René Magritte

Belgian painter

• Born: November 21, 1898
• Birthplace: Lessines, Belgium
• Died: August 15, 1967
• Place of death: Brussels, Belgium

Magritte was the most prominent Belgian associated with the modern art movement known as Surrealism. While his concept of the art of painting increasingly diverged from Surrealist theory, the integrity and fascination of his large body of work won for him an extended and devoted audience in the latter part of his career.

Early Life

René Magritte (ruh-nay mah-greet) was born to Léopold Magritte and Régina Magritte in Lessines, a small town in the province of Hainaut, part of the Walloon, as distinct from the Flemish, region of Belgium. Magritte was the eldest of three children. His brother Raymond, born two years later, became a successful businessman, and in adulthood there was little contact between the two. In childhood, Magritte was devoted to his youngest brother, Paul, who later pursued interests in music and poetry and remained on close terms with Magritte.

In 1899, Magritte’s father, who was a wholesale merchant, moved the family to nearby Gilly, where a peculiar event became fixed in Magritte’s imagination. Though it may have been remembered more through his parents’ retelling than directly in René’s memory he was a year old when it happened the unexpected landing of a hot-air balloon on the roof of the family’s house became a touchstone of his childhood experience, helping to prepare the ground for his sense of poetic wonder. Another early formative experience was stressed by Magritte in his account of his artistic origins. Around 1906, at a period when the Magritte children spent summer vacations with relatives in Soignies, Magritte played frequently in an old cemetery, where he and a young girl would lift iron gates and go down into the underground burial vaults. One day, climbing out into the sunlight, he found a painter at work among some broken stone columns. The artist, Magritte believed, seemed to be performing magic. The young boy’s impression may well have been tempered by his own first attempts at drawing, as he had begun to study sketching with other local children.

In 1912, while the Magritte family was living in Châtelet, Magritte’s mother was found drowned in the Sambre River. There is little doubt that her death was a suicide. When her body was found, the nightgown that she had been wearing when she disappeared had become wrapped around her face, a circumstance that has been remarked on by writers because a not uncommon element of Magritte’s imagery is the shrouding of the human face, and other forms, with light-colored cloth. Magritte’s only remembered reaction to this catastrophic event was a feeling of pride in the attention given him as the son of the dead woman. As a child, Magritte seems to have enjoyed unusual pastimes, such as dressing up as a priest to perform somber masses in front of an altar he made up himself. Practices like these often seemed intended to shock the family’s servants.

The year following his mother’s death, Magritte’s father moved the family to Charleroi. One day, on a carousel at the town fair, he met and became a close friend of a thirteen-year-old girl, Georgette Berger, who would later become his wife. Magritte was initially a student at the Athénée, the Charleroi high school, but in 1916 his father allowed him to begin art studies at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Despite his enthusiasm for painting and drawing, his attendance at the academy was intermittent and the results of his studies mediocre, but he was rapidly acquiring knowledge, ideas, and artistic acquaintances. After a brief period in which he painted in the Impressionist style widely popular since the 1880’s, he discovered cubism, a radical development in art that had originated about a decade earlier in Paris with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In 1919, another new development in the arts called Futurism captured his attention. Futurism, like cubism, was based intuitively on new concepts of space and time, but unlike cubism it had a pronounced technological and political element. Despite the profound attraction of these new ideas, Magritte continued to paint eclectically, absorbing a variety of other influences and allowing a degree of eroticism to remain in his partly abstract images.

In 1920, on a visit to the botanical gardens in Brussels, Magritte met Berger again by chance, and from that day to the end of his life he was rarely apart from her. The couple, whose earlier friendship had been interrupted by the war and Magritte’s move to Brussels, married in 1922 following Magritte’s compulsory military service. By this time he had exhibited his work in Brussels, but he took a number of jobs as a commercial artist to support himself and his wife. Freedom from financial cares was still many years in the future, though he was to achieve artistic, though not critical, success within a few years.

Life’s Work

A crucial turning point in Magritte’s conception of painting occurred in 1922 when he saw a reproduction of a painting, The Song of Love , by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. This work, dating from the years 1913-1914, is the representation of several seemingly unrelated objects a plaster cast of an ancient Greek sculpture, a surgeon’s glove, and a ball placed in an imaginary urban space. Rather than having an arbitrary effect, the juxtaposition of these unrelated objects evoked in Magritte a powerful response. He felt that a new kind of poetry had been revealed to him that was based on the mysterious resonance of objects. The Song of Love revealed the unsuspected affinities of objects and their capacity to command attention when freed of their functional roles and enabled Magritte to envision a fresh starting point for his painting.

A second vital influence of the early 1920’s began in Magritte’s association with Belgian writers and poets sympathetic to the activities of the avant-garde Dada movement, which had arisen in 1916 as a high-spirited defiance of the cultural norms implicated in the catastrophe of World War I. Dada was conceived as “anti-art” and was inherently self-limiting, but in its brief heyday it served as a liberating force for many artists; more important, it was the seed-bed of Surrealism, a more complex and influential movement, with a wide range of artistic and political ambitions. Surrealism is an elusive concept, but the words of the author Louis Aragon serve as a capsule description: “Reality,” stated Aragon, “is the apparent absence of contradiction. The marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.” Thus, Surrealism is “the marvelous” the chance event that reveals the weakness of the narrowly rational view of the world. Though in common usage the term has come to denote something crazy and dreamlike, Surrealism as a distinct cultural episode includes much sophisticated speculation, experimentation, and cultural criticism, as well as many episodes of leftist political activity.

Surrealism emanated from Paris, but one of the foremost groups of Surrealist artists was Belgian and included Magritte’s friends E. L. T. Mesens, Camille Geomans, Marcel Lecomte, and others. The “Pope of Surrealism,” as he has been called, was the French writer André Breton, with whom Magritte had a long and occasionally uncomfortable relationship. Among the Belgian Surrealists, Magritte was perhaps the leading figure, but because the movement was in large part a French literary matter, Magritte’s unique contribution to it was slow to be acknowledged.

The emergence of explicit Surrealist content in Magritte’s painting occurs in works dated 1926, during a period of intense activity in which Magritte often painted a picture a day. In the previous year, he had acquired a contract with a new gallery in Brussels, “Le Centaure,” which in 1927 presented his first one-man exhibition. Filled with novel and disturbing material, the show was not favorably received. Among the works shown were Le Jockey perdu (the lost jockey), which for Magritte was a breakthrough to the new kind of painting that he had envisioned years earlier under the spell of de Chirico’s The Song of Love. It shows a jockey whose mount seems to have frozen in midstride while passing through a strange forest of trees possessing trunks in the form of giant balustrades. The suspension of time, the juxtaposition of logically unrelated objects, and the cold tonality of the picture are hallmarks of Magritte’s imagery both early and late in his career.

In August, 1927, Magritte and his wife moved to Paris, where Magritte played an active role in the circle of Surrealists around Breton and the poet Paul Éluard. Magritte’s painting of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s adopted a central Surrealist notion, valid for poetry and painting alike, of challenging everyday consciousness by allowing dissonant objects, images, or ideas to confront one another. With the intention of undermining stereotyped attitudes toward art and life, the shock provoked by the Surrealist object, painting, or poem was viewed less as an artistic than as a moral gesture. In the period just following Le Jockey perdu, Magritte’s imagery had been bizarre, somber, and often inclined to suggestions of violence, but as he drew closer to the Parisian Surrealists his imagery became more philosophical and, almost paradoxically, more disturbing. Magritte found that a powerful poetic result could be obtained by objectively representing familiar objects in unexpected surroundings or by creating inspired marriages of objects that moved the viewer by their mysterious alliance. Fantasy and exotic narrative increasingly gave way to imagery that deliberately posed the deepest problems of interpretation. One of Magritte’s most popular themes, formulated in several variations, embodies these problems in a highly refined form. La Condition humaine I (1930) shows a canvas on an easel standing by an open window, which superimposes on the landscape seen through the window a painted representation of the landscape in identical detail. In a 1940 statement, Magritte observed that for the viewer, the tree in the painting was both inside the room and outside in the real landscape, a situation that embodies the process of vision, in which the object is both outside ourselves, in the real world, and within us, as a representation. Paintings such as this may be subject to what Magritte termed more or less adequate description, and even to metaphorical expression, but as with virtually all of his images, words may complement the poetry of the image but cannot displace it. Explanation, in the usual sense, was abhorrent to Magritte, who believed that the image should surpass one’s ability to interpret it. In his view, an “inspired” visual image was one embodying a thought that could be presented in no other way. He made a determined effort to distance himself and his work from the Surrealist enthusiasm for psychoanalytical interpetation, although some critics have made plausible interpretations of some of his paintings along psychoanalytic lines.

After three years in Paris, Magritte’s enthusiasm for the Parisian Surrealist milieu waned, and he returned to Brussels, where, except for occasional travels, he lived the rest of his life. During the 1930’s, he was represented in all the major international exhibitions of Surrealist art, but his paintings were still not avidly sought after. New associates entered his life, foremost among them the writer Louis Scutenaire, who became an indispensable friend and supporter. Magritte was indifferent to promoting himself in art circles, insisting that his images served not the world of painting but that of thought, but he occasionally wrote and lectured on his own work in a fashion that was labored but occasionally inspired. His writings and the accounts of his friends reveal him as a perceptive and sophisticated person with a lively appreciation of philosophy, literature, and music (his wife was a talented pianist and would often play for him works of the French composers Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Erik Satie). Magritte lived and worked in modest rented accommodations until, late in life, he purchased a house. He and his wife remained childless but had a succession of Pomeranian dogs.

Before the end of the decade, Magritte’s work had been seen in the United States and England, but the broadening of his audience was cut short in 1939 by the beginning of World War II. Following the German invasion of Belgium, Magritte spent three months in Carcassonne, France, before returning to Brussels. His painting continued along familiar channels for a time and then temporarily underwent a dramatic change in which he adopted the technique of the Impressionists, especially that of Auguste Renoir. Magritte’s stated intention in these works was to defy the wartime gloom and adapt Surrealism to open air and sunlight, but it can be doubted that he meant this experiment in anything but an ironic sense. He was roundly criticized by his friends and critics alike for this manner of painting, and he soon abandoned it. Another such essay in irony and, one suspects, defiance, was a series of twenty paintings done in raucous imitation of the Fauvist painters of the first decade of the century. These works, too, found few defenders when they were exhibited in Paris in 1948.

The final two decades of Magritte’s life were highly productive, but the work did not differ in fundamental character from the work of the previous two decades. His skill in representing objects, including the selection and application of colors to produce illusions of depth and volume, reached extraordinary heights in some of the later works. The 1952 painting Valeurs personelles (personal values) is reminiscent of the works of great Flemish masters of the fifteenth century in its sense of light and densely filled interior space. In it Magritte has enlarged several commonplace objects a comb, a match, a shaving brush, a glass, and a bar of soap to gargantuan size, putting on trial the logic of perception in much the same way as the author/mathematicianLewis Carroll had done three quarters of a century earlier in his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Magritte’s powers of thought and execution never waned, but beginning in the late 1950’s his health and stamina declined. In his later years, he took some pleasure, though little intellectual comfort, from the great respect he had gained throughout the world for his determined and productive career. On August 15, 1967, after seeming to have recovered from a serious illness, he unexpectedly died in Brussels.

Significance

One authority on René Magritte has accurately characterized the artist’s mature work by the phrase “pictures as problems,” but this should not be allowed to suggest that Magritte conceived of painting as a theoretical act, or that his work is systematic or doctrinaire. In personal appearance, Magritte was resolutely bourgeois, somewhat resembling in middle age the bowler-hatted man he often placed in his paintings; yet he was an essentially subversive artist, seeking to break through conventions of thought that were obstacles to knowledge. Within his skillful and attractive paintings lie traps for the mind. When Magritte launched, in 1929, his image consisting of a pipe and the inscription “This is not a pipe,” he began, in the words of Breton, “the systematic trial of the visual image, emphasizing its shortcomings and indicating the dependent nature of the figures of language and thought.” With this and a succession of related images, Magritte brought painting into a close relation to linguistic philosophy and contributed directly to subsequent phases of modern art such as pop art and conceptual art. The wide popularity of Magritte’s art in the years immediately following his death may not often reflect an appreciation of the complexities of his art, but his own words express conviction that his work would, in the end, have its due effect: “Women, children, men who never think about art history,” he said, “have personal preferences just as much as aesthetes do.”

Bibliography

Gablik, Suzi. Magritte. London: Thames & Hudson, 1985. The author befriended Magritte in the latter years of his career, and this book, originally published in 1970, is both an homage to the artist and a serious attempt to place Magritte in a broad cultural and intellectual context. Gablik’s approach is to focus on thematic constellations in Magritte’s work; consequently the selection of plates is more purposeful than in most other sources. The text sometimes lapses into jargon but is nevertheless highly recommended.

Hammacher, A. M. René Magritte. Translated by James Brockway. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974. This volume belongs to a series of art books of uniform design, a circumstance that creates a sense of tidiness in Magritte’s production that can be misleading. The text, however, is solid, and the chronological presentation of plates is as welcome as it is rare in books on Magritte’s painting.

Hughes, Robert. The Portable Magritte: With an Essay. New York: Universe, 2002. Contains more than four hundred colored reproductions of Magritte’s work and a brief essay by Hughes, examining the method and meaning of Magritte’s work.

Magritte, René. Rene Magritte. Text by René Passerson. Translated by Elisabeth Abbott. Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1972. The brief text is perceptive but the layout of the book is peculiar and claustrophobic. An introductory interview with Magritte’s widow is of more than sentimental interest.

Noël, Bernard. Magritte. Translated by Jeffrey Arsham. New York: Crown, 1977. The text of this book is a flawed translation from an original French edition. The author attempts to be breezy and sophisticated, but instead he sows confusion. The plates are adequate in quality but not in number.

Soby, James Thrall. René Magritte. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965. This slim volume features an agreeable but impressionistic essay accompanying illustrations of paintings seen in a celebrated 1965 American exhibition of Magritte’s work. The witty and lyrical elements of the artist’s work tend to come to the fore both in the text and in the images reproduced. Includes a bibliography.

Sylvester, David. René Magritte, 1898-1967. New York: Praeger, 1969. In this catalog of a 1969 Magritte retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, the author manages to offer stimulating commentaries on the paintings without transgressing Magritte’s injunction against “interpretation,” which the painter believed would obscure the poetry of his images.

Torczyner, Harry. Magritte: Ideas and Images. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977. The author, a lawyer and American friend of Magritte, is a dedicated servant of the painter rather than a scholar, and this large book is a superb compendium of commentary, documentation, and illustrations.

Waldberg, Patrick. René Magritte. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. Brussels: André de Rache, 1966. Produced with the painter’s blessing, this is an indispensable resource for the study of Magritte’s life and work. Some of Magritte’s most celebrated images do not appear in it and must be found elsewhere, but of more importance, much pertinent visual material is found only here.