Magritte, René

Magritte, René (rənā` mägrēt`), 1898–1967, Belgian surrealist painter. Strongly influenced by Chirico, Magritte developed a style in which a misleading sort of realism is combined with mocking irony. His paintings are dominated by an intense quietude and restraint, despite a startling juxtaposition of images. Characteristic works, such as The Red Model (1935; Modern Mus., Stockholm), contain elaborate fantasies constructed around commonplace situations.

Bibliography

See studies by S. Gablik (1970) and A. M. Hammacher (tr. 1974).

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Magritte, René (-François-Ghislain)

(born Nov. 21, 1898, Lessines, Belg.—died Aug. 15, 1967, Brussels) Belgian painter. After study at the Belgian Academy of Fine Arts (1916–18), he designed wallpaper and did advertising sketches until the support of a Brussels art gallery enabled him to become a full-time painter. His early works were in the Cubist and Futurist styles, but in 1922 he discovered the work of Giorgio de Chirico and embraced Surrealism with The Menaced Assassin (1927). Certain images appear over and over again in Magritte's works—the sea, wide skies, the female torso, the bourgeois “little man” in a bowler hat, rocks that hover overhead—and dislocations of space, time, and scale were common elements in his enigmatic and illogical paintings.