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Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, on 21 November 1898. At the age of twelve he began taking art classes in Chatelet, where he and his family had just moved to. Painting had always seemed "vaguely magical" to Magritte, who was an average student in school. After quitting high school, he enrolled in 1916 at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels where he followed the classes of drawing, Decorative Painting and Ornamental Composition. Landscapes showing the Sambre river in which his mother had killed herself in 1912, were among his first works.

Magritte's best friend at the time was the young poet Pierre Bourgeois, of whom he made several portraits. They became interested in modernity and the Italian Futurists and invited Theo van Doesburg to give a lecture on the Dutch movement 'The Style'. In 1920, Magritte's first Futurist-inspired paintings were exhibited along with works by the painter Pierre Flouquet. Pure geometric abstraction, which had its roots in the Northern countries, seemed too radical to Magritte who began to search for a different pictorial language, this time finding it under the influence of Cubism and Futurism.

The year of 1922 meant a lot for Magritte. In 1922 Magritte got married with Georgette Berger, whom he had met at the age of fifteen and met again at in 1920. Magritte was inspired by Georgette and she became his model. He also became friendly with Victor Servranckx, who had developed a very personnel geometric-abstract style. This was the beginning of a new direction for Magritte.

His first really outstanding works date from 1922-1923 and are characterized by Cubo-Futurist reminiscences and the pleasure of a very sensual representation in which women and colors are the dominant elements. He had realized that resorting to abstraction had not enabled hum to 'make reality manifest.' What he wanted was to establish a disturbing relationship between the world and objects. Therefore, toward 1925, he decides "only to paint objects with all their visible details". By placing them in situations which were unfamiliar to the spectator, he would "challenge the real world". Magritte abandoned the plastic qualities of pictorial art in favor of a more remote, colder style that portrayed images from which all aestheticism had to be banished.

One of the first works to display this change was Nocturne (1925). The work contains element from the iconography that Magritte created at the time and which he used throughout his life: the painting within a painting, the bird in flight, and fire, adding to the stage curtain an to the wooden bilboquet. These last two elements are also at the heart of The last Jockey (1926) which, according to Magritte, was a critical milestone in his entry into Surrealism. It gave him a mysterious feeling, an anxiety without reason.The feeling of anxiety, which manifested itself in dark tonalities, lugubrious shapes and mysterious juxtaposition of objects, invaded a large number of works from these years.

In 1927 Magritte and Georgette moved to Paris to be closer to where it all happens. He started to take part in the activities of the Surrealists and he becomes friends with Andre Breton. In 1929 he even went to Cadaques to stay with the Surrealists Salvador Dali, Juan Miro and Paul Eluard for a holiday.

During the same period (1925-1930), Magritte began combining words and images in his paintings. These word-pictures were not mere illustrations of an object or a concept. On the contrary, his work was intended to gently destabilize our mental habits of representation. Magritte elaborated a didactic classification of this type of painting, the simplest which consisted of denying an images through words, or vice versa. The most celebrated example of this is The Treachery of Images (1929): This is not a pipe since we can not smoke it. It is only a representation of one. Another technique used by Magritte was to represent a familiar object and to attribute to it a name other than its conventional one. Through this gallery of word-paintings, Magritte plays on the discrepancies, paradox, clarity and obscurity of common sense. The question remains as to whether the words actually represent what we think. As a result, the painting becomes a type of language.

Even when he lived in Paris, Magritte did not have a single one-man exhibition. In 1930, the effect of the economic crisis were apparent. His friend Goemans was forced to close his Paris gallery and collectors and galleries were bankrupt. Magritte no longer had a steady income and his relationship with Breton had deteriorated as a result of a mutual independence of mind. Discouraged he returned to Brussels and turned to commercial work.

With the support of a network of friends and sponsors who enabled him to sustain his daily life and to exhibit on several occasions at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Magritte was able to pull through these difficult years (1930-1940). At the same time he was earning a reputation abroad and his work was being exhibited in one-man shows or in group shows with other Surrealists in London, New York and Paris.

Magritte shared the Surrealist concept of the power of desire and eroticism to 'change life' and wanted to translate this idea through unconventional images. He continued involving metamorphosis in his work. In Black Magic a naked woman leaning on a rock gradually merges into the blue sky. The painter was, nevertheless, distrustful of the obvious seduction of 'pretty colors'. In The Rape he even pushed it to the point of obsession with the features of a woman's face replaced by sexual attributes: breasts, belly button and pubic hair. To avoid a scandal this painting was hidden by a velvet curtain at the Minotaure exhibition in Brussels.

In 1940, Magritte was going through a crisis resulting from the German Occupation, his precarious financial situation and his dissatisfaction with his painting. From then on, he decided that a feeling of pleasure and an atmosphere of happiness had to predominate over the sense of anxiety and suffocation which had previously inhabited his work. In order to show the 'bright side of life', Magritte first thought about changing his iconography and began to paint the leaf-birds which we see in two works from 1942, Treasure Island and The Companions of Fear.

In 1943, he was struck by a reproduction of Pierre Auguste Renoir's Bathers which led to a decisive transformation in his work. Enticed by the sensuality of the colors, he opted for a more luminous palette. While continuing to draw objects and figures with the meticulousness for which he was known, he added to them a touch clearly inspired by Impressionism, unleashing color in new, warmer and more cheerful tonalities. Magritte called this period his 'Sunlit' period.

Alexander Iolas, who became Magritte's principal dealer in the United States, successfully exhibited the artist's work in New York in 1947. Iolas therefor suggested that Magritte forget Renoir and focus his production on images which overwhelmingly appealed to the public, like Treasure Island. Obligated to come to terms with the necessities of life, Magritte created new combinations out of old images. Megalomania ( 1948) reveals similarities with The Marches of Summer (1938-1939): a female torso (now in three parts), weightless cubes, blue sky with clouds and a parapet. More works followed. For example The Domain of Arnheim (1949), was originally painted in 1936.

Magritte enjoyed the game of juxtaposing and manipulating motifs. An image could exercise such powers of seduction that the painter felt compelled to reproduce it many times. Rather than falling into repetitive indifference, he devoted himself to particularly evident in The dominion of Light (1949), an evocation of the simultaneous presence of day and night, a magnetization of the contradictions dear to the Surrealists. There are sixteen versions of this work.

Among the works by Magritte which, beginning in the mid-1950's, definitively ensured his international recognition, one was the subject of extraordinary infatuation. In Golconda (1953), Magritte brilliantly united different motifs from his repertory: small men in overcoats and bowler hats float weightlessly in a blue sky in front of facades of houses. Present since 1927, this bowler-hatted figure finally finds his true dimension. He becomes sels.