René MAGRITTE

René MAGRITTE (1898 - 1967)

René Magritte was born in Lessines in Belgian Hainaut on 21 November 1898 and was one of the greatest artists of the Surrealist movement.

In 1925-1926, he discovered a reproduction of Giogio de Chirico's "Song of Love" (1914) which upset him and challenged his conception of painting.
"The first painter who thought of making painting speak of something other than painting",
"My eyes saw thought for the first time".
Disappointed with the abstract aesthetics of his first paintings, Magritte embarked on a new path.
In January 1926, he signed a four-year contract with Paul-Gustave (P.G.) Van Hecke and the new gallery Le Centaure. During this period he produced 280 oil paintings, which is almost a quarter of his painted work.
A Belgian surrealist group was formed, including Camille Goemans, Marcel Lecomte, René Magritte, Messens, Paul Nougé and the composer André souris.
In 1927 Magritte met Louis Scutenaire (1905-1987) and they became close friends for forty years.
From 1927 to 1930, he lived in Paris, where he rubbed shoulders with the surrealists, notably André Breton, Paul Eluard, Salavador Dali and Max Ernst. The crisis of 1929 caused him to lose most of his contracts as a poster artist, and he returned to Brussels.
Between 1930 and 1933, sidelined from surrealist events and at odds with André Breton, Magritte returned to Brussels. He painted "les affinités électives" which radically transformed the nature of his work. He replaced the fortuitous surrealist encounters with the very logical approximation of an egg trapped in a cage.

In 1938, Magritte gave his lecture "The Life Line" at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In it, he explained a reasoned approach to solving "problems".

In 1954, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels organised the first major retrospective of his work. Magritte wrote two important texts in the catalogue.

In 1957, Magritte met Harry Torczyner, who became not only his friend and legal adviser, but also a collector of his work and the author of a monograph on it.

In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) devoted a major retrospective to him. The works came from European and American collections.

On 15 August 1967, Magritte died at the age of sixty-nine, after leading a quiet life during which he painted several hundred fantastic and poetic pictures that are exhibited worl