Art Bomb-7/18/2014 Rene Magritte

Aleathia says:

Today we are going to wander down the more controlled side of the Surrealist movement looking at the paintings of Rene Magritte.

Rene Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium in 1898.  His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress until she jumped from a bridge to her death when he was only 14 years old.  This was a huge marking in his life and this sentinal event showed up in many of his works throughout his life.

Magritte took art classes as a child but didn't start formal training until 1916 when he was 18 years old.  He went to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and then later spent a few years in Paris, France in the 1920's.  He returned to Belgium and lived the remainder of his life there.  In 1922, he married a childhood sweetheart named Georgette Berger who remained at his side the rest of his life.

While in art school, Magritte was heavily influenced by the Impressionists, as were most painters of the time, and then later he would discover the Futurists, especially Giorgio de Chirico, who would influence him the most.

In the 1920's he earned a living designing wallpaper and making commercial drawings.  He met several artists during this time namely Pierre Bourgeois, Camille Goeman, Lecomte, Paul Nouze, and Andre Souris. They were designers, teachers, biochemist, and civil servants painting on the side.  This group of painters would be known as the Belgian Surrealists and were much less flamboyant than their counterparts in Paris.

Surrealism, like Symbolism, started out as a literary movement championed by authors Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and Antonin Artaud.  Their primary goal was to use automatic writing to create which was to allow free flowing thought create images and to unhinder the conscious mind.

This was a difficult translation to painting and the literal automatic painting failed, but the group of painters retained the idea of Freudian unconscious as their source of activity.  Magritte departed from the other surrealists as he did not use the free association of dream states for the root of his art.  His was a rigorous, logical intellectual process. He looked at unusual realities of everyday life.

Rene Magritte made simple dislocations, conflicting associations and paradoxical associations that he continually refined throughout his career.

Displaced Objects:

The Traveler by Rene Magritte

The Beautiful Relations by Rene Magritte

Metamorphosis of Objects:

Philosophy in the Boudoir by Rene Magritte

Treasure Island by Rene Magritte

Conflicting Images:

The Listening Room by Rene Magritte

Personal Values by Rene Magritte

Interior/Exterior:

Promenades of Euclid by Rene Magritte

The Human Condition by Rene Magritte

Absence/Presence: 

The Unexpected Answer by Rene Magritte

The Great Family by Rene Magritte

and lastly one from his collection called The Dominion of Light, my favorite one... Empire of Lights.  I wrote a poem about it.

Rene Magritte

Empire of Lights, 1949

The street lamp
just buzzed on
like a robotic, cold
lightning beetle.

It reminds me
of our youth—
the one where
you promised me
a love that would grow
out of the darkness
that would fly
heaven-bound and rain
down as the sparks
of independence.

But here I stand
on the cobbled street
outside your childhood home
watching the sky fade
behind, the trees dissolving
the edges of history
and reality with one
swipe of its sword
thinking of that innocent night.

Your bedroom window
is alight, but you have since
gone to other worlds.  You
promised me warmth
and eternity and hope.

I am left with air passing
over my bare palms
hanging limp beside
the hull of my body.

I cannot even be
your memory.

Aleathia Drehmer 2011