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During the Second World War Magritte remained
in Brussels, practising a colourful, painterly style known as his "Renoir
Period". This was followed by other temporary interludes, including
a Fauvist-style experiment
in the later 1940s, featuring works characterized by violent colour and
grotesque imagery. However, in late 1948 he returned to the style and
themes of his pre-war painting. In that year he gained international recognition
when he agreed a contract with the New York art dealer Alexandre Iolas,
who remained his agent until Magritte's death in 1967. In the 1950s, Magritte
began to achieve international honours, and his art appeared in a number
of important exhibitions around the world. Two of the most important were
held later in New York: a retrospective at the Museum
of Modern Art MOMA in 1965, and a second retrospective at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in 1992.
As an Artist
Magritte specialised in classical productions
of absurdist compositions in which everything is represented prosaically,
using ultra-banal imagery quite unlike the extraordinarily bizarre images
seen in (say) works by Salvador Dali.
His personal surrealist idiom is thus far quieter than that of his surrealist
colleagues, but equally shocking. It is the situation of his objects,
or their partial transformation, or some other inversion of normality
(as in a night scene under a brilliant sky), that creates his particular
sort of conceptual shock and reveals him as a great pictorial poet.
Again, unlike Dali, Magritte does not use painting to express his private
obsessions or fantasies. Instead of self-revelation he employs wit, irony,
and intelligent comment to make his point. Thus for instance, in his word-paintings
(1928-1930) he explores the relationship between words and images and
the objects they denote. In such works as The Human Condition I
(1933; private collection) in which a canvas on an easel precisely reproduces
the "real" landscape beyond the window, he explores the relationship
between art to nature. There is a studied objectivity - Magritte liked
to pose as the average bourgeois.
Magritte used a number of repetitive themes
- suffocation and claustrophobia (confined spaces), an opposite yearning
for freedom (blue skies), phallic symbols (guns, sausages, candles), death
and decay (coffins), some of which may have been derived from the trauma
of losing his mother when he was 14.
In other works, he questions our assumptions about the world - for example,
he interferes with the normal scale of objects or defies the laws of gravity
(an apple fills a room; a train bursts through a giant fireplace), implying
that that nothing can be taken for granted - another possible reference
to the sudden disappearance of his mother. His effect is heightened by
his use of everyday objects. For example, the hero of many of his later
pictures is the man in urban uniform - coat, bowler hat, sometimes a brief-case
- as expressionless as a tailor's dummy. In his later work, these themes
were overworked and became something of a tired formula.
Influence
Magritte's cerebral representative type
of surrealism had a huge impact on his contemporaries, as well as on later
Pop artists and Neo-Dadaists. The 2006-7 Los Angeles County Museum of
Art show "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images"
was a major exhibition which examined his impact on recent artists.
Major Works
Masterpieces by Magritte include:
- The Menaced Assassin (1925, Museum of
Modern Art, New York)
- On the Threshold of Liberty (1929)
- The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images (1928-9, LACMA, California)
- The Listening Room (1933)
- La Condition Humaine (1933), National
Gallery of Art, Washington DC)
- The Red Model (1935, Museum of Modern Art, Pompidou Centre, Paris)
- Reproduction Prohibited (Portrait of Mr James) (1937, Boymans-Beuningen)
- Time Transfixed (1939, Private Collection)
- The Empire of Light, II (1950, Museum of Modern Art NY)
- Personal Values (1952, Personal Collection)
- Man in a Bowler Hat (La Grand Guerre) (1964)
Paintings by Rene Magritte
Works by Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte
can be seen in many of the world's best art
museums, notably the Museum of Modern art MOMA New York, National
Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Museum of Modern Art, Pompidou
Centre, Paris. The Menil Collection in Houston Texas has a significant
number of his works as does The Magritte Museum, located in the Hotel
Altenloh, in Brussels, which opened in May 2009.
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