"Everything we see hides another thing." -René Magritte
Quickly moving through Impressionism to Cubism in his early years, Belgian artist René Magritte is an icon of the Surrealist movement.
Magritte comes from a troubled childhood, with the suicide of his mother when he was 12, and then the First World War in his mid-teens. These troubled years feed into his work for the rest of his life, questioning reality, how we see the world, how people interact, and the very meaning of art and painting.
Drawing a lot as a child, it becomes his vocation. After serving in the post-WWI infantry, he becomes a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory in his early twenties, and works later designing advertising and posters.This very cubist influenced work here, is from 1923, entitled 'Youth.' This was created shortly after his military service.
Magritte's commercial art origin is not unusual for iconic artists, it seems. The demands of commercial work seem to do something to focus the artist's composition, and teach them to pack a lot of content into simply structured images, that can make an impression quickly.
An important skill in a successful artist is when they can depict that a depth beyond a first impressions. A work becomes even more impactful when it challenges us to question what we see in the painting and even the 'ordinary' world around us.
His work continues to explore what reality is. Deconstructing the perceived veneers of the world around us. From layers of reality stripped away, as shown below. Other pieces depict foreboding eagle shapes in enormous looming mountains in his late 1930s work.
This piece from 1926 is called "Popular Panorama" and depicts cutaway layers of reality that illustrate a separation of peaceful - yet somewhat ominous - natural environments separated from the modern world in which we all live.By the 1930s Magritte has mostly found his trade-mark style. Crisp realist, somewhat flat, portrayals of reality, with a twist to make us question how we look at the world.
He plays with our perception of how art fits into our lives and what purpose it serves for us. He finds that a landscape devoid of figures can ask us as much about how we live in our environs as another asks with a figure placed prominently within it.
Magritte's 1933 work called "The Human Condition" considers how we look at the world through art. He has a number of pieces that depict a pastoral view recreated in a realistic painting, yet situated in the very environment in which it was created. Perhaps a bit of a jab at landscape painters and realists? Was that view edited perhaps? Are we really seeing reality, just because it seems like a faithful reproduction?
"Why do we choose to capture the world on a canvas as it actually is, rather than just look at it in real life?" he seems to ask. Where is the challenge? How are we examining the human condition when our art is just pastoral landscapes?
I disagree with some reviewers' claims that he was exploring how objects connect with disparate things in our lives. I see this piece instead making a jab at pop-psychology and psychoanalysis. These random items, with their incongruous labels, as if in a museum display case, evoke a disbelief somewhat similar to that a skeptic feels hearing about Freudian dream interpretation.
You dreamt about a leaf perhaps? Well that represents a table in your life. A briefcase? That's the sky. A sponge? Well that's just a sponge. Wasn't it Freud that said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?"
As war approaches, the foreboding creeps into his work. In one piece, that gets later recreated in many variant forms, large, oppressive mountains loom over the scene, with small eggs or other objects sitting on a building ledge in the foreground.
Perhaps his most foreboding piece is "Black Flag" created in 1937. Somewhat referencing the Futurism of the early 20th century, but hinting too at dark days to come.
Magritte remains in Nazi-occupied Brussels during WWII, evolving his work into somewhat less attention-drawing period sometimes dubbed his "Renoir" period, with some very similarly styled pieces, yet still with that surrealist edge.
A theme in many of his war-period pieces is the use of birds. Owls are depicted, as are doves in flight. The imagery in those subjects is suggestive - quiet watchful waiting; the yearning to be free. An optimism even, particularly in the late war years.
In the post war period Magritte seems to pick up where he left off, making us question reality. Asking too, perhaps, why do we believe what we are fed in the art and media around us. For an advertising/poster guy living through a propaganda-filled period, this question must be a dominant topic during the war.
One of Magritte's most discussed messages is embodied in his famous "This is not a pipe" statement, with a crisp depiction of a pipe.But that's absurd, his audience exclaimed, it's clearly a pipe. When pressed with that, his reply was simply, "well try to put some tobacco into it."
Again he challenges us with the question of what is reality. What are these things we call paintings, and why do we choose to depict the things we do. More importantly, why do we accept the things we are told in various media to be true or real at all?
Magritte continues to place figures in his views of our world, and continues to obscure the faces. Not only does this create mystery about identity but allows us to perhaps put ourselves into the image. We ask who are we, and how do we fit into this (on the surface) familiar world. "Everything we see hides some other thing," he says.
Perhaps Magritte's most iconic artistic element, or device, is his man-in-the-bowler-hat. It seems he first appears around 1951, with the piece "Pandora's Box" where the figure crosses an urban bridge, with a the lure of a perfect white rose just in front of him. The title suggests that what he will find on the other side of the bridge is not what he might expect.
Many depictions of our bowler-hatted friend appear in subsequent years. Turned the other way, or with his face obscured by flowers or fruit, he shows up time and again. Clearly a device that resonated with Magritte and his public. Most exhibitions to this day feature this element.
This piece is "Decalcomania" from 1966.
René Magritte died in his native Belgium at 68 years old, in 1967.
