René Magritte

Biography

In 1922 the poet Marcel Lecomte showed René Magritte a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Song of Love”. Magritte burst into tears and later called it one of the most moving moments of his life: his eyes, he said, saw thought for the first time. He was twenty-three, worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory and had not yet painted a single Surrealist picture.

The first, “The Lost Jockey”, would come four years later.

René François Ghislain Magritte was born on 21 November 1898 in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor and textile merchant, and Régina Bertinchamps, who had been a milliner before her marriage. The family moved about: to Gilly, where his younger brothers Raymond and Paul were born, then to Châtelet. He began drawing lessons in 1910. Little is known of his childhood; he himself remembered an abandoned cemetery at Soignies where he played with a neighbour’s girl and met a painter who was painting its avenues, and those meetings left him feeling that a painter possesses some magical power. In February 1912 his mother died in the River Sambre, and her body was found only sixteen days later. The story that thirteen-year-old René saw her being pulled from the water has not been borne out by later research. According to legend her dress was covering her face, and the cloth-covered faces in his paintings of 1927–1928, among them “The Lovers”, have been linked to this image.

His first paintings, around 1915, were Impressionist. From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels under Constant Montald, but found the teaching uninspiring; he also took lessons there from the painter and poster designer Gisbert Combaz. His work of 1918–1924 shows the influence of Futurism and the figurative Cubism of Metzinger. From December 1920 to September 1921 he served in the Belgian infantry at Beverlo. In 1920, in Brussels, Magritte met Georgette Berger again, a butcher’s daughter from Charleroi whom he had known as a teenager in 1913, and on 28 June 1922 they married. Georgette, who had also studied art, became his model.

A contract with the Brussels gallery Le Centaure in 1926 let him give up advertising and paint full-time. His first solo exhibition, in Brussels in 1927, was a failure, and Magritte left for Paris, became friends with André Breton and joined the Surrealist group. In 1929 the Goemans gallery in Paris put him under contract together with Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy, and on 15 December that year the last, twelfth issue of the review La Révolution surréaliste carried his essay “Words and Images”, which echoed “The Treachery of Images” (1928–1929). At the end of 1929 Le Centaure closed, success in Paris did not come, and in 1930 Magritte returned to Brussels and to advertising: with his brother Paul he set up an agency that kept the family fed.

The thirties began badly. From 1930 to 1932 he had no exhibitions and no sales, and he lived on a monthly allowance arranged by the playwright Claude Spaak. In 1932 he joined the Communist Party, and afterwards left and rejoined it more than once. In 1934 Alice Lorge bought “Black Magic”, the first of eleven paintings showing Georgette in a classical nude pose. From 1934 to 1937, under the pseudonym “Emair”, he drew film posters for the German distributor Tobis; seven of them are kept in the city archive of Leuven. In 1936 he had his first solo exhibition in the United States, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, and in 1938 an exhibition in London. The English patron Edward James let him stay in his London house rent-free, and in 1937 Magritte painted him twice, in “The Pleasure Principle” and in “Not to Be Reproduced”. From 1930 to 1954 the couple lived in Brussels on the rue Esseghem, where his house is now a museum.

He sat out the Occupation in Brussels, and this caused his break with Breton. In 1943–1944 Magritte briefly took up a bright, broad, painterly manner known as his “Renoir period”; in 1946, with other Belgian artists, he signed the manifesto “Surrealism in Full Sunlight”; and in 1947–1948 he painted deliberately crude pictures in a Fauve spirit. In the lean post-war years, as is now known, he and his brother Paul, together with Marcel Mariën, produced forged Picassos, Braques and de Chiricos, and later banknotes as well. At the end of 1948 he returned to the themes and manner of his pre-war Surrealism.

His subjects were built from ordinary things. Beneath the pipe in “The Treachery of Images” is written “This is not a pipe”, and when asked about the picture Magritte replied: just try to fill it with tobacco. The man in the bowler hat appears in “Golconda” and in “The Son of Man” (1964); an easel bearing a painting that screens the view from a window, in “The Human Condition” (1933 and 1935); in the “Perspectives” the figures from paintings by David and Manet are replaced by coffins. It seems to me that the answer about tobacco explains him better than many interpretations. He called his pictures visible images that conceal nothing: the viewer asks what it means, and it means nothing, because mystery, too, means nothing.

In 1965 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed a Magritte retrospective, and in the 1960s interest in him rose sharply. His images were taken up by Pop Art, Minimalism and conceptual art, though he himself denied any kinship with Pop Art.

René Magritte died on 15 August 1967 in Schaerbeek, Brussels, at the age of 68, leaving unfinished a new version of “The Empire of Light”. He is buried in Schaerbeek Cemetery. In 1998, for his centenary, Belgium issued a 500-franc banknote in his honour, and on 30 May 2009 the Magritte Museum opened in Brussels, built mainly on the collections of the artist’s widow, Georgette, and of Irène Hamoir-Scutenaire.