The Belgian artist Rene Magritte, who was famous for his witty, mysterious, surrealistic paintings, never explained the meaning of his canvases, nor did he expose himself, hiding behind a faceless mask of an average person. Researchers of his work and authors of his biographies agree on one thing - both the artist’s paintings and the artist himself remain a mystery to us.
Childhood
Rene Magritte was born on November 21, 1898 in the small Belgian town of Lessin. He was the eldest of three sons, and his father worked as a salesman. The family was ordinary, unremarkable. The same thing, by the way, can be said about the life of Magritte as a whole, which has repeatedly baffled biographers. Why does the artist have so many strange, poetic, frightening images?
However, when Magritte was fourteen, a tragedy occurred in his life that left an imprint on both his personality and his paintings. On the night of March 12, 1912, Regina Magritte left the house in a nightgown and disappeared. A few days later, her body was discovered in the Sambra River, the hem of the shirt was wound around her head. Researchers of the artist's work believe that it is for this reason that the faces of people in some paintings are covered with cloth. One cannot but recall the famous "mermaids on the contrary" with the heads of fish and the legs of women. Be that as it may, the artist himself denied that the mysterious death of his mother had a special influence on him. “In my childhood there were enough other events that influenced me, ” he argued, though it was true that these were events he never told. Moreover, even the artist’s wife for a long time did not know anything about how his mother died.
Creation
After studying at the Royal Academy of Arts, Magritte got a job as a wallpaper designer and advertising artist. The early works of the artist, made in the style of cubism and futurism, belong to the same period. In 1926, Magritte created his first surrealistic painting, The Lost Jockey. A year later, he moved to Paris, where he met with the unwritten leader of French surrealism Andre Breton and arranged his first exhibition. In the "Parisian" years (1927-1930) Magritte finally shaped his artistic vision, as it remained almost unchanged until the end of his life. It was during these years in the artist’s work that the world that didn’t look like anything strange, full of secret meanings began to appear, which made him famous. The artist himself, by the way, said that his work has nothing to do with surrealism, calling his style "magical realism."
Magritte always wanted the viewer to look at his paintings. All his work consists of tricks, tricks, illusions, transformations, appearances, substitutions, secret meanings. Magritte tells us about the deceitfulness of everything that we usually don’t notice, about the illusory nature of being. So, for example, the painting “Treachery of Images” depicts a smoking pipe, and the signature “This is not a pipe” below.
Often in his paintings you can see a person in a bowler hat and without a face. Sometimes he turns his back on the audience, which makes him an even greater mystery. Many believe that this mysterious Mr. Nobody is a self-portrait of the artist.
Magicians usually hide their true face from the public, and Magritte led a completely inconspicuous life of a respectable bourgeois. He did not have a workshop, and he painted in the dining room, but so neatly that he never stained the floor with paint. And when the time was right, he stopped work to have lunch, although for artists of that time this was tantamount to abuse of art.
In the post-war years, full of quiet bourgeois joys, Magrit painted paintings that bring him world fame: “The Son of Man” and “Golconda”.
