Creator Record
Metadata
Name |
Magritte, René |
Other names |
https://www.getty.edu/vow/ULANFullDisplay?find=Magritte%2C+Ren%C3%A9&role=&nation=&prev_page=1&subjectid=500022967 |
Dates & places of birth and death |
(b Lessines, Hainaut, 21 Nov 1898; d Schaerbeek, Brussels, 15 Aug 1967). |
Nationality |
Belgian |
Occupation |
Belgian painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, photographer and film maker |
Notes |
"Belgian Surrealist painter. Magritte's family moved to France in 1910; two years later his mother drowned herself. At 17 he painted his first pictures, influenced by his enthusiasm for detective films and the bizarre paintings of James Ensor. He studied at the Brussels Academy from 1916, associating with the Belgian avant-garde—poets and painters—and admiring the Futurists and the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. After completing his military service, and experimenting with abstraction, he painted The Menaced Assassin (New York, MoMa) in 1926—the first of his ‘snapshots of the impossible’, in which he exploited the dislocation between image and reality. Magritte moved to Paris in 1927, becoming closely involved with the newly formed Surrealist group, led by André Breton, including Salvador Dalí, the poet Paul Éluard, and the film-maker Luis Buñuel. He returned to Brussels in 1930 after a quarrel with Breton, and remained there for the rest of his life, visiting England briefly in 1937, and moving to Carcassonne during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. In the latter part of his career, Magritte's international reputation gained him many public commissions: large frescoes including The Enchanted Domain (1952; Knokke-le-Zoute) and Les Barricades mystérieuses (1961) for the Brussels Palais des Congrès. His work became especially popular in America, which he visited several times. His disturbing, evocative images, thinly painted with meticulous attention to naturalistic detail, explore the poetic reality behind the appearances of objects by setting them in bizarre juxtapositions. His titles deliberately relate obliquely, if at all, to the apparent situations, thus adding an enigmatic intellectual element, frequently witty, to the imaginative paradoxes he creates." --Justine Hopkins |
Relationships |
influenced by De Chirico, Giorgio (Italian painter, writer, and scenographer, 1888-1978) spouse of Berger, Georgette (Belgian, wife of artist, 1901-1986) student of Combaz, Gisbert (Belgian painter and collector, 1869-1941) student of Damme-Sylva, Emile van (Belgian artist, 1853-1935) teacher of Aliséris, Carlos (Uruguayan painter, 1899-1974) |
Role |
Artist |
