Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte , born the November 21st 1898 with Stinginesses and died with Brussels the August 15th 1967, is a painter Belgian Surréaliste .

Biography

A case near its cradle, the recovery of a balloon of navigation failed on the roof of the family home, vision of a painter in a cemetery… Of three memories of its early childhood passed with Lessines, in the Hainaut, Magritte all its life the taste of the mystery and contrast will keep.

His/her father is tailor and his mother modiste. Their business goes badly and its childhood occurs in constant removals from Gilly to Charleroi. With the threshold of her adolescence his/her mother commits suicide by drowning. He is entrusted to his grandmother. He impassions himself then for films of Fantômas, reads Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Maurice Leblanc and Gaston Leroux. One year later, at the time of a fun fair in Charleroi, it meets a thirteen year old girl whose father is to stop with Marcinelle. She is called Georgette and if the life separates them some time, she ends up joining together them for always. Georgette, it is “the insane love”, the MUSE, the single model one.

In 1916, Magritte is registered with the royal Académie of the Art schools of Brussels and follows the courses of literature of G. Van Eekhoud and those of the painter Constand Montald. It meets E.L.T. Mesens and Marcel Lecomte which introduces it into the medium Dada. It must in Marcel Lecomte, or according to Louis Scutenaire in Mesens, its greater artistic emotion: the discovery of a reproduction of the “ Love song ”) of Giorgio de Chirico. “My eyes saw the thought for the first time” will write it while remembering this revelation. It also binds with Paul Nougé and Louis Scutenaire. In 1926, it paints sixty paintings and prepares a personal exposure to the gallery the Centaur.

In 1927, it leaves Belgium and settles in the Perreux-on-Marne, (the Valley-of-Marne). It meets the surrealist (André Breton, Paul Éluard, max Ernst, El Salvador Dalí) and takes part in their activities. It returns to Brussels in 1930. Success comes slowly thanks to the Iolas merchant and to the America. The remainder of its life occurs in Belgian and international exposures (New York, Rome, Rotterdam, Stockholm).

Between 1931 and 1936, it takes part at a small company of publicity, a food advertizing activity which it does not certainly carry on by vocation and which extended sporadically between 1918 and 1965.

He dies of a Cancer at sixty-nine years. He is buried at the side of his Georgette wife to the communal cemetery of Schaerbeek. Its burial makes the object of a procedure of classification like monument and site.

Its work

Its paintings often exploit the shift between an object and its representation. For example, one of its most famous tables is an image of pipe under which figure the text “This is not a pipe” ( the treason of the images , 1928 - 29). It is acted in fact of considering the object a concrete reality and not according to an at the same time abstract and arbitrary term. To explain what he wanted to represent through this work, Magritte stated this: “The famous pipe, one reproached it enough to me! And yet, can you stuff it my pipe? Not, this is not, it is only one representation. Thus if I had written under my table “this is a pipe”, I would have lied! ”

The painting of Magritte wonders on its own nature, and the action of the painter on the image. Painting is never a representation of a real object, but the action of the thought of the painter on this object. Magritte reduced reality to an abstract thought returned in formulas which its leaning for the mystery dictated to him: “I take care, as far as possible, to make only paintings who cause the mystery with the precision and the enchantment necessary to the life of the ideas”, declared it. Its mode of representation, which appears voluntarily neutral, academic, even school, highlights a powerful work of déconstruction of the reports/ratios which the things maintain in reality. Magritte excels in the representation of the mental images. For Magritte, visible reality must be approximate in an object way. It has a decorative talent which appears in the geometrical fitting of the representation. The essential component at Magritte, it is its innate dislike of plastic, lyric, pictorial painting. Magritte wished to liquidate all that was conventional. “The art of painting can be really restricted only to describe an idea which shows a certain resemblance with visible that offers us the world” declared it. For him, reality should not certainly be approximate under the angle of the symbol. Among the tables most representative of this idea, Perspicacity (1936) shows us a painter whose model is an egg posed on a table. On the fabric, the painter draws a bird with the spread wings.

Another table, prohibited Reproduction (1937) watch a man of back looking at a mirror, which does not reflect the face of the man but his back. Same manner, painting is not a mirror of reality.

Painter of the Metaphysical and surreal, it treated the obviousnesses with a corrosive Humor, way of sapping the base of the things and the spirit of serious. He slipped between the things and their representation, the images and the words. Instead of inventing techniques, Magritte preferred to go at the bottom them things, to use of the painting which becomes the instrument of a knowledge inseparable from the mystery:

“In my childhood, I liked to play with a little girl, in the old unused cemetery of a small town of province. We visited the caveaux undergrounds of which we could raise the heavy iron doors and we went back to the light, where a painter, come from the capital, painted in an alley of the cemetery, very picturesque with its broken stone columns strewing the dead sheets. Art to paint appeared vaguely magic to me then and the gifted painter of higher capacities. ” ( Conference , 1938, Magritte)

List principal works

the Spy (1924)
the Jockey lost (1926)
the Assassin threatened (1927)
the fast Hope (1927)
the Break-light (1927)
Figures of night (1927)
the Direction of the night (1927)
the Prince of the Objects (1927)
False Mirror (1928)
the Invention of the life (1928)
Le Monde lost (1928)
the Palate of the Curtains, III (1928)
the Lovers (1928)
Flowers of the Abyss (1928)
the Palate of the Curtains, III (1928)
gigantic Days (1928)
the subjected Reader (1928)
the treason of the images (1929) (This is not a pipe) with approximately 10.000 euros
symmetrical Trick (1928)
the Masterpiece (1929)
the Voice of Space (1931)
the Key of the dreams (1930) with (1935)

Universe uncovered (1932)
the unforeseen answer (1933)
the Human condition I (1933)
the Human condition II (1934)
black Magic (1935)
Perspicacity (1936)
“the Key of the fields” (1936)
prohibited Reproduction (1937)
stabbed Duration (1937)
Beyond the (1938)
the Field of Arnheim (1938)

the First day (1943)
the Universal gravitation (1943)
the Memory (1948)

good omen (1949)

Empire of the lights, II (1950)

the Castle haunted (1950)

the seducer (1950)
personal Values (1951)

the Room of listening (1952)
Golconde (1953)
the Schoolmaster (1954)
Empire of the lights (1954)
Travel souvenir (1955) to approximately 600.000 euros
part of pleasure (1956) to approximately 300.000 euros in 2005
the Castle of the Pyrenees (1959)
the Month of the grape harvest (1959)

the Cord sensitive (1960)
the Friend of the Order (1964)
the Man to the bowler hat (1964)
the son of man (1964)
the Great War (1964)
the Full power (1965)
the Beautiful Company (1965 - 1966)
the Happy Giver (1966)

beautiful the relations (1967)

Quotations

“It is necessary that painting serf for another thing that with painting. ”
“an object never makes the same office as its name or than its image. ”
”

See too

Museums

In the legacy “Irene Scutenaire-Hamoir”, whose Tom Gutt is the executor, with the royal Museum of modern art in Brussels (royal Musées of the Art schools of Belgium) appears many works of the painter (more than one score of paintings, a score of gouaches, forty drawings, etc) which were with the walls of their house of the Rue of the Alfalfa, in particular: Portrait of Nougé , 1927; the Robber , 1927; Discovered , 1927; Character meditating on the madness , 1928; Portrait of Irene Hamoir , 1936; defended Reading , 1936; Beautiful Canto , 1938; the Great hopes , 1940; the Fifth season , 1943; the Smile , 1943; the Harvest , 1943; Good fortune , 1945; natural Meetings , 1945; Thousand and One Nights , 1946; the Intelligence , 1946; Lyricism , 1947; Lola de Valence , 1948 (whose images are visible on the site of the royal Museums of the Art schools of Belgium).

Others

Rene Magritte was 9th in the Walloon version of the election of the “larger Belgian” in 2005. In the Flemish version, it was 18th.

Selective bibliography

Writings of Magritte

Rene Magritte, Manifest and other writings , warning of Marcel Mariën, the Naked Lips, Brussels, 1972.
Quatre-vingtdeux Letters of Rene Magritte in Mirabelle Sleep and Maurice Rapin, with letters of No5el Arnaud and Georgette Magritte, Paris, 1976.

Rene Magritte, complete Écrits (edition established and annotated by André Blavier, Flammarion, Paris, 1979.

Rene Magritte, Words and the images , choice of writings, Labor, Brussels, 2000.

On Magritte

Patrick Waldberg, Rene Magritte , followed by a general bibliography by Andre Blavier, Andre de Rache editor, Brussels, 1965 (358 p.).
Number Rene Magritte , (many texts, in particular of E.L.T. Mesens, Louis Scutenaire, Paul Colinet, Camille Goemans, Paul Nougé, Marcel Mariën, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Jacques Prévert, max Ernst, Jean Arp, Philippe Soupault, Irene Hamoir, Raoul Ubac, Marcel Lecomte, Man Ray), Belgian Art, Brussels, January 1968 (90 p).
Louis Scutenaire, With Magritte , Brussels, Lebeer-Hossmann, 1977.
Suzi Gablik, Magritte , Cosmos monographs, Brussels, 1978 (translation of English, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970.
Bernard Christmas, Magritte , Flammarion, Paris, 1977 (96 p.).
Harry Torczyner, Magritte, true art to paint , Draeger, Paris, 1978 (144 p.).
Retrospective Magritte , Brussels, Palate of the Art schools, 1978 and Paris, National museum of Modern art, Centers Georges Pompidou, 1979.
Marcel Mariën, the surrealist activity in Belgium (1924-1950) , Brussels, Lebeerr-Hossmann, 1979 (510 p.).
Rene Magritte and surrealism in Belgium , Brussels, royal Museums of the Art schools of Belgium, 1982.
Rene Magritte , texts of Camille Goemans, Marcel Mariën, Philippe Junod, Foundation of the Hermitage, Lausanne, 1987 (236 p.).
the surrealist movement in Brussels and in Wallonia (1924-1947) , Paris, Arts center Wallonia Brussels, 1988.
Magritte in the private collections, retrospective , texts of Harry Torczyner, Louis Scutenaire, Evelyne Kornélis, Anne Deknop, E.L.T. Mesens and many testimonys, Gallery Isy Brachoy, Brussels, 1988 (238p.).
Jacques Meuris, Rene Magritte , Taschen, Köln, 1990 (222p.).
Rene Magritte, the period “cow”, “feet in the dish” with Louis Scutenaire , Marseilles, Cantini Museum, 1992.
Irene, Scut, Magritte & C° , Brussels, Museum Royal of the Art schools of Belgium, 1996.

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