In his works, Renê Magritte depicted everyday objects in an unfamiliar environment. The artist was particularly interested in the problem of reality and image.
René Magritte was born in 1898. November 21 Lesinio in Belgium. He was the eldest of three sons in the family. He spent his youth in Charleroi. 1910 started learning drawing. His mother committed suicide when René was 13 years old. 1916 - 1918 R. Magritte studied intermittently at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. 1920 for the first time his paintings were exhibited at the Brussels Art Center. in 1921 R. Magritte served in the military, after which he briefly worked as a designer in a wallpaper factory, where he got to know the avant-garde environment of Brussels. in 1922 saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's painting "Song of Love" which influenced him. The artist painted pictures influenced by modernist currents of art of that time: cubism, metaphysical painting. in 1922 R. Magritte married Georgette Berger, an acquaintance from childhood. in 1923 his works have been exhibited at the Royal Artists' Circle exhibition in Antwerp alongside works by Lyonel Feininger, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy and Paul Joostens. in 1925 René painted the first surrealist painting "The Lost Jockey" (Le jockey perdu) and met the Belgian surrealist poet E. I. T. Mesens, who became a long-time friend and associate.
in 1927 The first personal exhibition of R. Magritte took place at the Centaur Gallery in Brussels, which was evaluated unfavorably by critics.in 1927 R. Magritte moved to France, stayed in the Le Père-sur-Marne area near Paris, where he met members of the surrealist group: Jean Arp, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard and Joan Miró. in 1928 R. Magritte exhibited at the surrealist exhibition at the Goemans gallery in Paris. Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealist group in Paris, had anti-Catholic views, and when R. Magritte's wife came to a gathering of artists with a golden cross left by her family, a quarrel took place between the artists. 1930 R. Magritte returned to Belgium, where he later destroyed all memorabilia from the Paris period, almost setting his house on fire. In Brussels, the artist spent the rest of his life, he began to lead an emphatically bourgeois lifestyle. in 1933 his solo exhibition took place at the Brussels Palace of Fine Arts.
in 1936 there was a change in the artist's work, which he explained as follows: "one night I woke up at night in a room where there was a cage with a sleeping bird, but by mistake I saw an egg in the cage ... and I was shocked by this connected relationship between the objects: the cage and the egg, when before I tried to express this shock by painting unrelated objects."in 1936 the first personal exhibition of R. Magritte took place in the USA, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York and in 1938. - England, London gallery. in 1936 R. Magritte's works were exhibited in a joint exhibition of Dadaists and Surrealists at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the Second World War, R. Magritte began to experiment in art by including the motifs of impressionist art, especially responding to the art of O Renoir. He explained it as follows: “before the war I expressed anxiety in my painting, but the war years taught me that the most important thing is to express charm. I live in a very ugly world." in 1947 There was another brief change in Magritte's work, when he began to create silly and clumsily painted works that caused a scandal in 1948. exhibition in Paris. After that, the artist created in a pre-war surrealist manner. in 1965 his retrospective exhibition took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on that occasion the artist visited the USA. 1951-53 the artist created a monumental wall painting in the casino in Knokke. René Magritte died of pancreatic cancer in 1967. August 15, buried in Brussels. The René Magritte Memorial Museum was established in the house where R. Magritte lived with his wife. A large collection of the artist's works was accumulated in 2009. in the opened R. Magritte Museum, which is part of the Royal Belgian Art Museums in Brussels.
