Renee Magritte

RenÐ"© Magritte

RenÐ"© Magritte was born in Belgium on November 21, 1898. His childhood took place in Charlerloi. He was born to poverty and held left-wing political views. Magritte's mother killed herself when he was only fourteen. He later joined the Communist Party. However, he preferred not to use his art for political causes.

Magritte started to create successful oil paintings in the 1920s. This is when Magritte started to come into his own. In 1922, Magritte got married to Georgette Berger. Magritte was inspired by Georgette and she became his model. He also became friendly with Victor Servranckx, who had developed a very geometric-abstract style. This was the beginning of a new direction for Magritte. In 1927 Magritte and Georgette moved to Paris to be closer to where it all happens. He started to take part in the activities of the Surrealists, which became his style of choice for the majority of his life. Magritte began combining words and images in his paintings. These word-pictures were not mere illustrations of an object or a concept. Just the opposite, his work was intended to gently destabilize our mental habits of representation. Magritte elaborated a instructive classification of this type of painting, the simplest which consisted of denying an images through words, or vice versa.

Magritte shared the Surrealist concept of the power of desire and eroticism to change life and wanted to translate this idea through unconventional images. He continued involving metamorphosis in his work. In Black Magic, a naked woman leaning on a rock gradually merges into the blue sky. The painter was, nevertheless, distrustful of the obvious seduction of beautiful colors. In The Rape he even pushed it to the point of obsession with the features of a woman's face replaced by sexual attributes, such as breasts, a belly button and pubic hair..

In 1940, Magritte was going through a crisis resulting from the German occupation in World War II. Also, at this point Magritte's financial situation became an issue and his dissatisfaction with his own paintings. From then on, he decided that a feeling of pleasure and an atmosphere of happiness had to predominate over the sense of anxiety. Magritte first thought about changing his iconography and began to paint the leaf-birds, which are seen in two works from 1942, Treasure Island and The Companions of Fear.

Magritte's