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 based on 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 ARTIST INFO:
René François Ghislain Magritte (Lessines, 21 November 1898 – Schaerbeek, 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist painter.

Magritte initially worked as a designer at a wallpaper factory and subsequently also made many posters.

Magritte’s debut in painting was Cubist, Futurist and abstract work, influenced by his supervisor Victor Servranckx at the wallpaper factory UPL (Les Usines Peters-Lacroix, in Machelen). After becoming acquainted with Giorgio de Chirico’s work in 1925, Magritte began to assimilate surrealist elements into his work. De Chirico depicts objects very realistically but in entirely different causal and temporal contexts. Thus De Chirico emphasizes the enigmatic nature of the object world. The conventional order and placement of things is likewise ironized in this way.

Magritte primarily made 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 he 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 crowned with the friendship of Paul Éluard and André Breton, who had already written The Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. When Breton once insisted that Magritte’s wife remove a necklace with a cross, he decided to return to Brussels.

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

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

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

During World War II Magritte worked and lived in the French town of Carcassonne. He forged art to support himself, mainly works by De Chirico, Picasso and Braque. During a short period, between 1940 and 1946, Magritte subtly enriched his palette with an Impressionist emphasis (the so-called 'Renoir period') on the advice of his agent. This style would sell better.

In 1945, after returning to Belgium, he joined the Communist Party of Belgium. In 1948 he briefly painted in a cartoon-like style, but also unsuccessfully. Yet after a short time Magritte returned to his earlier, almost photorealistic style, somewhat more aggressive due to the turbulent relationship with his former surrealist circle (Goemans, Scutenaire, Nougé, Lecomte, Souris, E.L.T. Mesens). Magritte’s black humor often led to morbid figuration, further surrealized by the sometimes impossibly unlikely names he attached to his works.

In 1953 Magritte created the murals 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 explains the large presence of Magritte’s work in American collections today. His best-known icon La Trahison des Images is also there.

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

The majority 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 there are nude women and realistically painted fish. 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 painted with exquisite technique, which emphasizes the realistic effect of truly improbable representations.

The best-known work by Magritte is undoubtedly La Trahison des Images (1928-29) or “The Treachery of Images” with the painted caption: Ceci n’est pas une pipe under a highly realistic image of a pipe. In this work Magritte paints a pipe with the message below: This is not a pipe. He wants to remind himself and the viewer that this is a painting, a canvas painted with oil paint, and not a real pipe. Any reference to a real pipe betrays the fact that a pipe is actually an idea and thus has its origin in the mind.

By constantly questioning ourselves and, as it were, misdirecting it, Magritte forces us to think about art. In this light, the titles of Magritte’s works can also be seen. These titles usually have nothing to do with the subject of the painting. Later conceptual artists took this line even further with installations, performances, or happenings and reduced the artwork to an idea. This is also a critique of artists who think they must recreate reality as truthfully as possible, as the hyperrealists later did. René Magritte believed it was the painter’s task to place reality in a different frame. His art always raises more questions than it can answer. This is evidenced by the painting of a mermaid, depicted with a fish head and human legs. A contrasting example is also the painting of a very realistically depicted fish that, at its tail end, changes into a burning cigar with curling smoke (painting “l’Exception” 1963). Magritte’s work also demonstrates an extremely high mastery of the technique of oil painting on canvas.

Much of Magritte’s work shows metamorphosis, a change of one object into another. Or the work is, in other respects, impossible, for example the series of tenement houses at night, with a bright 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