![]() ![]() The following year, in 1928, he and his wife Georgette decided to move to Paris. In 1927 he held his first solo exhibition at the Le Centaure gallery in Brussels: the show turned out to be a total failure, and all sixty-one works exhibited were heavily panned by critics. The first Surrealist picture he painted was Le Jockey Perdu (1926), a watercolor collage in which a jockey is depicted on top of his own galloping horse running toward trees in the shape of chess pieces: the entire scene is surrounded by a curtain that goes to accentuate a scenic vision.Ī year after joining the Surrealist Avant-Garde, Matisse met André Breton, a leading figure in the Movement. His interest in the movement came with his discovery of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Song of Love, whose ability to represent a new way of seeing, going beyond appearances, he admired. Parallel to his work as a graphic designer, Magritte continued his interest in the avant-garde, thus deciding in 1925 to join the Surrealist group in Brussels. Having completed his academic studies in 1922, he married Georgette Berger, his partner since high school, and in 1923 began his first job as an advertising graphic designer instead. Following his great passion, he will decide to enroll in 1916 in the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts where he will begin to become interested in avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism. He thus began classical studies and later focused on painting. ![]() Moving to the city of Charleroi, Magritte will keep his childhood traumas at bay while trying to start a new life. This traumatic event profoundly influenced the painter’s artistic activity to the extent that he depicted in several paintings (L’histoire centrale and Les amants), figures with their faces completely covered by a white veil. His childhood is marked by numerous relocations and especially by the suicide of his mother, who in 1912 decided to take her own life by throwing herself into the Sambre River, being found with a shirt wrapped around her face. René Magritte was born in Lessines, a small Belgian town, on November 21, 1898. All of Magritte’s works thus focus on the contrast between reality and fiction, between the rational and the irrational, between realistic and dreamlike representation, between the ordinary and the mysterious. No matter how realistically the object is represented, it is unable to fulfill its function, which is to be smoked, and that is why it cannot be defined as a pipe. Magritte is best known today for his work La Trahison des Images (1928-29), a painting depicting a pipe and a caption quoting the phrase “ceci n’est pas une pipe,” which invites the viewer to deep reflection on what the real object really is and what representation is. Admired by the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio De Chirico, he implemented a new language based on evasion from reality. “Reality is never as we see it: truth is above all imagination”: through this famous statement by the painter we can perfectly frame the artist’s thinking, noting in him a desire to always find new forms of suggestion of reality, continuing to question where the boundary between real and fiction lies. Magritte’s works consequently push beyond the rational, crossing the thresholds of the ordinary in a humorous key. ![]() The most influential artists of the movement besides Magritte are Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy.ĭespite the depiction of seemingly realistic subjects, Magritte’s greatness lies in the transformation of the everyday into illusion and dreams by unearthing unusual meanings and declaring open war on reason. Surrealism, an avant-garde of which he was a member, is an artistic movement born in France in the 1920s, from the very beginning it presented itself as a revolutionary avant-garde that went beyond reality thus emphasizing a new dreamlike dimension made up of dreams, paranoia, free associations, and madness, thus freeing the unconscious from mental constraints. René Magritte (Lessines, 1898 - Brussels 1967), nicknamed “le saboteur tranquille” because of his ability to succeed in insinuating doubts about reality, is considered one of the greatest exponents of Surrealism, so much so that he is considered one of the fathers of the Surrealist movement. René Magritte: life, style and works of one of the greatest exponents of Surrealism, capable of transforming the extraordinary into the extraordinary. ![]()
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