Also known as the magician of enigmatic images and an extremely important contributor to the 20th century art, going beyond the craft of painting Magritte redefined for himself the role of painter as one that express thoughts through images, strongly influenced by philosophy.
“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” – René Magritte
This is not a pipe – the famous text inserted in The Treachery of Images, one of Magritte’s work that speak strongly about his believes illustrated the visitors ticket beautifully.
It was produced in the late 20s, period when Magritte lived in Paris, from 1927 and 1930, where he befriended Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Salvador Dai, all key figures of the time, leading him to naturally become involved with the Surrealist movement.
“The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe’, I’d have been lying!”— René Magritte
The approach in Magritte’s work is to question what is seen, the power of images and perceptions that play with human mind and imagination.
Many philosophers shared with the Belgium artist the very same dilemma, which not coincidentally is a part of Magritte’s works. Perhaps one of the more important ones, if not the most, is The Allegory of the Cave, by greek philosopher Plato, representing a skeptical attitude towards visual representations and how the human conditions is held captive by its perception of the world, defined by conventions and in mass.
His paintings hits us with a merciless break down that challenges all of concepts we take for granted and all of the assumptions that sustain our lives.
It is the type of Art that is conceptual and timeless.
To support himself and his art, Magritte worked as a commercial artist producing designs and advertisements, letting fine art influence his work. To this day, brands as Volskwagen, RayBan and Allianz to name a few have drawn inspiration and used his work in their advertising campaigns.
“And unlike adverts, his paintings are riddling and ambiguous – the stuff, not necessarily of nightmares, but certainly of unsettling, half-remembered dreams.” Alastair Spoke, 2011, on telegraph.co.uk
Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images was a cooperation between Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt am Main with Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, displaying masterpieces from important international museums and collections including Musée Magritte in Brussels, the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
Alternachivement visited the exhibition dedicated to his work at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt museum, which was exhibited from Feb to June 2017, to admire very close the work of this genius.
