How René Magritte led the Belgian surrealist movement

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Rene Magritte is known for his humorous yet mysterious art, chief among them the iconic man in a bowler hat. But despite his significant contributions to surrealism—and the fame of his work—the evolution of his artistic practice is not widely known.

Magritte’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales marks the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in Australia, opening almost exactly 100 years after André Breton published his first surrealist manifesto in 1924.

The exhibition represents four decades of Magritte’s unique artistic vision and includes more than 100 works from collections in Australia, Belgium, Japan and the United States.

The man behind the bowler

Magritte was born in 1898 in Lessines, Belgium. From early childhood he developed a strong passion for painting. At the age of 16, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he received a traditional art education. Early in his career, he also worked as a graphic designer to support himself financially by creating various advertisements for magazine covers and posters.

Magritte sought to explore and expand his artistic practice beyond the Belgian art scene’s conservative aesthetics and limited opportunities for experimentation.

He drew inspiration from magazines, magazines and exhibition catalogs depicting avant-garde works. His earliest known self-portrait illustrates his early influence of Cubism. It is a double-sided work: on one side there is a painted portrait of Georgette Berger (who later became Magritte’s wife) playing the piano.

Rene Magritte “Self-Portrait (Self-Portrait) (recto)”; 1923, 1921, Sisters ‘L’ Collection © Copyright Agency, Sydney 2024, photo © Ludion Image Bank.

However, it was Magritte’s encounter with surrealist works of art (especially the Italian artist Giorgio De Chirico’s Song of Love with its dreamlike atmosphere) that greatly influenced his practice.

From the mid-1920s, Magritte began to create personal and poetic images in which familiar objects are depicted realistically, but in unexpected combinations. He also introduced motifs that appeared throughout his career, such as curtains, toys, clouds and boulders. His first solo exhibition at the Le Centaure gallery in Brussels demonstrated his devotion to surrealism.

Art as a process of reasoning

Magritte’s exhibition places the artist’s work in the context of Belgian surrealism, highlighting how he was influenced by fellow writers, philosophers and artists from Brussels.

Among these figures was the poet Paul Nouget, founder of Belgian surrealism in 1926. Nougé introduced a more scientific and rationalist perspective to the Belgian movement, distinguishing it from its Parisian counterpart.

Parisian surrealism was fascinated by psychoanalysis, focusing on the irrational and the unconscious. Meanwhile, Belgian surrealism turned its attention to consciousness, rationality and the search for meaning. This methodology was contrary to the beliefs of the Parisian surrealists.

Although Magritte worked with the Parisian surrealists from 1927 to 1930, while living in Paris he maintained some independence. He viewed his artistic practice as a process of reasoning.

While in Paris, Magritte developed his verbal imagery, as seen in “The Literal Meaning” and the famous “The Harm of Images” (better known as Ceci n’est pas une Pipe, or “This is not a pipe”), which is today considered a landmark in history of European contemporary art.

René Magritte “The Literal Meaning (Le sens propre)” 1929, oil on canvas, 73 × 54.6 cm, Menil Collection, Houston, 1980-09 DJ © Copyright Agency, Sydney, 2024, photo: James Craven.

His approach was based on Nouget’s reflections on the nature and status of words and images, pointing to the arbitrary nature of language. In these works, Magritte invites us to take part in a linguistic game, forcing us to think about the relationship between an object, its name and its representative image.

Returning to Brussels, Magritte explored what he considered philosophical “problems” through rigorous, almost mathematically constructed paintings. He sought to reconcile the depicted object and the “thing attached to it in the shadow of consciousness” through the canvas.

In The Human Condition, he addresses the “window problem” as an object to look through and as a metaphor for traditional perspective painting, revealing the way we perceive external reality through our own internal conceptualization.

René Magritte “La Condition Humane” 1933, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm, National Gallery, Washington, gift of the Collectors Committee, 1987.55.1 © Copyright Agency, Sydney 2024, photo © Photothèque R Magritte / Adagp Images , Paris, 2024.

“Solar surrealism” and lesser-known works

The Magritte exhibition also features some amazing and much lesser-known works. By the mid-1930s, the artist had gained significant recognition in Europe and beyond. However, the outbreak of World War II prompted him to question the relevance of surrealism as a response to war.

He was looking for new approaches to surrealism. In Solar Surrealism, he considered images that evoked feelings of happiness, adopting an impressionistic style characterized by feathery brushstrokes reminiscent of Auguste Renoir depicted in Lucky Action.

René Magritte “La bonne Fortune” 1945, oil on canvas, 60 × 80 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 11689 © Copyright Agency, Sydney 2024, photo © Photothèque R Magritte / Adagp Images, Paris, 2024 .

In the 1950s and 60s, Magritte returned to the realistic style that defines his work. In his art series “The Power of Light” he creates a paradoxical image. We consider the properties of light at different times of day, highlighting the ambiguity created by the coexistence of light and dark.

Continuing Legacy

Magritte also influenced the next generation of artists associated with Pop Art and Conceptual art, including those who went far beyond his time.

Today, his influence is evident in popular visual culture, from Pedro Almodóvar’s 2009 film Broken Embraces to Beyoncé’s music video for “Mine,” which references “Lovers.”

Magritte’s work continues to be relevant as it explores perception and the porous relationship between images and reality. This topic is very relevant in the era of artificial intelligence, when the line between artificial and real seems increasingly blurred.

More than 50 years after his death, Magritte continues to encourage us to think about how we perceive, experience and describe the world around us.

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How René Magritte led the Belgian surrealist movement

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