Rene Magritte - Last Draft

College of Fine Arts and Design

Year 2 Fine Arts & Graphic and Multimedia Design - Unit 4 (0710201)

Cultural Studies

Academic Year 2011/2012

Instructor: Dr. Katherina Aslanidou

Name: Ali Nafeh.                                ID: U000-26128

Rene Magritte

Part 1: The Movement Surrealism

In the sense the surrealism is an expression of the unconventional thoughts of the subconscious mind; it has been always excited in art. Surrealism as a declared aim of art first made an appearance in Paris in 1924, Andre Breton who was a student of psychiatry thought that art and life could be regenerated by liberating the subconscious mind, in his studio in Rue Fountain, where he gathered with his artist friends, he issued the first surrealist newspaper (manifesto), this was followed by the la Revolution Surrealite, the first surrealist newspaper.

In order to release the subconscious mind, Breton adopted the process of automatic writing, by putting down the first thought that comes to mind with ignoring the control of conscious ego, some painters used the same tactics with adopting the process of automatic drawing, some of them even drew and painted in semi darkness and created an art out of that,

With a positive aim of their art, the surrealists quickly supplanted the Dadaists and began to promote their own work. The first surrealist exhibition in 1925, took a place at the gallery Pierre in Paris, with a great range of contributors, including Georgiou de Chirico, Paul klee, Jean (HANS) Arp, Man Ray, Jean Miro and Pablo Picasso. The diversity of their art showed at once that unlike the impressionist movement some half a century earlier. The surrealists were an elected group with a common style in painting and united only in turning to their subconscious for inspiration.

An exhibition to the abstraction of early surrealism was the work of Chirico, an Italian who since 1917, when he had founded metora metafisica with his friend Carlo Carra, had painted pictures that would later be drawn in to the surrealist world, Chirico differed from the other early surrealists in that he painted realistic scenes with a backgrounds of classical architecture and with shop dummy figures that were perfectly recognizable as real objects.

In the 1930, some surrealists began to paint pictures of recognizable objects, though, these were sometimes distorted and placed in unusual situations, and the main protagonists of this kind of surrealism were Paul Delvauxe, Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte.

While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Magritte met many artists who would influence his style; amongst them were E.L.T Mesens, Pierre Flouquet, and Piérre Bourgeois. He also showed some interest in the Futurist movement, and Cubism, but it was when he discovered Giorgio De Chirico's surrealist works that he found true inspiration. It was from this inspiration that Magritte decided to make each of his painting a visual poem; a quality he found present in De Chirico's works.

Part 2: Rene Magritte

Without doubt the most famous Belgian artist of the 20th century, Rene Magritte has achieved great popular compliments for his characteristic approach to Surrealism. To support himself he spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this likely shaped his fine art, which often has the reduced impact of an advertisement. While some French Surrealists led affected lives, Magritte preferred the quiet mystery of a middle-class existence, a life symbolized by the bowler-hated men that often populate his pictures. In later years he was castigated by his peers for some of his strategies (such as his tendency to produce multiple copies of his pictures), yet since his death his reputation has only increased. Conceptual artists have admired his use of text in images, and painters in the 1980s admired the offensive taste of some of his later work.

Just as Magritte was achieving success, the Second World War broke out. Although he continued to develop his signature style, he also gradually more deployed a bright, impressionistic palette as a subversive response to the loneliness of the war. He wrote, "The sense of chaos, of panic”, which Surrealism hoped to promote so that everything might be called into question was achieved much more successfully by those idiots the Nazis Against widespread negativity, I now propose a search for joy and pleasure." In 1946 Magritte signed a manifesto called "Surrealism in Full Sunlight," and broke with Breton. This phase was followed by Magritte's brief experiment with an intentionally provocative "savage" style he called "Vache" (cow) that was characterized by vulgar subjects, basic coloring, and is generally regarded as parodying the Fauves. As Magritte expected, his works in this style were incredibly unpopular. For the remainder of the 1950s and 1960s Magritte returned to his characteristic style and set of subjects. By the end of his life he enjoyed great success and there were six major retrospectives of his oeuvre in the 1960s alone.

Part 3: Social Critics.

In 1912, Régina Bertinchamp, Magritte's mother, committed suicide by drowning herself in the Sambre River. The night of her suicide, the Magrittes followed Bertinchamp's footprints to the river, where they found her dead with her nightgown wrapped around her face. Magritte was 14 at the time. He would claim years later that his only recollection of his mother's death was his pride at being the center of attention and his subsequent identity formation as the "son of a dead woman." Some critics point out that several of the subjects in Magritte's paintings are veiled in white sheets as a reference to his mother's suicide.

In 1927, Magritte joined André Breton, Paul Eluard, Salvador Dali, and other artists and writers who were part of the surrealist movement in Paris. Magritte held his first one-man exhibit was in Brussels in 1927, and as it was with his social group, his art drew the anger of the critics and the traditional art crowd. But what made Magritte's work so special was his incredible skill at painting realistic objects and figures. The critics could not deny his talent, nor could they send away his work as an exercise in "laisser-faire". Like De Chirico, and Dali, he was a true technician, and a technician with soul. What set him apart from the other surrealists was his technique of juxtaposing ordinary objects in an unexpected way; while Dali would "melt" a watch, playing with the stability of an object, Magritte would leave objects in one piece, but play with their position in reality, playing with logic. This technique is sometimes called Magic Realism. Of course, what really upset the critics was that Magritte's art did not provide answers, but only confusion, and questions as to why.

His work makes a regular call on us to surrender, at least temporarily, our usual expectations of art. Magritte never responds to our difficulty and expectations. He offers us something else instead. His friend Paul Nougé has expressed the problem better than anyone else; what he said in 1944 still holds good: "We question pictures," he said, "before listening to them, we question them at random. And we are surprised when the reply we had expected is not approaching.

Magritte's work allows one to conjure up a state of being which has become rare and precious - which makes it possible to observe in silence. Reading and reflection call for silence, listening no less. Silence can be used for waiting for an illumined vision of things, and it is to this vision that Magritte introduces viewers.

Magritte attempted, as it were, to achieve a controlled character in his work. After he had finished a painting, it set up a tone within him, in which he involved his closest friends. This meaning in the artist himself was necessarily different from that in others, who are the inexperienced in regard to his clear and spoken imagery. Yet, despite everything, Magritte probably attached more than usual importance to having people feel the right kind of importance. That he could do anything about this he was an illusion; the others were the critics, the art historians, the museums, the art dealers, the collectors, who play their own game with a variety of intentions.

Usually, Magritte chose regular things from which to construct his works - trees, chairs, tables, doors, windows, shoes, shelves, landscapes, and people. He wanted to be understood via these ordinary things. Those who find him difficult to understand should not forget that he had turned his back on the fantastic and on the immediate world of dreams. He did not seek to be obscure. On the contrary, he wanted through a cure of shock and surprise to liberate our conventional vision from its darkness.

Part 4: Conclusion.

Magritte's work had a major impact on a number of movements that followed his death, including Pop, Conceptualism, and the painting of the 1980s. In particular, his work was hailed as a indication of upcoming trends in art for its emphasis on concept over execution, its close association with commercial art, and its focus on everyday objects that were often repeated in pictorial space. It is easy to see why artists such as Andy Warhol, Martin Kippenberger, and Robert Gober cite Magritte as a profound influence.