Rene Magritte: Artist of the Month

[Texas June]

Rene Magritte 11/21/1898 – 8/15/1967

http://rene-magritte-paintings.blogspot.com/ - This blog is a wonderful compilation of his work. Be sure to visit to see the chronology of Magritte’s most prolific artistic life. From what I’ve read, he is a complex personality with a strong talent to depict whatever he chooses to paint or illustrate. From 1918 – 1924, most of his work was nude females, but that’s just a small part of his work, with each painting standing on its own for what it is. My being ignorant of Surrealism, Abstract and Contemporary – research has opened a whole new artistic world to me - I admire that talent!

Paletaworld.org --- Belgian surrealist painter…..His first one-man exhibition was in Brussels in 1927. At that time Magritte had already begun to paint in the style, closely akin to surrealism, that was predominant throughout his long career. A meticulous, skillful technician, he is noted for works that contain an extraordinary juxtaposition of ordinary objects or an unusual context that gives new meaning to familiar things. This juxtaposition is frequently termed magic realism, of which Magritte was the prime exponent. In addition to fantastic elements, he displayed a mordant wit, creating surrealist versions of famous……….paintings. ["Magritte, Rene Franηois Ghislain," Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.]

In 1927 he gave us The Menacing Assassine.

Theartstory.org (Art Story Foundation) --- exerpts, please visit the site to read full text.
Author: Sophia Powers Quick View: Synopsis:
Surely the most celebrated Belgian artist of the 20th century, Rene Magritte has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. To support himself he spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this likely shaped his fine art, which often has the abbreviated impact of an advertisement. While some French Surrealists led ostentatious lives, Magritte preferred the quiet anonymity of a middle-class existence, ………”

Key Ideas:
Magritte wished to cultivate an approach that avoided the stylistic distractions of most modern painting. While some French Surrealists experimented with new techniques, Magritte settled on a dead-pan, illustrative technique, the better to clearly articulate the content of his pictures. Repetition was an important strategy for Magritte, informing not only his handling of motifs within individual pictures, but also encouraging him to produce multiple copies of some of his greatest work…….

The illustrative quality of Magritte's pictures often results in a powerful paradox: images that are beautiful in their clarity and simplicity, but which also provoke unsettling thoughts. They seem to declare that they hide no mystery, and yet they are also marvelously strange.

Magritte was fascinated by the interactions of textual and visual signs, and some of his most famous pictures employ both words and images. While those pictures often share the air of mystery that characterizes much of his Surrealist work, they often seem motivated more by a spirit of rational enquiry - and wonder - at the misunderstandings that can lurk in language.

The men in bowler hats that often appear in Magritte's pictures can be interpreted as self-portraits. Portrayals of the artist's wife, Georgette, are also common in his work, as are glimpses of the couple's modest Brussels apartment. Although this might suggest autobiographical content in Magritte's pictures, it more likely points to the commonplace sources of his inspiration. It is as if he believed that we need not look far for the mysterious, since it lurks everywhere in the most conventional of lives.

DETAILED VIEW:

Childhood:
Rene Magritte was the eldest of three boys, born to a fairly well-off family. His father is thought to have been in the manufacturing industry, and his mother was known to be a milliner before her marriage. Magritte's development as an artist was influenced by two significant events in his childhood: the first was an encounter with an artist painting in a cemetery, who he happened across while playing with a companion. Magritte later wrote: "I found, in the middle of some broken stone columns and heaped-up leaves, a painter who had come from the capital, and who seemed to me to be performing magic." The second pivotal event was the suicide of his mother in 1912 when Magritte was fourteen. According to the apocryphal account, Magritte was present when her body was fished out of a river……[today, his presence is in doubt]……..

Early training:
Magritte first began to paint in 1915, [and worked until his death), and enrolled in the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels the following year. However, he was fairly uninspired by his classes, and his attendance suffered as a result. He did become close friends with a fellow student, Victor Servranckx, who introduced Magritte to Futurism, Cubism, and Purism. In particular, Magritte was drawn to the work of Jean Metzinger and Fernand Leger, both of whom had much influence on Magritte's early work, as is evident from his experiments with Cubism such as his 1925 piece Bather.

1925 - Bather

Mature Period:
In 1921, Magritte performed his obligatory military service, and returned home in 1922 to marry Georgette Berger, a girl he had known since childhood. He also began work under Servranckx's supervision as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory. This job lasted about a year, after which Magritte became a freelance designer of posters and publicity.

In 1926, he signed a contract with the Galerie le Centaure in Brussels and was able to make his living as a fine artist for a brief spell. This early period was marked by profound changes in Magritte's work. Around 1925 he first saw the work of Giorgio de Chirico, and began to work more distinctly within the Surrealist idiom. Not only were Magritte's images from the mid-twenties reminiscent of the desolate and mysterious mood that de Chirico created in his work, but the younger artist went so far as to actually transpose many of de Chirico's favorite objects such as spheres, trains, and plaster hands onto his own canvases.

From 1927-1930 Magritte lived in Paris and forged strong connections with Andre Breton's coterie of Parisian Surrealists that at that time included artists such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. He began incorporating more ambiguously organic forms in his work, as well as experimenting with quintessentially Surrealist subject matter such as madness and hysteria. However, Magritte was increasingly disillusioned by the "dark" subjects of his fellow Surrealists. Perhaps most significantly, it was in Paris that Magritte began to experiment with the use of words and language in his paintings.

In 1927 he created The Double Secret

In 1928, he created Tentative de I’Impossible. This reminds me of experiences I have in painting. Due to my eyes, I paint close to the canvas. At times, I’ve noticed my brain fills in the image while I’m working – seemingly to direct my brush through the next section of the image. Sorry, it’s difficult to explain. Anyway, I reckon that’s why this painting got my attention!

By 1930 his contract with the Galerie le Centaure had ended, and later that year the gallery shut its doors altogether. Magritte returned to Brussels to take up work in commercial advertising once again. Scholars dispute whether Magritte also supplemented his income during this time by producing faked paintings of established artists and even perhaps forged currency. Regardless, from 1930 to 1937, Magritte had little time to devote to his own art.

Although, in 1934, he painted The Rape. I find this one visually disturbing. It makes me wonder, if he had little time to paint, what influenced him to materialize this thought to add to his portfolio?

By the late 30's however, the growing interest of international collectors, including Edward James in London, led to Magritte's increased financial independence, and he was at last able to give up commercial work almost completely.

Late period:
Just as Magritte was achieving success and recognition, the Second World War broke out. Although he continued to develop his signature style, he also increasingly deployed a bright, impressionistic palette as a subversive response to the bleakness of the war. He wrote, "The sense of chaos, of panic, which Surrealism hoped to foster so that everything might be called into question was achieved much more successfully by those idiots the Nazisâ. Against widespread pessimism, I now propose a search for joy and pleasure." In 1946 Magritte signed a manifesto called "Surrealism in Full Sunlight," and broke with Breton. This phase was followed by Magritte's brief experiment with an intentionally provocative "savage" style he called "Vache" ("cow") that was characterized by vulgar subjects, crude coloring, and is generally regarded as parodying the Fauves. As Magritte expected, his works in this style were phenomenally unpopular. For the remainder of the 1950s and 1960s Magritte returned to his characteristic style and set of subjects.

In 1954, he painted a lovely evening landscape with lights. L’Empire des Lumieres.]

By the end of his life he enjoyed great success and there were six major retrospectives of his oeuvre in the 1960s alone.

In 1963 - Perspective

In 1965, he painted Le Blanc-Seing, one I particularly enjoy, because I like the unexpected display of dimension.

Legacy:
Magritte's work had a major impact on a number of movements that followed his death, including Pop, Conceptualism, and the painting of the 1980s. In particular, his work was hailed as a harbinger of upcoming trends in art for its emphasis on concept over execution, its close association with commercial art, and its focus on everyday objects that were often repeated in pictorial space. It is easy to see why artists such as Andy Warhol, Martin Kippenberger, and Robert Gober cite Magritte as a profound influence.

http://courses.washington.edu/hypert.../magritte.html
Though strangely methodical and persistent, Magritte's probings and comparisons of visual and verbal representation do not of course count as philosophical inquiries into the theory of signification. Though through his working of incongruities, he poses problems, he makes no attempt to solve them. His pursuit of topics like the dependence of representation on framing and the equivalence/nonequivalence of words and images has an almost empirical feel to it, as again and again we are presented with paintings that cause our expectations of correlation and consistency to tremble, almost as if the effect on us is to be measured, each one varying just one parameter. The paintings we have looked at have no subject other than these probings, this sly trickery, that produced the images of representation upon which his enduring popularity rests. He is the first visual semiologist.

Quotes by Magritte:
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."

"Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences."

"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."

"We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world."

"Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

See what I mean when I say Rene Magritte was a great artist, in my opinion! I appreciate the opportunity Jon gave me to learn more about our rich art history. I have a newly found respect for abstract work, and must admit I doubt my brain will ever be able to produce it! I suppose the closest I've ever come to it so far is this one in my private collection ...
Thank you for reading my post.

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Last month

[ArtSavesLives]

Nice job, June!

Magritte caught my attention when I was still in junior high school and just coming into my interest in art. As a Camp Fire Girl I got to spend a few days in Chicago, and the Art Institute had a comprehensive Magritte exhibit at the time. I don't recall the exact content of the show, but these paintings are representative of what caught my eye:

There was a series of these street scenes, and I was impressed/challenged by the tension between the lamplit street and the sunlit sky. I found them fascinating!






I loved this piece ... it was so straightforward! I recall standing before it and being fascinated at how it looked so real but so impossible!


And I don't know that this was the exact one on exhibit, but I do remember the "floating objects" in many of the works we saw . . .

[WaltWally]

Great post, June!

I've been a big fan of Magritte for a long time. You did a nice job summarizing his work and life!

One of his originals was at the New Orleans Museum of Art several years ago- it would defy adequate representation as an on-line image, because a major feature of it was a figure that had been painted rather thickly and then painted over with a landscape.. You could see the underlying image as the texture it still had, even thought the colors and values were 'gone'...

The one I think of mostly when I think of Magritte is 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 "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. It does not "satisfy emotionally"—when Magritte once was asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magritt..._list_of_works

Thanks for doing this! Oh, and I love your painting here!

[raeburn10025]

Thanks for this. I love Magritte.

[PushingPixels]

Great job June! I enjoyed the article and your thoughts on this interesting man.

[Texas June]

Thanks everyone! I appreciate your responses - and my introduction to Abstract/Contemporary that you build everyday. I have a tendency to think of color and light in images of landscapes and faces. It is a delight for me to view your work in all subjects, obvious or not - but always interesting! I look forward to learning more.

[Wilsonart]

Excellent presentation.
A long time favorite of mine.

[Texas June]

Originally Posted by Wilsonart

Excellent presentation.
A long time favorite of mine.

Thank you, Babs, your kind words mean a lot to me.

[BlueRiderMan]

Awesome to see you presenting. Very nice work, June.
I like all of his paintings but The Son of Man, 1964, is my favorite.

“There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”


~

[Texas June]

Originally Posted by BlueRiderMan

Awesome to see you presenting. Very nice work, June.
I like all of his paintings but The Son of Man, 1964, is my favorite.

“There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”~

Thank you, Blue! This Ab/Con work is new to me and very interesting. There's some really good artists in this forum. I've been stuck in my landscapes and faces, but always had the desire to branch out and learn more. I plan to visit often, and ... y'all come back, ya hear! Art is a big, big world!

[~JON]

Surrealism, Abstract and Contemporary – research has opened a whole new artistic world to me - I admire that talent!

Wonderful to hear you have explored new territory and enjoyed it. Thank you so much for your lovely presentation of Rene Magritte.

Art is a big, big world!

[TheRaven]

Great job Texas June. I enjoyed the reading your article.

[AddiesArt]

Beautifully done June!
I've been a fan of Magritte for a long time.

[~JON]

Thank you, June!