This biography from the Archives of AskART:
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 Rene Magritte was born on November 21,1898 in the town of Lessines in southern Belgium, near Brussels. He was the oldest of three brothers. He began taking art lessons at the age of twelve. Between 1916 and 1921 he was enrolled at the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels, but he attended classes only occasionally. He had some published drawings, some advertising posters, a stint as a designer at a wallpaper factory and another doing freelance publicity work for a fashion house. He had toyed with Dada, Futurism and Cubism; he had designed magazine covers and stage sets and written song lyrics.
When he was only fourteen, Magritte woke one night to find his mother missing. He and his brothers searched the neighborhood and found her, drowned in a river after a jump from a bridge. Her nightgown was folded back over her face by the current. Several of his paintings painted through his life used a nude woman with various references to this tragic loss.
In 1922 a young friend of Magritte's showed him, in a magazine he brought back from Paris, a smudgy reproduction of a work by the prewar precursor of surrealism, Giorgio de Chirico. On seeing it, Magritte uncharacteristically burst into tears. Although it was a few years before Magritte abandoned his "modern" formula, he recognized the key to his own domain. In the years 1926 through 1930 he painted over two hundred and eighty pictures, some of them very large. Max Ernst was another influence.
Magritte and his wife, Georgette Berger, were married for over forty-five years and had no children. They lived in Brussels at the same address from 1930 to 1954; he used to take his little dog for a walk every day. The Magrittes lived for three years in a Paris suburb and Rene was in daily contact with the surrealists. He painted regularly four mornings a week at home in his stuffy little apartment. He was a moonfaced little man, middle-aged, who puttered around Brussels, proving that he has all the technical facility of the best surrealists and none of their nightmare overtones.
By the time Magritte died in 1967 at the age of sixty-eight, his genius was acknowledged.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources include:
Pipeline to Pop by Kenneth Baker, ARTnews, September 1999
Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1998
Peter Plagens in Newsweek Magazine, July 6, 1992
M.Therese Southgate, MD in Journal of the American Medical Association, July 5, 1995
Magritte, The Man in the Bowler Hat by George Melly in Art & Antiques Magazine, April 1992
From the internet, artchive.com
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Biography from Rogallery.com:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Rene Magritte was born on the 21st November, 1898 in Hainaut, Belgium.
His father was a tailor and a merchant. As his business did not go well
the family had to move often. René lost his mother early and tragically
– she committed suicide for unclear reasons. René was only 14 years old
at the time.
From 1916 through 1918 Magritte studied in the
Royal Academy of Arts in Brussels (Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts). He
became a wallpaper designer and commercial artist. His early
painting works were executed under the influence of the Cubism and
Futurism (1918-20), then he was inspired by the Purists and Fernand
Léger. In 1922 Magritte married Georgette Berger, with whom he
first became acquainted when fifteen years old. After meeting again in
1920, she became his model and then wife.
The acquaintance with
Giorgio de Chirico's Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting) and
Dadaistic poetry constituted an important artistic turning-point for
Magritte. In 1925 he came close with a group of Dadaists and
co-operated in the magazines Aesophage and Marie, together with E.L.T.
Mesens, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, Schwitters, Tzara and Man Ray.
In 1926 Magritte painted The Lost Jockey,
it is his first painting that he allowed to be labeled as "Surrealist".
After his first, badly-received, one-man show in Brussels in 1927, he
left for Paris. In 1927-30 Magritte lived in France, where he
participated in the activities of the Surrealists, establishing a close
friendship in particular with Max Ernst, Dali, André Breton and
especially with Paul Eluard.
In Paris, Magritte's system of
conceptual painting was formed, it remained almost unchanged until the
end of his life. His painting manner, intentionally dry and
academic, "polished in the technical sense" (p.18 Magritte. By Marcel
Paquet. Taschen. 1992) with precise and clean draughtsmanship
demonstrated a paradoxical ability to depict trustworthy an unreal,
unthinkable reality.
In Magritte’s works the morphologically
similar objects belonging to different classes, exchange some qualities
or unite as hybrids (Companions of Fear. 1942, The Explanation, 1954, The Flavour of Tears, 1948); a night landscape gleams under daylit skies (The Empire of Lights 1954).
Demonstrating
the problems of visual perception and illusionary of images, Magritte
used the symbols of mirrors, eyes, windows, stages and curtains and
pictures within pictures (The False Mirror, 1935, The Key to the Fields. 1936, Beautiful World. 1962.)
Magritte
was fond of philosophy and literature. Many of his paintings
reflect his impressions of literature works, illusions and
philosophical metaphors, e.g. The Giantess (after Baudelair) 1929-30; The Domain of Arnheim (after Edgar Poe) 1938; Hegel's Holiday. 1958 (homage to Hegel's dialectics).
In
the 1940s Magritte made two attempts to change his painting style. But
the so-called “vie-heureuse” or “plein-soleil” period of 1945-47, when
he painted in the style of Renoir, and the “époque vache” (Cow Period)
that followed in 1947-48 did not prove to be effective and the artist
returned to his previous manner.
In the 1950s Magritte executed two fresco cycles: The Enchanted Realm for a casino in Knokke-le-Zut (1953) and The Ignorant Fairy
(1957) for the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi. These monumental
compositions repeat the motifs of his previous paintings. In his last
year Magritte began to make sculptures of his painted images,
developing the theme of correlation of mental and material realities.
Magritte died of cancer at the age of 69, August 15, 1967 in Brussels. |
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