René Magritte (1898-1967), after - Black Magic

René Magritte - Black Magic (after) - Offset print/poster print - 70 x 50 cm

Name: René Magritte
Title: Black Magic
Type: Original art poster - High-quality offset print/poster print based on original work from 1945
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 1945

EXTRA INFO ABOUT THE ARTIST:
René François Ghislain Magritte (Lessines, November 21, 1898 – Schaerbeek, August 15, 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 was Cubist, Futurist and Abstract, under the influence of 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 into his work. De Chirico depicts objects very realistically, but in entirely different causal and temporal contexts. Thus De Chirico emphasizes the mystery of the world of objects. The conventional order and placement of things are likewise ironized in this way.

Magritte mainly 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 had his first solo exhibition at the gallery Le Centaure in Brussels.

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

When in 1930 the Le Centaure Gallery, where Magritte was under contract, went bankrupt, E.L.T. Mesens could buy all his works, at that time about 200.

In 1934 Magritte and his circle applied the cadaveric exquisite technique to imagery, following language experiments in which a poem was 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 Archives of Leuven preserve 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 for works by De Chirico, Picasso and Braque.[1] For 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 tended to sell better.

In 1945, after his return to Belgium, he joined the Communist Party of Belgium. In 1948 he briefly painted in a comic-like style, but also unsuccessfully.[1] But soon he returned to his earlier, almost photorealistic style, somewhat more aggressive due to the 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 gave his work.

In 1953 Magritte created the murals in the Casino of 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 most famous 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, stylistically, belongs to Surrealism, one of the major art movements of the 20th century. In many of his works, naked 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 otherwise nonexistent images.

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 the highly realistic image of a pipe. In this work Magritte paints a pipe with the caption beneath: "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, i.e., a painting, and not an actual pipe. Any reference to a real pipe betrays the fact that a pipe is essentially an idea with its origin in the mind.

By constantly questioning ourselves and, as it were, fooling ourselves, Magritte compels 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 took this line to extremes with an installation, a performance or a happening, reducing the artwork to an idea. This is also a critique of artists who believe they must depict reality so faithfully, as the later hyperrealists do. 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. A testament to this is the painting of a mermaid, depicted with a fish head and human legs. Also emblematic is the painting of a very realistically depicted fish that changes into a lit cigar at the tail end with curling smoke (painting "l'Exception" 1963). Magritte’s work also shows an extraordinary mastery of oil painting on canvas.

Much of Magritte’s work shows metamorphosis, the transformation of one object into another. Or the work is, in other respects, impossible, for example the nightly series of houses with a clear daytime sky above, or a moon hanging in front of a tree’s leaves, owls or other birds sprouting from the ground.

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