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Rene Magritte description of the painting gigantic days. Why was Rene Magritte obsessed with hats?

Rene Magritte description of the painting gigantic days. Why was Rene Magritte obsessed with hats?

07.04.2019

17.03.2011 V 22:08

Surrealism by Rene Magritte

Violence(all works can be enlarged)

One of the outstanding artists of the last century, Rene Magritte(1898–1967) was from Belgium. Educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, he was at first heavily influenced by Dadaism and Cubism. 1925 was a turning point in his work: the painting "Roses of Picardy" marked a new style and a new attitude - "poetic realism". The artist moves to the "center of surrealism" - Paris, where he participates in all surrealistic exhibitions.

Dadaism, or Dada- modernist movement in literature, fine arts, theater and cinema. It originated during the First World War in neutral Switzerland, in Zurich. It existed from 1916 to 1922. The main idea of Dadaism was the consistent destruction of any kind of aesthetics. The Dadaists proclaimed: "The Dadaists are nothing, nothing, nothing, surely they will achieve nothing, nothing, nothing."
The main principles of dada were irrationality, the denial of recognized canons and standards in art, cynicism, disillusionment and lack of system. It is believed that Dadaism was the forerunner of surrealism, which largely determined its ideology and methods.

lovers

In the early 1950s Magritte's art is receiving ever-increasing international recognition, as evidenced by his large exhibitions in Rome, London, New York, Paris, and Brussels. In 1956, Magritte, as an outstanding representative of the culture of Belgium, was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Prize.

red model

The main feature of Magritte is the atmosphere of mystery in his works. The feeling of mystery, as you know, is inherent in real art. "I have always considered Magritte an artist of the imaginary, a master standing somewhere on the level of Giorgione," wrote Herbert Read. In these words is the key to Magritte's poetics. Magritte stands out sharply among the surrealists: unlike them, he uses not fantastic, but ordinary elements, taken in bizarre relationships.

Insight("La clairvoyance(autoportait)")

The originality of the work of Rene Magritte will be revealed more fully if we turn to the topic "Surrealism and Freudianism". The main theorist of surrealism, Andre Breton, a psychiatrist by profession, attached decisive importance to Freud's psychoanalysis when evaluating the artist's work. Freudian views were not just adopted by many surrealists - it became their way of thinking. For example, for Salvador Dali, by his own admission, the world of Freud's ideas meant as much as the world of Scripture for medieval artists or the world of ancient mythology for Renaissance masters.

The "method of free association" proposed by Sigmund Freud, his "theory of errors", "interpretation of dreams" were aimed primarily at identifying morbid mental disorders for the purpose of healing. The interpretation of works of art proposed by Freud was also aimed at this. But with this understanding, art is reduced to a particular, so to speak, "healing" factor. This was the fallacy of the approach of the theorists of surrealism to works of art. Magritte was well aware of this, noting in one of his letters in 1937: "Art, as I understand it, is not subject to psychoanalysis. It is always a mystery."

Nostalgia

His art has often been called "waking dreams". The artist clarified: "My paintings are not sleepy dreams, but awakening dreams." No wonder the prominent surrealist Max Ernst, seeing his exhibition in New York in the early 1950s, said: "Magritte does not sleep and is not awake. He illuminates. He conquers the world of dreams."

The Return of the Flame ("Le retour de flamme")

“Without mystery, neither the world nor the idea is possible,” Magritte never tired of repeating. And as an epigraph to one of his self-portraits, he took the line of the French poet of the 19th century. Lautreamont: "I sometimes dream, but never for a moment lose the awareness of my identity."

Herbert Read noted: “Magritte is distinguished by the severity of forms and a distinct clarity of vision. His symbolism is pure and transparent, like the glass of windows that he loves to portray so much. Rene Magritte warns of the fragility of the world. like ice floes." This is an example of one of the possible interpretations of Magritte's ambiguous metaphors. This artist's glass window motif can also be seen as a boundary between two worlds - the real and the unreal, the poetic and the mundane, between the conscious and the unconscious.

Philosophy of the boudoir

Perspective II: Manet's Balcony ("Perspective II^ le balcon de Manet")

Golconda

The painting "Golconda" (1953) can be seen as a materialized metaphor: people "with weight" have become weightless. There is an irony hidden in the name: after all, Golconda is a semi-legendary city in India, famous for its gold placers and diamonds, and these people seem to be attracted by gold. The artist hangs in a boundless space several dozen neatly dressed - with bowler hats, ties and fashionable coats - rentiers, while maintaining absolute equanimity.

Mystery of the horizon

Magritte gave the title a decisive role in the perception of the picture. According to the recollections of relatives and friends, when inventing names, he often discussed them with fellow writers. Here is what the artist himself said about this: "The title is an indicator of the function of the picture", "The title should contain a lively emotion", "The best title of the picture is poetic. It should not teach anything, but instead, surprise and fascinate."

Month of the grape harvest

Big family

Carte blanche

fake mirror

In the painting "False Mirror" (1929), which expressed the artist's ideological credo, the entire space is occupied by the image of a huge eye. Only instead of the iris, the viewer sees a summer blue sky with transparent clouds floating across it. The title explains the idea of the picture: the sense organs only reflect the appearance of things, without conveying the hidden depths of the world, its secrets. Only the incompatible helps, according to Magritte, to grasp the meaning of being. An image can be born only from the convergence of two more or less distant realities.

son of man

Magritte painted this painting as a self-portrait. It depicts a man in a tailcoat, in a bowler hat, standing near a wall, behind which one can see the sea and a cloudy sky. The person's face is almost completely covered by a green apple hovering in front of him. The picture is believed to owe its name to the image of a modern businessman, who remained the son of Adam, and an apple, symbolizing the temptations that continue to haunt a person in the modern world.

Rene Magritte Museum in Brussels

Bella Adzeeva

The Belgian artist René Magritte, despite his undoubted belonging to surrealism, has always stood apart in the movement. Firstly, he was skeptical about perhaps the main hobby of the entire group of Andre Breton - Freud's psychoanalysis. Secondly, Magritte's paintings themselves do not look like either the crazy plots of Salvador Dali or the bizarre landscapes of Max Ernst. Magritte used mostly ordinary everyday images - trees, windows, doors, fruits, figures of people - but his paintings are no less absurd and mysterious than the work of his eccentric colleagues. Without creating fantastic objects and creatures from the depths of the subconscious, the Belgian artist did what Lautreamont called art - he arranged "a meeting of an umbrella and a typewriter on the operating table", combining banal things in an unbanal way. Art critics and connoisseurs still offer new interpretations of his paintings and their poetic titles, almost never associated with the image, which once again confirms that Magritte's simplicity is deceptive.

Rene Magritte himself called his art not even surrealism, but magical realism, and was very distrustful of any attempts at interpretation, and even more so the search for symbols, arguing that the only thing to do with paintings is to consider them.

From that moment on, Magritte periodically returned to the image of a mysterious stranger in a bowler hat, portraying him either on a sandy seashore, or on a city bridge, or in a green forest or facing a mountain landscape. There could be two or three strangers, they stood with their backs to the viewer or half-sided, and sometimes - as, for example, in the painting High Society (1962) (can be translated as "High Society" - ed.) - the artist indicated only the outline men in a bowler hat, filling it with clouds and leaves. The most famous paintings depicting a stranger are "Golconda" (1953) and, of course, "The Son of Man" (1964) - Magritte's most replicated work, parodies and allusions to which are so common that the image lives already separately from its creator. Initially, Rene Magritte painted the picture as a self-portrait, where the figure of a man symbolized a modern man who has lost his individuality, but remains the son of Adam, who is unable to resist temptations - hence the apple covering his face.

"Lovers"

Rene Magritte quite often commented on his paintings, but left one of the most mysterious - "Lovers" (1928) - without explanation, leaving room for interpretation by art critics and fans. The former again saw in the picture a reference to the artist’s childhood and the experiences associated with the mother’s suicide (when her body was taken out of the river, the woman’s head was covered by the hem of her nightgown - ed.). The simplest and most obvious of the existing versions - "love is blind" - does not inspire confidence among specialists, who often interpret the picture as an attempt to convey isolation between people who are unable to overcome alienation even in moments of passion. Others see here the impossibility of understanding and knowing to the end close people, others understand "The Lovers" as a realized metaphor for "losing one's head with love."

In the same year, Rene Magritte painted a second painting called "Lovers" - on it the faces of a man and a woman are also closed, but their poses and background have changed, and the general mood has changed from tense to peaceful.

Be that as it may, "The Lovers" remains one of Magritte's most recognizable paintings, the mysterious atmosphere of which is borrowed by today's artists - for example, the cover of the debut album of the British band Funeral for a Friend Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation (2003) refers to it.

"Treachery of images", or It's not ...

The names of paintings by Rene Magritte and their connection with the image is a topic for a separate study. "Glass Key", "Achieving the Impossible", "Human Destiny", "Obstacle of the Void", "Beautiful World", "Empire of Light" are poetic and mysterious, they almost never describe what the viewer sees on the canvas, but about , what meaning the artist wanted to put into the name, in each individual case one has only to guess. “The titles are chosen in such a way that they do not allow me to place my paintings in the area of the familiar, where the automatism of thought will certainly work to prevent anxiety,” Magritte explained.

In 1948, he created the painting "Treachery of Images", which became one of Magritte's most famous works thanks to the inscription on it: the artist went from inconsistency to denial, writing "This is not a pipe" under the image of a pipe. "That famous pipe. How people reproached me with it! And yet, you can fill it with tobacco? No, it's just a picture, isn't it? So if I wrote under the picture "This is a pipe", I would be lying !" the artist said.

Sky Magritte

The sky with clouds floating across it is such an everyday and used image that it seems impossible to make it the "calling card" of a particular artist. However, Magritte's sky cannot be confused with someone else's - more often due to the fact that in his paintings it is reflected in fancy mirrors and huge eyes, fills the contours of birds and, together with the horizon line from the landscape, imperceptibly passes to the easel (series "Human Destiny "). The serene sky serves as a background for a stranger in a bowler hat ("Decalcomania", 1966), replaces the gray walls of the room ("Personal Values", 1952) and is refracted in three-dimensional mirrors ("Elementary Cosmogony", 1949).

The famous "Empire of Light" (1954), it would seem, is not at all like the work of Magritte - in the evening landscape, at first glance, there was no place for unusual objects and mysterious combinations. And yet there is such a combination, and it makes the picture "Magritte" - a clear daytime sky over a lake and a house plunged into darkness.

(Fr. Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte; born - November 21, 1898, Lessin, died - August 15, 1967, Brussels) - Belgian surrealist artist. Known as the author of witty and at the same time poetically mysterious paintings.

René Magritte was viewed with suspicion. Especially doctors. Especially psychoanalysts. Those who did not notice any mental abnormalities behind this artist sharply changed their minds to the opposite after that. How did you get to know his work?

But in response to their encroachments, the artist himself, not without sarcasm, argued that the best patient for a psychoanalyst is another other psychoanalyst. And the most popular in those days, Sigmund Freud, was not taken seriously at all. But he continued to draw apples and faces, mirrors with fantastic reflections, coffins for the sitting dead and other oddities and incomprehensibility.

Rene spent his childhood and youth in the small industrial city of Charleroi. Life was hard.

Rene Magritte "Son of Man", 1964.

In 1912, his mother drowned herself in the Sambre River, which apparently had a great influence on the then-teenager future artist. When the corpse was found, its head was carefully wrapped in a light gauze cloth.

This is probably why a special place in Magritte's work is occupied by faces, or rather, their absence. Most often, the face in the portrait is either covered by a foreign object, or wrapped in cloth, or simply the back of the head or another part of the body is depicted instead of the face.

Magritte brought back from childhood a number of other, not so tragic, but no less mysterious memories, about which he himself said that they were reflected in his work.

Beginning in 1916, Magritte studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, and left the Academy in 1918. At the same time, he met Georgette Berger, whom he married in 1922 and lived with until his death in 1967.

The Menaced Assassin - 1927

Magritte's paintings are characterized by a detached, as it were, imperturbable style. They depict ordinary objects that Magritte, unlike other major surrealists (Dali, Ernst), almost never lose their “objectivity”: they do not spread, do not turn into their own shadows. However, the very strange combination of these objects is striking and makes you think. The equanimity of style only exacerbates this surprise and plunges the viewer into a kind of poetic stupor caused by the very mystery of things.

At the age of 14, Rene meets a girl named Georgette. A few years later, she becomes his wife, lover, muse, colleague and friend - the artist's only female model. There were no other women in his life. The beautiful face of Georgette is elusive in the paintings of Magritte. It is hazy and encrypted, like an elusive beauty.

The Meaning of Night 1927

The goal of Magritte, by his own admission, is to make the viewer think. Because of this, the artist’s paintings often resemble puzzles that cannot be completely solved, since they raise questions about the very essence of being: Magritte always talks about the deceitfulness of the visible, about its hidden mystery, which we usually do not notice. There is a cycle of works by the artist in which he writes under ordinary objects: this is not him. Particularly popular is the painting "Treachery of Images", which depicts a smoking pipe with the caption "This is not a pipe." Thus, Magritte again reminds the viewer that the image of the object is not the object itself.

He, like Dali and other surrealists, transferred dreams and thoughts to the canvas. but he hated it when critics called him a surrealist. “I am a magical realist,” Magritte said to himself.

At the age of 18, Rene went to study at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts, where he quickly realized that for him to transfer the details of real life to the canvas was mortal longing. Here he “falls ill” with cubism and futurism in the spirit of Fernand Léger, but is cured by becoming acquainted with the work of Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico.

Time Transfixed 1938

In general, the names of paintings play a special role in Magritte. They are almost always poetic and, at first glance, have nothing to do with the image itself. And it was precisely in this that the artist himself saw their significance: he believed that the hidden poetic connection between the name and the picture contributes to that magical surprise that Magritte saw as the purpose of art.

In 1921, Magritte was drafted into the army, and a year later, upon returning to civilian life, he got a job as a draftsman at a wallpaper factory, where he spent hours writing roses on paper in great detail (roses would later become one of the leitmotifs of his paintings - a symbol of the fatal and unsafe beauty - "Grave of a fighter", 1961). Then, together with his brother, he opens an advertising agency, which allowed them to soon forget about pressing problems.

In 1930 there was a break with Breton. Magritte returns to Brussels and, together with Paul Delvaux, becomes one of the leaders of the surrealist movement here. During this fruitful period of activity, Magritte created a number of paintings with mysterious and poetic subjects, including his most often copied painting, The State of Man (1935). The image of the sea in the painting on an easel standing in front of an open window miraculously merges with the “real” sea view from the window.

When the Germans occupied Belgium in 1940, Magritte first spent three months in exile in Carcassonne (France), and then returned to Brussels, where he survived the war. Immediately after the war, Magritte decided to paint with sweeping strokes, in the style of Renoir and Matisse, explaining this by the need to find joy as opposed to the general pessimism of those years. This period in the work of Magritte is most often called the period of “bright sun” (“plein soleil”). But the motives of impressionism and fauvism in the work of the master of mystery paintings did not convince the public and criticism, and by 1948 the artist returned to his own style.

“I take an arbitrary object or topic as a question,” he wrote, “and then set about looking for another object that could serve as an answer. To become a candidate for an answer, the object being sought must be connected to the question object by a set of arcane links. If the answer suggests itself in all clarity, then the connection between the two objects is being established.” And again: “For me, thought initially consists only of visible things, and it itself can become visible thanks to painting.” Rene Magritte

In the 50s, the artist creates some of his most famous works. Among them is the painting "Golconda" (1953). The artist depicted dozens of neatly dressed rentiers (with bowler hats, ties and fashionable coats) hovering in a boundless space, while maintaining absolute equanimity. Golconda is an ancient city in India that has become synonymous with countless treasures and riches, because it was here that many famous diamonds and other precious stones were found. The people in the picture seem to be attracted by the treasures of Golconda.

In 1950-1960, the paintings of Rene Magritte shook the US art market, where only his exhibitions were held for a whole season. Money poured in from all sides, but this man with the face of a kind pharmacist, as his relatives claimed, remained true to himself: no bohemia, a modest home, a quiet workshop and riding his favorite form of transport - the tram.

Magritte died on August 15, 1967, at the age of 69, from cancer, leaving a new version of his perhaps most famous painting, Empire of Light, unfinished. She forever remained in their room on an easel. Georgette said, turning to her husband: “You were mistaken in one thing - in the finiteness of your own life, in the victory of death over everything. You remained alive not only for me, but for all those who look at your paintings: after all, you are all in them. I look at them and talk to you and argue like I always do. You still did what you dreamed of. You penetrated the looking glass, but remained. You have conquered death."

He sought to destroy the usual idea of the well-known, unchanging, to make the object see in a new dimension, leading the viewer into confusion. In his canvases, he created a world of fantasy and dreams from real things, immersing viewers in an atmosphere of dreams and mystery. The artist brilliantly knew how to "direct" their feelings. It would seem that the world created by the artist is static and solid, but the surreal always invades the ordinary, destroying this familiar world (an ordinary apple in a room, growing, displaces people or a steam locomotive jumps out of the fireplace at full speed - “Pierced Time”, 1938).