🖌️🎨René Magritte René Magritte 1898-1967

 Magic Realism

He didn't change wives like Picasso, didn't shock the public like Salvador Dali, didn't go on drinking binges like Jackson Pollock.

He hated traveling, patriots, advertising and the voices of radio hosts.

He asked to be buried in a tram, which he preferred to airplanes and cars.

He was married to a woman he fell in love with at the age of 15 and lived with until his death... in short, mortal boredom. 🙂

Which can't be said about his Rebus paintings!

I'll tell you about them in detail today in the captions to each painting

Come in, look at them and solve them.

Today we remember René Magritte René Magritte 1898-1967

Magritte was associated with the image of a little bourgeois in a bowler hat - and the furnishings of his apartment seem to correspond to this idea.

He spent most of his life very simply: his house in Brussels at 135 Esseghemstraat (now a museum of his house) did not even have a bathroom - he built one in the kitchen for his wife Georgette.

They never had children - partly because of their unstable financial situation, but they loved their dog very much, and Magritte only went with her to those cinemas where animals were allowed.

And after her death, he stuffed her - and joked that he would gladly stuff everything that surrounded him.

On the floor there was a "poor man's rug": the parquet was painted in speckles, as old Belgian families often did.

Magritte most often worked in the kitchen, because it was the warmest space in the house.

He painted the walls of the living room and kitchen blue and light green - to match the background of many of his works. Interior details often appeared in his paintings: the same fireplace, window opening, panorama of the staircase - everything was copied from a real setting.

As soon as a new piece of furniture appeared in his life, Magritte transferred it to canvas.

He also worked a lot with photographs and built his images based on them. This allowed him to achieve particular accuracy in his paintings: adding impossible details to them, he achieved a strange surrealistic feeling and made us think about how real our everyday world is.

René Magritte (1898 - 1967) was born in the provincial Belgian town of Lessines.

The father of the future artist was a fabric merchant, his mother worked as a seamstress.

As a 14-year-old teenager, he witnessed a tragedy that took place on the banks of the city's Sambre River.

For unknown reasons, his mother threw herself into the river, and the son saw with his own eyes how her lifeless body was pulled out from there.

Before that, the unfortunate woman had repeatedly tried to commit suicide. But her husband, who was not there this time, always saved her.

Having experienced a deep shock, he withdrew into himself and lived in a constant search for answers to the questions that arose in his subconscious, and later “talked” about them to himself through his paintings.

The Magritte family managed to hide the fact of their mother’s suicide for quite a long time; even René’s wife did not find out about this story right away. He never touched on this sensitive topic, but as soon as it was revealed, psychologists immediately rushed to look for hidden subtext in the artist’s paintings.

At the age of 18, René Magritte became a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. However, after studying there for about two years, the young man left the academy and got a job as an artist at a paper factory.

In 1926, he created his first work, “The Lost Jockey,” and a year later his personal exhibition took place.

But both the public and critics gave the newly-minted surrealist and his works a rather cold reception.

After an unsuccessful debut, Magritte left his job and went to Paris, where he met famous surrealists of the time.

Communication with them radically changed the young aspiring artist's idea of art, influenced his artistic manner, style and handwriting, which were fundamentally different from the usual pictorial language of surrealism.

- Magritte's most important role in the history of art is that he was the first to place words on the picture plane, since he believed that painting and words have something in common.

Although this innovation was not appreciated in Europe itself, it was received with great enthusiasm in America.

And therefore, it was in the United States, where a huge part of the artist's legacy is collected today, that Rene Magritte received recognition and radically influenced new generations of painters.

Magritte was a great master not only of riddles, but also of symbolism. Throughout his career, he used several objects that were carried over from one painting to another. These were a pipe, an apple, a trombone, a rose, a jockey, a bowler hat, a sheet, which the artist sometimes used to cover the faces of his characters.

According to statistics, out of 2,000 paintings painted by Magritte, in more than 50 the artist used a remarkable detail - a bowler hat, which became a distinctive feature of Rene's work.

Such hats began to be produced in the second half of the 19th century specifically for the British middle class.

And at the beginning of the 20th century they came into fashion and became very popular. The informal and practical look made this attribute an obligatory part of the men's wardrobe

for 40 years, Rene intermittently returned to the image of a man in a bowler hat. Bowler hats, painted in a realistic style, became a symbol of anonymity and mystery.

"A bowler hat... does not surprise," Magritte once said in 1966. "It is a headdress that is not original. A man with a bowler hat is simply a middle-class man, hidden in his anonymity. I wear it too. I do not strive to stand out."

Magritte elevated bowler hats to iconography in his work.

The irony was amusing: the artist chose an object that was supposed to ensure unrecognizability, but everything turned out differently.

The bowler hat became one of the main attributes of the paintings of the legendary Rene Magritte, his calling card. And Magritte himself was associated with the image of a little bourgeois in a bowler hat.

The story of his love for one and only woman has deep roots in his childhood.

It was then that the boy met his future bride, and from then on they were practically inseparable.

The daughter of a butcher who lived next door, Georgette Berger, witnessed how Rene made an unexpected decision to become an artist. This was after the death of his mother, when they saw the artist at work while walking through the cemetery. Soon the girl moved to live in Brussels, and Rene, having decided to study to be an artist, followed.

His studies did not work out, and after his military service, Rene proposed to the girl, and the young couple got married in 1922. Georgette became not only a loving and devoted wife, she was Magritte's muse and model, with whom he painted all female images.

The artist was constant in his feelings for his wife, they lived very happily and it seemed that this would last forever. But after 14 years of married life, Magritte became infatuated with a certain Sheila, a participant in performances, and for a while completely lost his head. The rejected wife, in revenge on her husband, started an affair with the artist Paul Colinet. However, less than four years later, the Magrittes were back together.

He died at the age of 68 from "trivial" pancreatic cancer next to his beloved Georgette.

Georgette outlived her husband by almost 20 years.

- If you look at a thing with the intention of trying to understand what it means, you will no longer see the thing itself, but will focus on your question.

Source: kulturologia, Arthive