Artist 101: who is René Magritte?

One of the most important representatives of the Surrealism movement, Rene Magritte, who fascinated him with his works reflecting his extraordinary intelligence, left special works in his 69-year life. Some adorned the cover of a pop album, while others inspired the posters of cult films such as The Exorcist. So, what kind of life did Magritte, one of the greatest inspirations of contemporary painting, live? Here is the life and works of the master in brief…

René Magritte was born on 21 November 1898, the youngest of three sons to a wealthy Belgian family. His traveling sales representative father and his haberdashery mother, who committed suicide by jumping into the Sambre River when he was only 14, were the greatest architects of his life.

At just 14, Magritte became the closest witness to her mother’s body being pulled from the water. It has been claimed that the floating of his mother’s corpse on the water inspired the artist’s Les Amants series drawn in 1927-1928. However, Magritte did not like this explanation at all.

Magritte, who started painting at the age of 17, three years after her mother’s death, enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels the following year. However, his failure in his classes brought bad results. While Vitor Servranckx, whom he met during this period, affected his whole life, his military age had already arrived.

In 1925, he saw the work of Giorgio de Chirico for the first time, and his love for surrealism began to flare up. The Paris period, in which he lived from 1927 to 1930, will inflame this fire of surrealism; It would allow him to make connections with powerful bands that included artists like Max Ernst and Salvador Dali.

He was unemployed when his contract with Galerie le Centaure expired in 1930. As he again made his way to Brussels to work in advertising, researchers debate whether Magritte earned his income during this time by making fake images of famous artists and perhaps even producing counterfeit money.

Regardless, from 1930 to 1937 Magritte had little time for his own art. By the late 1930s, however, the growing interest of international collectors, including Edward James in London, ensured Magritte’s financial independence, and he was eventually able to give up trading business almost entirely.ART101: 4 20-th Century Art Movement

The Second World War, which broke out during the period when Magritte achieved success and fame, would reshape his life. During this period, when he developed his own unique style, he turned to a brighter, impressionist understanding as a devastating response to the gloom of war.

After the 1950s, his brief experiments with the deliberately provocative “wild” style that were regarded as parodies of the fauves, Magritte returned to his characteristic style and subject set, creating six major retrospectives in the 1960s alone.

While some French surrealist artists led flamboyant lives, Magritte preferred the quiet anonymity of a middle-class existence as symbolized by the bowler hats that often fill his paintings.

The men with bowler hats, often seen in Magritte’s paintings, were interpreted as self-portraits years later. While this suggests an autobiographical content in Magritte’s paintings, it rather explains the mundane sources of his inspiration. The clearest message that we don’t need to look for the mystery far away, that it is in front of us in our daily lives.

By 1936, Magritte, whose paintings became famous enough to be exhibited in New York, died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967, and was buried in the Schaarbeek Cemetery in Brussels. Interest in Magritte’s work grew in the 1960s, and his paintings inspired pop, minimalist and conceptual art.

This picture is under Magritte ‘This is not a pipe.’ He shows a pipe he wrote. When asked about the famous painting, Magritte replied, “This is just a representation, isn’t it? So I would be lying if I wrote ‘This is a pipe’ on my picture!” says. The Betrayal of Images is considered one of the most influential masterpieces of the Surrealism movement and is the most famous painting of Rene Magritte.