Magritte, René

Ma·gritte (mä-grētʹ), René. 1898-1967.

Belgian painter whose surreal works, such as Steps of Summer (1938), depict ordinary objects in unexpected or implausible situations.

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▪ French artist

born Nov. 21, 1898, Lessines, Belg.

died Aug. 15, 1967, Brussels

      Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. His works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and others.

      After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916–18), Magritte became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches for advertisements. In 1922 he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's painting “The Song of Love” (1914), an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements (a classical bust and a rubber glove among them) in a dreamlike architectural space; it had a great influence on Magritte's mature style. For the next few years he was active in the Belgian Surrealist movement. With the support of a Brussels art gallery, he became a full-time painter in 1926.

      His first solo show was held in 1927. It was not well received by the art critics of the day. That same year he and his wife moved to a suburb of Paris. There he met and befriended several of the Paris Surrealists, including poets André Breton and Paul Éluard, and he became familiar with the collages of Max Ernst. In 1930 Magritte returned to Brussels, where (except for the occasional journey) he remained for the rest of his life. During the 1940s he experimented with a variety of styles, sometimes, for example, incorporating elements of impressionism, but the paintings he produced in this period were not successful by most accounts, and he eventually abandoned the experimental. For the rest of his life he continued to produce his enigmatic and illogical images in a readily identifiable style. In his last year he supervised the construction of eight bronze sculptures derived from images in his paintings.

      The sea and wide skies, which were enthusiasms of his childhood, figure strongly in his paintings. In “Threatening Weather” (1928) the clouds have the shapes of a torso, a tuba, and a chair. In “The Castle of the Pyrenees” (1959) a huge stone topped by a small castle floats above the sea. Other representative fancies were a fish with human legs, a man with a bird cage for a torso, and a gentleman leaning over a wall beside his pet lion. Dislocations of space, time, and scale were common elements. In “Time Transfixed” (1939), for example, a steaming locomotive is suspended from the centre of a mantelpiece in a middle-class sitting room, looking as if it had just emerged from a tunnel. In “Golconda” (1953) bourgeois, bowler-hatted men fall like rain toward a street lined with houses.

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