Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte was a Belgian Surrealist painter whose deadpan canvases of bowler-hatted men, floating rocks, and ordinary objects placed under impossible captions made him one of the most quoted image-makers of the twentieth century. He was born in Lessines in 1898 and spent most of his life in and around Brussels, painting in a small dining room rather than a studio.

His early work passed through Impressionism and Cubism before he encountered Giorgio de Chirico's The Song of Love, a meeting he later described as the moment painting acquired a new purpose for him. From 1927 he worked in Paris alongside Andre Breton's Surrealist circle, returning to Brussels in 1930 after a falling-out and continuing his investigation of pictorial paradox at home.

The 1929 painting The Treachery of Images, showing a tobacco pipe above the inscription Ceci n'est pas une pipe, became the touchstone for later debates about representation. Other works in the same vein, including The Son of Man, The Lovers, Golconda, and The Empire of Light, applied a similar method, treating each canvas as a calm puzzle whose surface decorum hid a logical scandal.

During the German occupation Magritte produced a brief sunlit, Renoir-styled phase, then a deliberately crude vache series in 1948 to mock Parisian taste. He returned to his clear hard manner until his death from pancreatic cancer in 1967. His widow Georgette, often the model in his paintings, outlived him by nineteen years.

The name Rene comes from the Latin Renatus, meaning reborn, originally given in early Christian usage to mark baptism. He earned a quieter version of the meaning, shedding three earlier styles before settling into the painting voice that carried his work into common language.