René Magritte (1898-1967), after - De Belofte

René Magritte - The Man with the Bowler Hat (after) - Offset printing/poster print - 70 x 50 cm

Name: René Magritte
Title: The Promise / La Promesse
Type: Original art poster - High quality offset print/poster print of the original work from 1954
Publisher: KMSKB - Magritte Foundation - Standaard Uitgeverij
Style: Modern - Surrealism

Characteristics:
- Perfect condition: A+
- 70 x 50 cm
- Signed in print
- Based on the original work by Magritte from 1950

EXTRA INFO ABOUT THE ARTIST:
René François Ghislain Magritte (Lessen, 21 November 1898 – Schaarbeek, 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist painter.

Magritte initially worked as a designer at a wallpaper factory and later also created many posters.

Magritte's debut in painting encompassed cubist, futurist, and abstract works, influenced by his boss Victor Servranckx at the wallpaper factory UPL (Les Usines Peters-Lacroix, in Machelen). After encountering Giorgio de Chirico's work in 1925, Magritte began to assimilate surrealist elements. De Chirico depicts objects in a highly realistic manner within entirely different causal and temporal contexts. Thus De Chirico emphasizes the mysteriousness of the object world. Likewise, the conventional order and placement of things can be ironized in this way.

Magritte mainly created paintings (oil on canvas), but also gouaches, objects, and collages.

Under the leadership of E.L.T. Mesens he contributed to the magazine Oesophage and in 1927 had his first solo exhibition at the gallery "Le Centaure" in Brussels.

Between 1927 and 1930 Magritte stayed in a suburb of Paris, where his surrealist vision was cemented by the friendship of Paul Éluard and André Breton, who had written The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. When Breton once insisted that Magritte's wife remove a cross pendant, he decided to return to Brussels.[1]

When in 1930 the "Galerie Le Centaure", where Magritte was under contract, went bankrupt, E.L.T. Mesens was able to purchase all of his works, at that time about 200.

In 1934 Magritte and his circle applied the technique of the cadavre exquis to images following the linguistic experiments in which a poem is written by multiple poets.

Between 1934 and 1937 Magritte, under the pseudonym 'Emair', designed film posters for the German sound-film distributor Tobis Klangfilm. The City Archive of Leuven preserves seven posters designed by Magritte.

During World War II Magritte worked and resided in Carcassonne, France. He forged art to support himself, mainly works by De Chirico, Picasso, and Braque.[1] During a short period between 1940 and 1946, Magritte, on his agent's advice, slightly enriched his palette with an impressionistic accent (the so-called 'Renoir period'). This style reportedly sold better.

In 1945, after returning to Belgium, he joined the Communist Party of Belgium. In 1948 he briefly painted in a comic strip style, but also unsuccessfully.[1] However, Magritte soon returned to his earlier, almost photorealistic style, somewhat more aggressive due to his increasingly turbulent relations with his former surrealist circle (Goemans, Scutenaire, Nougé, Lecomte, Souris, E.L.T. Mesens). Magritte's black humor often led him to morbid figuration, further surrealized by the sometimes impossibly unlikely titles he assigned to his works.

In 1953 Magritte created wall paintings in the Casino in Knokke on the Belgian coast, commissioned by the Nellens family. These are now protected by the Royal Commission for Monuments and Landscapes. In 1960 he was awarded the Belgian State Prize for all his work. It was the first time the State Prize was awarded to a painter.

In the 1950s Magritte's work was very popular with New York collectors. This accounts for the large presence of Magritte's works in American collections today. His best-known icon La Trahison des Images is also there.

Magritte died in 1967 in Schaerbeek of pancreatic cancer, where he is buried in the municipal cemetery.

Most of Magritte's oeuvre, in terms of style, belongs to surrealism, one of the major art movements of the 20th century. In many of his works, nude women and realistically painted fish appear. This is probably a reference to the fact that Magritte found his mother naked in the Meuse after she had committed suicide.

Magritte's work, like that of Salvador Dalí and Carel Willink, is extremely finely painted, which emphasizes the realistic effect of depicting impossible objects.

The best-known work by Magritte is undoubtedly La Trahison des Images (1928-29) or "The Treachery of Images" with the painted text: Ceci n'est pas une pipe under a very realistic image of a pipe. In this work, René Magritte paints a pipe with the message underneath: 'This is not a pipe' (Ceci n'est pas une pipe). He wants to remind himself and the viewer that this is a canvas painted with oil paint, i.e., a painting, not a real pipe. Any reference to a real pipe betrays the fact that a pipe is actually an idea rooted in the mind.

By constantly questioning ourselves and, as it were, deceiving ourselves, Magritte forces us to think about art. In this light, the titles of Magritte's works can be seen. These titles usually have nothing to do with the subject of the painting. Later conceptual artists pursued this line to an extreme with installations, performances, or happenings, reducing the artwork to an idea. This is also a critique of artists who think they must depict reality so truthfully, as the hyperrealists later did. René Magritte believed it was the task of the painter to place reality in another frame. His work always raises more questions than it can answer. This is evident in the painting of a mermaid, depicted with a fish head and human legs. Also notable is the painting of a very realistically depicted fish that, at the tail end, turns into a burning cigar with curling smoke (the painting "l'Exception" 1963). Magritte's work also shows an extremely high mastery of the technique of oil painting on canvas.

Much of Magritte's work features metamorphosis, a transformation of one object into another. Or the work is, in other respects, impossible, for example the series of houses at night with a clear sky above in daylight. Or a moon hanging in front of the leaves of a tree. Owls or other birds emerging from the ground as plants.

He is related to the following artists: Morris Louis Yves Klein Lucio Fontana Piet Mondrian Niki de Saint Phalle Otto Piene Heinz Mack Kazimir Malevich Jean Tinguely Rainer Maria Latzke Jef Verheyen Pol Bury Walter Leblanc Rene Magritte André Racz Pierre Alechinsky Victor Vasarely Georges Vantongerloo Yves Klein Otto Piene Heinz Mack Lucio Fontana Piero Manzoni Jesús Rafael Soto Victor Vasarely Karl Otto Götz Gerhard Richter Anselm Kiefer Georg Baselitz Jannis Kounellis Cy Twombly Antoni Tàpies Hans Hartung Pierre Soulages Mark Rothko Kazuo Shiraga Bridget Riley Agostino Bonalumi Jean Tinguely Niki de Saint Phalle Guy Vandenbranden Marcel Duchamp Joseph Beuys Jean Tinguely Alexander Calder Nam June Paik Claes Oldenburg Chris Burden Richard Buckminster Fuller Karel Appel Asger Jorn Constant Nieuwenhuys Corneille Jean Dubuffet Jackson Pollock Willem de Kooning Hans Hartung Joan Miró Antoni Tàpies Sam Francis Franz Kline Mark Tobey André Masson Lucio Fontana Eduardo Chillida Kazuo Shiraga Zao Wou-Ki