René Magritte limited himself to the essential – as far as he himself and his art were concerned. The Belgian painter, who did not even have his own studio his whole life, painted without flourish and ballast; he only wanted to paint that what he believed should be painted.
(...) Continue readingRené Magritte – Difficult youth; escape from reality into literary worlds
René Magritte was born on 21 November 1898 in Lessines in Belgium. The eldest son of a tailor and a hatmaker, he was not born an artist, but was already practicing painting and drawing at the age of twelve. In 1912, his young life was rocked by the unexpected and tragic suicide of his mother. Magritte was present when her body was discovered; he later artistically processed this view of death - a nightdress wrapped around the head – by repeatedly inserting cloth-covered heads into his pictures. Thereupon, the family moved to the industrial town of Charleroi and had to contend with the harsh living conditions there, which René escaped into a fantasy world of adventure and gothic novels: Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gaston Leroux, Maurice Leblanc and the stories of the master thief Fantômas were his preferred teachings. The fantastic, often impossible, in these stories had a great influence on the artist and fascinated him so much that it later found an unmistakable expression in his paintings.
Impressionism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism
René Magritte found a lover and muse in Georgette Berger, two years his junior, who often stood as model for him and to whom he remained married until his death. The artist’s early pictures were still characterised by Impressionism, but he later moved away from this. It was during military service that Magritte stumbled upon the painting Das Lied der Liebe by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico – it made a great impression on him and influenced his further style of painting. According to Magritte, Chirico had achieved exactly what art was about: capturing the essence. In 1916, Magritte began studies at the Brussels Académie des Beaux-Arts, where he leant about Constructivism. From the early 1920s, the young painter earned a living as a pattern draughtsman in a wallpaper factory as well as working as an advertising and poster painter. He came into contact with the Dada movement through the art dealer E. L. T. Mesens, who had taught Magritte’s younger brother Paul the piano, but it was only in Surrealism that the painter found his true artistic vocation.
Commercial success came late
For a long time, René Magritte had to pay his way with activities unrelated to art; even as a forty-year-old husband, he was still dependent on the support of patrons, whilst a corner of his living room between table and stove, served as his studio. He broke with the Surrealists around André Breton – their controversial and sometimes fanatical mastermind – because they were sceptical of his planned ideas and concepts in their striving for chance and automatism. René Magritte himself viewed the Second World War as a decisive turning point in his art career: before the war, he painted the fear of evil, and after the war, his driving inspiration was the longing for good. It was only in the last years of his life that he found the long sought-after success: his pictures were shown all over the world and American painters such as Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg were interested in his art. Magritte, however, remained in the bourgeois confines of his adopted home of Brussels, which he found equally oppressive and protective – he hardly went beyond its boundaries his whole life.
René Magritte died in Brussels on 15 August 1967.
René Magritte - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
