Rene Magritte

He met Georgette Berger first in 1913 when they were both teenagers. The couple met again in 1920 and fell in love. Their relationship culminated in marriage in 1922 which lasted till the artist’s death.

Magritte suffered from pancreatic cancer and died in 1967.

The Magritte Museum was opened in May 2009 in Brussels. It is dedicated to the art work of this great surrealist artist and is located near the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

He was born as the eldest son of Leopold Magritte, a tailor and textile merchant and his wife Regina. He received drawing lessons from the time he was 12 years of age.

Not much is known about Magritte’s early life except for the fact that his childhood was scarred by a very tragic incident. His mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. His mother’s death affected him deeply.

He started painting as a teenager and his earliest known paintings date from 1915. Initially he adopted an Impressionistic style.

He enrolled at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1916 where he studied under Constant Montald. He remained there for two terms till 1918, though he did not think much of the experience.

From 1918 till 1924, the paintings he produced, most of which were female nudes, reflected futurism and the figurative Cubism of Metzinger.

He served for a short while from December 1920 till September 1921 in the Belgian infantry before becoming a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory where he designed posters and advertisements till 1926.

He sold his first art work, a painting of the singer Evelyn Brelin in 1923. This led to a contract at the Galerie la Centaure in 1926 which enabled him to become a full-time artist. The very same year, he created his first surreal painting, ‘The Lost Jockey’.

He began to delve deep into surrealism, often using everyday objects and simple imagery to create confusing images. He used to play with people’s imagination by combining elements of reality with fantasy which challenged people’s minds to find out the real meaning behind his paintings.

He held his first exhibition in 1927 in Brussels where he showed 61 of his paintings. The exhibition was a failure and critics reviewed his paintings very harshly. Depressed, he left for Paris.

One of his best known paintings is ‘The Treachery of Images’ which depicts a pipe with the caption ‘This is not a pipe’. What the artist meant was that the painting as a whole was just an image of a pipe, not an actual pipe.

His painting ‘The Son of Man’ is a self-portrait that shows a man in an overcoat with his face obscured by a hovering green apple. There is the sea and a cloudy sky in the background. This was considered to be one of his most confusing paintings.