Magritte, René

*21.11.1898 - † 15.08.1967

biography

Magritte was born on November 21, 1898 in Lessines, Belgium. After moving to Brussels with his family, he studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts from 1916 to 1918, where he met the constructivist Viktor Servranckx, who influenced him to the extent that Magritte began to paint geometrically abstract pictures. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger. In the following years he had to earn a living in various jobs, such as designing posters or as a draftsman in a wallpaper factory. He also painted abstract paintings with Servranckx, and in 1924 he came into contact with the painting of Giorgio de Chirico, which changed his style. In 1927 Magritte moved to Paris and made contact with the group of surrealists that gathered around André Breton. In the following years he painted a large number of pictures in a surrealist manner and returned to Brussels in 1930. During the Second World War he painted impressionist pictures for a time, but later devoted himself to surrealism again and died on August 15th in Brussels. Magritte's works captivate the viewer with their dreamlike atmosphere, which is caused by the fact that he played with real objects but put them together incorrectly and thus changed perspectives or familiar content. It is rather "unsurrealistic" that he never tried to depict psychological or meditative backgrounds in his pictures, so that he is sometimes seen as the forefather of pop art. Nevertheless, Magritte is, alongside Dali and Ernst, the most important surrealist who is still able to captivate the viewer today.