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René Magritte,
the famous Belgian Surrealist, developed his signature techniques
early in his career while working as a commercial artist-designing
wallpapers, posters, sheet-music covers and collage illustrations
for furriers' catalogs. When he moved to Paris from Brussels, in August
1927, to join the Parisian Surrealists, Magritte began his investigation
of pictorial language in a burst of activity that was to produce sixty
pictures in one year, some quite large. |
When Magritte left Paris in 1930, he abandoned the Surrealist milieu
where the painters tended to be subordinate to the writers, and in
particular to André Breton. Although Magritte was not adverse to the
company of writers-indeed Paul Eluard was his closest friend in Paris
and many of his writer friends helped produce titles for his paintings-he
was adverse to Breton's organizing, and returned to Brussels where
he was regarded as the center of the avant-garde circle. He remained
in Belium, save for a few trips, until his death.
Magritte's works are conceived of as riddles. In them, he explores
the mysteries lurking in the unexpected juxtaposition of everyday
things, involving the viewer in a self-induced disorientation. His
paintings exclude symbols and myths; everything is visible. Magritte
worked from several sources, which he repeated with variations: anatomical
surprises, such as the hand whose wrist is a woman's face; the mysterious
opening, where a door swings open onto an unexpected vista; metamorphic
creatures, such as a stone bird flying above a rocky shoreline. He
animates the inanimate, as a shoe with toes; he enlarges details,
as an immense apple filling a room. he makes an association of complementaries,
as the leaf-bird, or the mountain-eagle. His titles accompany the
paintings in the way that names correspond to objects, without either
illustrating or explaining them. There is always a kind of logic to
Magritte's images but when asked about analysis of the content of
his paintings, Magritte replied, "If one looks at a thing with the
intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer
seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised."
The interpretation of the image was a denial of its mystery, the mystery
of the invisible. His images are to be looked at, not into.
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