René Magritte

René Magritte was a Belgian-born artist who painted in the Surrealist style. When a young child, his beloved mother committed suicide by leaping from a bridge in the dead of night and drowning herself. When young René awoke and realized she was not in the room they shared, he woke his family and they set out to search for her. They found her body floating in the stream with her face covered with her nightgown. The influence this had on his art becomes apparent in the many works in which he painted his subjects' faces covered with cloth. One such painting is The Lovers.

Magritte began painting at age 12 and later studied for a short time at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Early in his career he was influenced by the Cubists and the Futurists. His first exhibition of quasi-cubist works was at the Le Centre d'Art gallery and the works showed the oddly contradictory influences of Henri Matisse, Albert Gleizes, André Lhote, and the Italian futurists. It was in 1927 that he became acquainted with the Paris surrealists.

The Surrealist movement declared the irrational and contradictory a virtue. It was an attempt to explore the subconscious and to cause one to gain insight into the human mind. Magritte remained one of the major representatives of surrealist art until his death on August 15, 1967.

There were two main forms of surrealist art. The first was called organic or biomorphic and involved "automatic" drawing and calligraphy as a way of expressing the subconscious freely. Magritte was a member of the second branch which created more concrete and dream-like images. This second group created works which could be paradoxically considered to be realistic representations of the absurd or impossible. René Magritte was a master of this second form. The members of this second group were heavily influenced by De Chirico.

De Chirico was a painter and his works were a major influence on Magritte. Despite the fact that De Chirico's works were such an enormous factor in the development of Surrealism, and of Magritte's work in particular, the admiration and regard the Surrealists showed for De Chirico's pictures was not returned. De Chirico considered the surrealist movement a joke in light of the fact that his works were considered so important to the formation of this movement.

Another major influence on Magritte's work was a cinematic one. A five-part serial, "Fantomas", by the French movie-maker Louis Feuillade was the main cinematic influence on Magritte . This series of films (taken from novels of the same name) dealt with a character named Fantomas who captured the imagination of Magritte as well as many other surrealists. Fantomas was a "genius of evil ". He could commit grisly and brilliant crimes without leaving a trace . It is clear that Magritte was fascinated by the character of Fantomas. One of the rare occasions in which he made direct use of a source was in The Backfire and this was almost a direct copy from one of the covers of the Fantomas. In fact, the only change that he made was to replace the dagger in Fantomas' hand with a rose. In another painting , The Threatened Assassin Magritte painted another episode from Fantomas . In this painting there are five men waiting outside of a room which contains the nude corpse of a woman and an unperturbed man standing by a gramophone. Fantomas strikes again. The influence of the cinema was further evident in Magritte's work in his use of multiple images. For example, a Magritte painting called Man Reading a Newspaper distinctly suggests the frames of a movie film. All of this demonstrates that the cinema had a remarkably strong influence on the works of René Magritte.

Ren&eacte; Magritte brought to surrealism a style which was uniquely his own. Magritte painted objects with an almost photographic accuracy but placed them in unreal relation to one another. By using only familiar objects but bringing them together in such unreal ways, Magritte was able to create something unfamiliar and startling. Magritte wanted to make the viewer question the nature of accepted reality. By creating works that demonstrate that some part of the world can be irrational yet coherent, Magritte throws all "reality" into question. The human mind itself is what creates the magic of Magritte's work because that is where the twisting of consciousness and accepted reality actually takes place. This effect is immeasurably enhanced by Magritte's scrupulous depiction of appearances. By giving his impossible creations an almost photographic reality, the human mind is startled into the contemplation of what is real. The brain is challenged to actually consider that which is so basic to its concept of the world as to never before have required any real thought.

René Magritte's style of painting resulted in his being called a "Father of American Pop Art" in 1961. He, however, was not pleased by this association. He felt Pop Art was a joke and used the term sugar-coated Dadaism to describe it. His resentment of being associated with a movement which credited him for his immense influence upon it is certainly ironic in light of the fact that his feelings for American Pop Art exactly mirror those De Chirico had for Surrealism and Magritte.

René Magritte was an artist who took mundane objects, pulled them through his imagination and forced them out the other side in such unreal combinations and relationships that they could cause the viewer to question the very nature of reality. His works were efforts to overthrow the sense of the familiar. He was one of the greats of the Surrealist movement and it seems likely that his works will only gain in popularity over time. He was a maker of visual puzzles which never fail to provoke thought in the viewer.

Sources Used In Compiling This Essay :


This Magritte painting, "Le château des Pyrénées", was painted in 1959


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