"The Mystery of Things" in the paintings of Rene Magritte, who wanted to "make everyday life less dreary"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

"To make everyday life less dreary" - this was the task set by the Belgian artist Rene Magritte. His paintings do not just attract attention - they are capable of instilling anxiety, puzzling, bewitching, even scaring.

Belgian bourgeois

Rene Magritte was born in the small Belgian town of Lessines in 1898. The family soon moved to Charleroi. The artist's childhood was not easy, in addition to everything else, he was overshadowed by a tragedy: when Rene was 14, his mother committed suicide. Magritt studied for two years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, after which he began to work in the field of advertising. The search for Magritte's own path in art took place under the obvious influence of the surrealists. The artist's style - "magic realism", as he himself later called it - was developed after 1926.

While studying at the Academy, Magritte met his future wife Georgette, with whom he lived until his death in 1967. The spouses did not have children, most of the artist's life was spent in Brussels, in an apartment where he spent almost all his time at work. Magritte, unlike his colleagues in the workshop, was not the artist who draws attention to his person with shocking and scandalous actions. All the more impressive was his inexplicable and often unexplained paintings.

The magical realism of Magritte's paintings

The artist's favorite technique is the depiction of ordinary, everyday objects in a strange and unimaginable combination. Such an ordinary character as a man in a bowler hat - Mr. Everyday, as Magritte himself called him - has become an extremely recognizable image. The human face, hidden now by an apple, now by a bird, becomes part of a large philosophical puzzle that permeates all of Magritte's work.

The artist himself preferred not to give explanations for his plots, leaving the viewer to find the answer himself. Paintings, he believed, needed to be looked at, and that was what they were created for. Looking at it can evoke strange feelings. The painting "Empire of Light", it would seem, does not depict anything unusual - a peaceful night landscape, a cozy light in the windows of the house. True, if you look at the sky, it turns out that it is illuminated by the sun, which means that the picture is both day and night. The effect of the work was so strong that the artist had to repeat the idea over and over again to fulfill private orders, and now there are 16 replicas of the painting in the world.

Know how

Magritte would well deserve the title of a working genius: during his life he created about 2000 paintings, and often he had to fulfill orders and create paintings on the same subject. In addition to paintings, Magritte was fond of photography - this side of his work made it possible to achieve images of objects with a special, almost documentary accuracy.

There are only two things in the painting "Hegel's Vacation" - a glass of water and an open umbrella. In a letter to a friend, Magritte confessed: “My last painting began with a question: how to depict a glass of water in a painting in such a way that it would not be impersonal? But at the same time and so that he was not particularly bizarre, arbitrary or insignificant. In a word, so that you can calmly say: brilliant! I began to draw glasses one by one, each time with a stroke across. After the hundredth or fiftieth drawing, the stroke became somewhat wider and, finally, took the shape of an umbrella. At first, the umbrella was inside the glass, but then it ended up under it. So I found a solution to the original question: how can a glass of water be portrayed brilliantly."

Surrealism develops further - and contemporary artists set new challenges for themselves.