Magritte Rene description of the painting Giant Days. Rene Magritte: paintings with names and descriptions

Bella Adtseeva

The Belgian artist Rene Magritte, despite his undoubted affiliation with surrealism, 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 are not similar to either the crazy plots of Salvador Dali or the bizarre landscapes of Max Ernst. Magritte used mostly ordinary everyday images - trees, windows, doors, fruits, human figures - but his paintings are no less absurd and mysterious than the works of his eccentric colleagues. Without creating fantastic objects and creatures from the depths of the subconscious, Belgian artist he did what Lautreamont called art - he arranged “a meeting of an umbrella and a typewriter on the operating table,” combining banal things in an unusual way. Art critics and connoisseurs still offer new interpretations of his paintings and their poetic titles, almost never related to the image, which once again confirms: 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 look at them.

From that moment on, Magritte periodically returned to the image of a mysterious stranger in a bowler hat, depicting him either on the sandy seashore, or on a city bridge, or in a green forest, or facing mountain landscape. There could be two or three strangers, they stood with their backs to the viewer or semi-sideways, and sometimes - as, for example, in the painting High Society (1962) (can be translated as "High Society" - editor's note) - the artist indicated only an outline men in a bowler hat, filling it with clouds and leaves. Most famous paintings, depicting a stranger - "Golconda" (1953) and, of course, "Son of Man" (1964) - Magritte's most widely replicated work, parodies and allusions to which occur so often that the image already lives separately from its creator. Initially, Rene Magritte painted the picture as a self-portrait, where the figure of a man symbolized 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 to art critics and fans. The first ones again saw in the painting a reference to the artist’s childhood and experiences associated with her mother’s suicide (when her body was taken out of the river, the woman’s head was covered with the hem of her nightgown - editor’s note). The simplest and most obvious of the existing versions - “love is blind” - does not inspire confidence among experts, 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 getting to know close people to the end, while others understand “Lovers” as a realized metaphor for “losing one’s head from love.”

In the same year, Rene Magritte painted a second painting called “Lovers” - in it the faces of the man and woman are also closed, but their poses and background have changed, and general mood 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 his debut album refers to it British group Funeral for a Friend Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation (2003).

"The Treachery of Images", or This Is Not...

The names of Rene Magritte's paintings and their connection with the image are a topic for separate study. "The Glass Key", "Achieving the Impossible", "Human Destiny", "The Obstacle of Emptiness", " Wonderful world", "Empire of Light" - 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 special case we can only guess. “The titles are chosen in such a way that they do not allow my paintings to be placed in the realm of the familiar, where the automaticity of thought will certainly work to prevent anxiety,” Magritte explained.

In 1948, he created the painting “The Treachery of Images,” which became one of the most famous works Magritte thanks to the inscription on it: from inconsistency the artist came to denial, writing “This is not a pipe” under the image of a pipe. "This 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'd be lying !" - said the artist.

Magritte's Sky

The sky with clouds floating across it is such an everyday and used image that making it " business card"of any particular artist seems impossible. However, Magritte's sky cannot be confused with someone else's - more often than not 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 moves to the easel (series “Human Lot”) 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 into volumetric mirrors("Elementary Cosmogony", 1949).

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

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

Rene Magritte was looked at with suspicion. Especially doctors. Especially psychoanalysts. Those who did not notice any mental abnormalities in this artist sharply changed their opinion 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 psychoanalyst. And he did not take Sigmund Freud, who was the most popular in those days, seriously at all. But he continued to draw apples for faces, mirrors with fantastic reflections, coffins for sitting dead people 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 future artist, who was then still a teenager. When the corpse was found, its head was carefully wrapped in a light gauze cloth.

This is probably why faces, or more precisely, their absence, occupy a special place in Magritte’s work. Most often, the face in a portrait is either covered with a foreign object, or wrapped in cloth, or even the back of the head or another part of the body is simply depicted instead of the face.

Magritte brought back from his 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 with whom he lived until his death in 1967.

The Menaced Assassin – 1927

Magritte's paintings are characterized by a detached, seemingly imperturbable style. They depict ordinary objects, which in 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 strange combination of these objects itself is striking and makes you think. The equanimity of the style only aggravates 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. Beautiful face Georgette is elusive in Magritte's paintings. It is vague and encrypted, like elusive beauty.

The Meaning of Night 1927

Magritte's goal, 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 existence: Magritte always talks about the deceptiveness of the visible, about its hidden mystery, which we usually do not notice. There is a well-known series of works by the artist in which he writes under ordinary objects: this is not him. Particularly popular is the painting “The 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 an object is not the object itself.

He, like Dali and other surrealists, transferred dreams and thoughts onto canvas. but he couldn’t stand 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 it was for him to transfer details to canvas real life- mortal melancholy. Here he “falls ill” with cubism and futurism in the spirit of Fernand Léger, but is cured after becoming acquainted with the work of Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico.

Time Transfixed 1938

In general, the names of the paintings play off Magritte’s special role. They are almost always poetic and, at first glance, are in no way connected with the image itself. And this is precisely where the artist himself saw their significance: he believed that the hidden poetic connection between the title and the painting contributed to the 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 painting roses on paper the smallest details(roses would later become one of the leitmotifs of his paintings - a symbol of fatal and dangerous beauty - “The Grave of a Fighter”, 1961). Then, together with his brother, he opens an advertising agency, which soon allowed them to 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 Human Condition” (1935). Image of the sea in a painting on an easel standing in front of 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 hard times of 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 search for joy as opposed to the general pessimism of those years. This period in Magritte’s work is most often called the period of “bright sun” (“plein soleil”). But the motifs of impressionism and fauvism in the work of the master of mystery paintings did not convince the public and critics, 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 searching for another object that might serve as an answer. To become a candidate for an answer, the object being sought must be related to the question object by a set secret connections. If the answer suggests itself in all clarity, then the connection between the two objects is 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 created several of his most famous works. Among them is the painting “Golconda” (1953). The artist depicted several dozen neatly dressed rentiers (with bowler hats, ties and fashionable coats) hanging in a boundless space, while maintaining absolute equanimity. Golconda – ancient city in India, which has become synonymous with countless treasures and riches, because it was here that many famous diamonds and other precious stones. The people in the picture seem to be attracted by the treasures of Golconda.

In the 1950-1960s, Rene Magritte’s paintings shocked the US art market, where only his exhibitions were held for an entire 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 mode of transport - the tram.

Magritte died on August 15, 1967, at the age of 69, from cancer, leaving unfinished a new version of his perhaps most famous painting, Empire of Light. She remained forever in their room on an easel. Georgette said, turning to her husband: “You were wrong about one thing - about limbs.” own life, in the victory of death it is necessary for everyone. You remained alive not only for me, but also 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 as always. You finally did what you dreamed of. You entered the looking glass, but remained. You have conquered death."

He sought to destroy the usual idea of the well-known, unchanging, to make him see the object in a new dimension, leading the viewer to 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 strong, but the unreal always invades the everyday, 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).

Bella Adtseeva

The Belgian artist Rene Magritte, despite his undoubted affiliation with surrealism, 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 are not similar to either the crazy plots of Salvador Dali or the bizarre landscapes of Max Ernst. Magritte used mostly ordinary everyday images - trees, windows, doors, fruits, human figures - but his paintings are no less absurd and mysterious than the works 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 unusual way. Art critics and connoisseurs still offer new interpretations of his paintings and their poetic titles, almost never related to the image, which once again confirms: Magritte’s simplicity is deceptive.

From that moment on, Magritte periodically returned to the image of a mysterious stranger in a bowler hat, depicting him either on the 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 semi-sideways, and sometimes - as, for example, in the painting High Society (1962) (can be translated as "High Society" - editor's note) - the artist indicated only an 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, “Son of Man” (1964) - Magritte’s most widely replicated work, parodies and allusions to which are found so often that the image already lives 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"

In the same year, Rene Magritte painted a second painting called “Lovers” - in it the faces of the man and 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 group Funeral for a Friend Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation (2003) refers to it.

"The Treachery of Images", or This Is Not...

The names of Rene Magritte's paintings and their connection with the image are a topic for separate study. “The Glass Key”, “Achieving the Impossible”, “Human Destiny”, “The Obstacle of Emptiness”, “The Beautiful World”, “Empire of Light” - 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 can only guess. “The titles are chosen in such a way that they do not allow my paintings to be placed in the realm of the familiar, where the automaticity of thought will certainly work to prevent anxiety,” Magritte explained.

In 1948, he created the painting “The Treachery of Images,” which became one of Magritte’s most famous works thanks to the inscription on it: from inconsistency the artist came to denial, writing “This is not a pipe” under the image of a pipe. "This 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'd be lying !" - said the artist.

Magritte's Sky

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 any particular artist. However, Magritte’s sky cannot be confused with someone else’s - more often than not 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, imperceptibly passes from the landscape onto 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).

In 1978, Adrian Maben made a film about the great Rene Magritte. Then the whole world learned about the artist, but his paintings were worthy of becoming immortal from the very beginning. Magritte painted in the style of surrealism, and he was boldly put on the same level as Salvador Dali. Magritte was very witty in his works. See for yourself: they deserve admiration.

Son of Man, 1964

Scheherazade, 1948

The funniest thing about the artist’s style was that he did not draw incomprehensible images, but used quite primitive things as components of the picture. It seems that all the objects are recognizable, but the end result is some kind of unimaginable surprise (surprise!).

Perpetual motion, 1935

Moreover, Magritte himself said that he “sews” a thought into each picture, and the images are not a stupid accumulation of elements, but an independent story.

The Pleasure Principle, 1937

Companions of Fear, 1942

Researchers say that if you evaluate all of an artist's paintings, you can create a fairly clear idea of his inner world.

This is not an apple, 1964

Big family, 1967

The Great War, 1964

Tranquil Sleeper, 1927

The artist was born on November 21, 1898 in the city of Loessin. When he turned 14, Rene's mother drowned herself in the Sambre River, which was a huge shock for the child. For some reason, it is generally accepted that this fact did not influence Magritte’s work, but there is certainly a connection.

Lovers, 1928

Lovers II, 1928

Golconda, 1953

Two Mysteries, 1966

Apparently, as compensation for his difficult childhood, at the age of 15 the boy falls in love with Georgette Berger, and she becomes his only woman for life. He dedicates all his paintings to her, she is his only model, he remains faithful to her. A respectable love story! When he turns 22, they get married; by that time, Magritte had already graduated from the art academy.

Georgette Magritte, 1934

Magritte with Georgette

On a wave of love, the future talent admires the works of other masters (cubism was in fashion at that time), and begins to earn extra money as a painter and poster artist.

Therapist, 1937

Philosophical lamp, 1936

Magritte's first exhibition took place in 1927. Then he read a lot, moved among philosophers and respected writers, studied psychoanalysis, so all his paintings were full of deep content and meaning. But he did not like psychoanalysis and did not consider himself a surrealist, since critics of his paintings tried to “dissect” his character based on his works. We reached the Oedipus complex and remembered dead mother and then Magritte got angry.

“It’s terrible to see what kind of mockery a person who has made one innocent drawing can be subjected to... Perhaps psychoanalysis itself is best theme for a psychoanalyst."

Rape, 1934

Meditation, 1936

In the 1950s it came to him world recognition, paintings were exhibited in Rome, London, New York, in general, in best galleries planets. His art was often called “daydreams.”

Listening Room, 1952

Red model, 1935

Distorting Mirror, 1928

Collective invention, 1942

The artist specified:

“My paintings are not dreams that put you to sleep, but dreams that awaken you.”

Of course, his paintings are drawn in different styles and techniques: art deco, post-impressionism, cubism, surrealism, all kinds of materials were used in his works (from gouache to appliqué), but he gained fame precisely because of the surrealism in his works, which is atypical for anyone.

Midnight Married, 1926

In 1967, Rene died of pancreatic cancer. Almost 50 years have passed, but his work still excites and appeals to people. This means that the artist can safely be considered a classic.

Unfinished painting, 1954