Magritte René

Biography of Magritte René ( 1898-1967 )

A central figure of Surrealism, he developed a body of work of remarkable intellectual coherence, grounded in a methodical interrogation of the relationships between image, language, and reality.

Born on 21 November 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, Magritte spent his childhood in Châtelet. The tragic death of his mother in 1912, whose body was found in the River Sambre, has often been invoked in connection with certain motifs in his work—particularly the veiled faces—although the artist himself consistently rejected reductive biographical interpretations. In 1916 he enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he received an academic training he soon found unsatisfactory. His early works reveal successive influences: late Impressionism, Futurism, and subsequently Cubism and Purism, in the wake of Metzinger and Léger.

A decisive revelation occurred in 1922 when he encountered Giorgio de Chirico’s The Song of Love (1914). This aesthetic discovery convinced him of the poetic power of enigmatic imagery and of the unexpected juxtaposition of ordinary objects. From that moment onward, Magritte developed a pictorial vocabulary based on the meticulous representation of familiar elements—pipes, bowler hats, curtains, cloud-filled skies, rocks, windows—combined according to a logic of displacement and contradiction.

In 1926 he painted The Lost Jockey, considered his first fully Surrealist work. The following year he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels. The critical reception was reserved, even hostile, prompting him to relocate to Paris in 1927. There he associated with André Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, and the Surrealist circle. During this period he produced some of his most decisive works, among them The Treachery of Images (1929), famously inscribed with the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). Through this paradoxical assertion, Magritte affirmed that the painted image of a pipe is not the pipe itself but its representation, thereby laying the groundwork for a conceptual reflection on the status of the image that would exert a profound influence on postwar art.

Upon returning to Brussels in 1930, Magritte adopted a deliberately discreet lifestyle, in stark contrast to the subversive aura of his work. He cultivated a painting style of smooth, almost impersonal facture, which he described as “plein air painting of thought.” Works such as The Human Condition (1933), The Red Model (1935), and The Empire of Light(begun in 1949) elaborate themes of mise en abyme, metamorphosis, and the coexistence of opposites. The Empire of Light, in particular, juxtaposes a nocturnal landscape shrouded in darkness with a luminous daytime sky, producing an image of unsettling visual clarity.

During the Second World War, Magritte underwent a brief “Renoir period” (1943–1947), characterized by a warmer palette and freer brushwork, conceived as an optimistic response to troubled times. This was followed in 1948 by the so-called “Vache period,” marked by deliberately provocative, expressionistic gestures, before he returned to his more controlled and emblematic style.

From the 1950s onward, international recognition steadily increased. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1954 and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. René Magritte died on 15 August 1967 in Brussels.

Deeply rooted in a philosophical inquiry into representation, his work anticipated many of the concerns of Conceptual art. Through the rigor of his method and the deceptive clarity of his images, Magritte demonstrated that mystery lies not in the exotic or the irrational, but within reality itself—once one consents to displace its apparent certainties.