albums The Pleasure Principle by Gary Numan and The Pleasures of Electricity by John Foxx were based on Magritte's painting Le Principe du Plaisir.
- In the UK TV series Sapphire & Steel, (in the untitled fourth serial), the appearance of the faceless spirit, and of the photos he hides inside, are based on Magritte's works.
- Paul Simon writes of René and Georgette Magritte in Christopher Street in New York with his song René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War, on the 1983 album Hearts and Bones.
- Playwright Barry Kornhauser wrote a play about Magritte's early life, This Is Not a Pipe Dream, which was published in 1993.
- In the 2004 film I Heart Huckabees, Magritte is referenced by Bernard Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman) as he holds onto a bowler hat. This particular hat is a recurring element of Magritte's work, appearing in The Son of Man and Golconda.
- The Son of Man was used in the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair and in the 2004 short film Ryan.
- In the 1992 film Toys, using Magritte-inspired imagery, Robin Williams and Joan Cusack make a fake music video of "The Mirror Song" by Trevor Horn and Bruce Wooley. The song was acted in the video by Williams and Cusack using the pseudonyms "Yolanda and Steve." They wore bowler hats and overcoats while the video imagery referenced The Son of Man and Golconda. For the latter, the little bowler-hatted figures were shown slowly descending.
- Demeter Fragrances, known for their unique scents, has a scent called "This is not a Pipe" named after the painting "ceci n'est pas une pipe".
- Indie rock band Recover titled their 2002 album "Ceci n'est pas." The album cover features a picture of the band on a background similar to The Treachery of Images; "Ceci n'est pas Recover" is written under the picture in a font similar to that of the painting.
- The cover of the album "Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation" by the Welsh Post-hardcore band Funeral for a Friend is based on the two paintings "The Lovers" [1] by Magritte.
- The cover of Australian band Expatriate's "lovers le strange" E.P. [2] is also based on "The Lovers".
- The cover of the 2005 album Frances The Mute by The Mars Volta was inspired by "The Lovers" as well.
- On the set of the television show Good Eats, there is a painting over a fireplace of a turkey floating in front of a sky background with a bowler hat floating above it, an obvious reference to Magritte's painting "The Son of Man".
- On his 2003 album Hobo Sapiens, John Cale (former member of The Velvet Underground) included a song titled "Magritte". The song pays homage to the artist, through such lines as "And how often we forgot Magritte / How we remembered him then / And worshipped at his feet / Pinned to the edges of vision."
- The cover of Jackson Browne's 1974 album, Late for the Sky, is inspired by Magritte's "L'Empire des Lumieres."
- Paul McCartney is a life-long fan of Magritte and owns many of his paintings. His wife Linda bought him Magritte's easel for a birthday present. He claims that Magritte's Apple painting inspired him to use the name Apple for the company that dealt with the Beatle's business.
- In the 2006 film Stranger than Fiction, protagonist Harold Crick, a dull businessman, carries a green apple in his mouth as he heads to work at the start of the film; the loss of the apple plays a part in the resolution of the film.
- The painting of the man with an apple floating in front of his face is one of several paintings seen in Michael Jackson's music video Scream.
- In Treehouse of Horror IV Bart Simpson walks past a gallery of famous paintings parodied with Simpsons characters. One of the paintings is Bart in tuxedo with an apple floating in front of his face.
- The painting "Ceci n' est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) was used in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to illustrate how art can be an illusion.
- Magritte's work has apparently also inspired MTV jingle during the early 90s, with the paintings "ceci n'est pas une pomme" and "ceci n'est pas une pipe", referring to the MTV slogan "ceci est MTV".
- Alan Hull of UK folk-rock band Lindisfarne used Magritte's paintings on two of his solo albums. 1973's 'Pipedream' and 1979's 'Phantoms'. 'La Lampe Philosophique' is reproduced for the cover of Pipedream. In addition, the same painting inspired the song 'Peter Prophy Don't Care', recorded for the band's 1971 LP Fog on the Tyne ('Your nose is in your pipe...').
- The Forbidden Game: The Chase by L.J. Smith referred to the painting and quote "This is not a pipe" and about knowing the difference between image and reality. This key event helped solve the entire conflict in the book.
- The song "Dancing on the Rock" on Dave Sterling's CD Along the Curve is inspired by the painting La Chateau des Pyrenees.
- In an episode of Boston Legal, (Smile), Alan Shore attempts to get a young girl prodigy into an acclaimed private school. The young girl claims to be a fan of Magritte and references "ceci n'est pas une pipe".
Selected list of works
- 1920 Landscape
- 1922 The Station
- 1923 Sixth Nocturne
- 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 and The Encounter
- 1927 The Meaning of Night, Let Out of School, The Murderer Threatened, The Man from the Sea, The Tiredness of Life, The Light-breaker, A Passion for Light, The Menaced Assassin, Reckless Sleeper and The Muscles of the Sky
- 1928 The Lining of Sleep, Intermission, The Flowers of the Abyss, Discovery, The Lovers I & II [3] [4], The Daring Sleeper, The Acrobat’s Ideas, The Automaton, The Empty Mask, Reckless Sleeper, and Attempting the Impossible
- 1929 The Treachery of Images, 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
- 1933 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 and Forbidden Literature
- 1937 The Future of Statues and The Black Flag
- 1938 Time Transfixed and Steps of Summer
- 1939 Victory
- 1940 The Return, The Wedding Breakfast
- 1941 The Break in the Clouds
- 1942 Misses de L’Isle Adam and The Misanthropes
- 1943 Universal Gravitation and Monsieur Ingres’s Good Days
- 1944 ? The Domain of Arnheim
- 1945 Treasure Island and Black Magic
- 1947 The Cicerone, The Liberator, The Fair Captive and The Red Model
- 1948 Blood Will Tell, Memory, The Mountain Dweller, The Art of Life, The Pebble, The Lost Jockey (1948) and Famine
- 1949 Megalomania, Elementary Cosmogany and Perspective, the Balcony
- 1950 Making an Entrance, The Legend of the Centuries, Towards Pleasure, The Labors of Alexander and The Art of Conversation
- 1951 David’s Madame Récamier, Pandora's Box, The Song of the Violet, The Spring Tide and The Smile
- 1952 Personal Values
- 1953 Golconda, The Listening Room and a fresco for the Knokke Casino
- 1954 The Invisible World 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
- 1958 The Golden Legend
- 1959 The Castle in the Pyrenees, The Battle of the Argonne, The Anniversary and The Glass Key
- 1960 The Memoirs of a Saint
- 1962 The Great Table, The Healer, 'Waste of Effort and Mona Lisa (circa 1962)
- 1963 The Great Family, The Open Air, The Beautiful Season, Princes of the Autumn, Young Love and The Telescope
- 1964 Evening Falls, The Great War, The Son of Man and Song of Love
- 1965 Carte Blanche and Ages Ago
- 1966 The Shades, The Happy Donor, The Gold Ring, The Pleasant Truth and The Mysteries of the Horizon
- 1967 Good Connections, The Art of Living and several bronze sculptures based on Magritte’s previous works.
See also
- On the Threshold of Liberty, Magritte's 1929 painting.
- The Son of Man, Magritte's 1964 painting
- Golconda, Magritte's 1953 painting
- List of Belgian painters
- The Exorcist, film poster and shot inspired by The Empire of Light (L'Empire des lumières)[5] [6]
Notes
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- 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.
External links
- Foundation Magritte
- Collection of books on Magritte
- René Magritte Museum at Brussels
- The Magritte Site
- Magritte at Artcyclopedia
- Magritte paintings, biography and historical information
- René Magritte - His Life, His Work
Credits
New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:
The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:
Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.
![[1]](http://www.paintingstogo.com/magritte/the_lovers_2.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://www.amo.org.au/media/release_cover/14661.jpg){kind=link}
![[3]](http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/%7Emalek/magrit11.jpg){kind=link}