10 things to know about René Magritte

René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was born in Lessines, Belgium. His father was a tailor and textile merchant; his mother committed suicide in 1912, drowning herself in the River Sambre.

Four years later, Magritte enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, before spending short periods in the Belgian infantry, and as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory. In 1924 he began work as a freelance graphic designer in Brussels. Over the next five years he produced advertisements for many clients, including a Belgian fashion house and Alfa Romeo.

If you had seen René Magritte in the street, however, you might have easily mistaken him for an ordinary bourgeois Belgian. Indeed, he later adopted the now iconic bowler hat precisely because it was the uniform of the Belgian fonctionnaire.

In Paris, Magritte was introduced to the writers, artists and other characters associated with Surrealism, not least its leader, André Breton. The supposed lawlessness of the movement, however, was undermined by Breton’s prescriptive behaviour. In France, Surrealism conjured up ideas of automatism and the subconscious, concepts that were a far cry from Magritte’s own quest for answers full of magic and mystery to the riddles posed by the world around us.

Magritte left Paris after his wife Georgette was publicly criticised for wearing a crucifix, returning to the more bourgeois and familiar sphere of Belgian Surrealism.

From the 1920s onwards, Magritte explored the arbitrary way in which letters and sounds are attached to concepts and objects in the world. He was an early explorer of notions of signs and signifiers, and some of his pictures tap into ideas about perception.

This is taken to the extreme in his famous declaration, ‘This is not a pipe’, emblazoned across his 1929 picture of a pipe. Of course, it is a painting and not a pipe — hence its title: The Treachery of Images.

Throughout his career, Magritte accumulated a personal inventory of everyday objects and motifs that he deployed in a variety of combinations or arrangements — apples, eggs, rocks, birds, bowler hats, umbrellas, a glass, clouds in a perfect blue sky, to name but a few.

From the 1930s, Magritte sought to find ‘solutions’ to particular ‘problems’ posed by different types of objects, a method that enabled him to challenge and reconfigure the most ubiquitous and commonplace elements of everyday life. These problems obsessed him until he was able to conceive of an image to solve them.

This philosophical method had come to him after waking from a dream in 1932. In his semi-conscious state, he looked over at a birdcage that was in his room and saw not the bird that inhabited the cage, but instead an egg. This ‘splendid misapprehension’ allowed him to grasp, in his own words, ‘a new and astonishing poetic secret’.

In La corde sensible (1960), sold by Christie’s in 2017 for just over £14.4 million, Magritte has solved the ‘problem of the cloud’ by placing an empty glass — a vessel generally used for containing a liquid — under the cloud itself. Water is the ‘elective affinity’ that unites these seemingly disparate objects, its absence here allowing Magritte to render them in a strangely impossible encounter.

Le domaine d’Arnheim (The Domain of Arnheim), painted in 1938, is Magritte’s first realisation in oil of one of his most enduring pictorial motifs, the magisterial eagle-shaped mountain. This subject matter so appealed to Magritte that he repeated the same theme nine times between 1938 and 1962.

The painting, which sold for £10,245,000 at Christie’s in London in 2017, once formed part of the collection assembled by the great English patron and collector of Surrealist art, Edward James.

During the Second World War Magritte adopted a style of painting he called ‘surréalisme en plein soleil’, a response to the horror of the conflict that was engulfing Europe. Inspired by the palette and voluptuous nudes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the works he created in this style reflect his desire to explore ‘a beautiful side’ of life.

In a 1941 letter to his friend Paul Eluard, he wrote: ‘The power of these pictures is to make one acutely aware of the imperfections of everyday life.’ The female body was a key element within this strategy of disruption, and Magritte celebrated the sensuous, elegant forms of women in numerous paintings throughout this period.

Magritte’s successful career in advertising — he ran an agency, Studio Dongo, with his brother, Paul, in the 1930s — probably helped to hone his idea of how to make an image stick. In a tumbledown shack in his garden, Magritte created posters, music covers and advertisements right up until the 1950s, long after he had become internationally acknowledged as an artist. He never abandoned the commercial world, but went on appropriating its advertising strategies into much of his art.

Throughout his life, Magritte shunned all attempts to decode the meaning of his work. ‘I have nothing to express!’ he once exclaimed. ‘I simply search for images, and invent and invent. The idea doesn’t matter to me: only the image counts, the inexplicable and mysterious image, since all is mystery in our life.’

Many of Magritte’s iconic masterpieces reside in major museums across the world. The Magritte Museum, housed in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, has one of the largest and most varied collections of his work.