René Magritte

     René François-Ghislain Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium in 1898.  Growing up, his father, Léopold, encouraged all of his artistic endeavors and he began painting at the age of 12.  His mother suffered from severe clinical depression.  When he was 14, she committed suicide, throwing herself into the river of Sambre, and was found several days later floating down the river covered with her nightgown.  This event had a strong impact on Magritte and shows up in several of his later works.

The Heart of the Matter

Classic Crush

     While studying in the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Magritte was inspired by the surrealist works of Giorgio De Chirico.  Magritte, along with André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Salvador Dalí, was one of the leaders of the surrealist movement in Paris.  

     The quality of Magritte's work that is especially admirable is his talent in making surrealist objects and people seem realistic.  Unlike artists like Dalí, who morphed ordinary objects in a surrealist manner, Magritte kept objects in their original form, but juxtaposed seemingly unrelated items.  Examples of this are shown in the following works.

Son of Man

La Thérapeute

"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."
Rene Magritte