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Biography
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.
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. (continued on the bottom)
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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 1965 a large retrospective of Magritte's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a manifestation of his worldwide recognition. Magritte referred to his work of the latest period (1958-1965) as his 'found children'. The iconographic elements, between them, in a reverting manner, finished by tying everything together in the last ten years of Magritte's life.
On 15 August 1967, Rene Magritte died in Brussels.