Dimensions
225 x 305 x 10mm
The paintings of the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magitte (1898-1967) have exerted an extraordinary fascination, particularly since the enormous increase in awareness and popularity of his work since the 1960s. Magritte shows us a world of silence and isolation in which familiar objects are altered or juxtaposed in impossible combinations in order to create a sense of disorientation and the absurd. Many of his most memorable paintings date from his three prolific years 1927-30, when he lived near Paris and was in close touch with the writer Andre Breten and other French Surrealists.
In his pre-war painting, stylistic concerns were of secondary importance to Magritte, and for the most part he concentrated on the relation between objects and words or between the image of an object and the object itself. He deliberately cultivated a cold, unemotive, style-less style. This quality renders the violence and macabre sexuality of some of his works all the more disturbing. His own impressionist and "vache" (ugly, crude) pictures of the 1940s were rediscovered in the 1980s by a younger generation of painters and critics keenly responsive to the later work of other masters of parody and allusion such as Picabia and de Chirico.
Includes notes to the 91 illustrations, 51 in colour.
