René Magritte (1898-1967), after - Sky Bird

René Magritte - The Sky Bird - Offset printing/poster print - 70 x 50 cm

Name: René Magritte
Title: The Sky Bird
Type: Original art poster - High-quality offset print/poster print of the original work from 1966
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 1966

EXTRA ARTIST INFO:
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 produced many posters.

Magritte's debut in painting was with Cubist, Futurist, and abstract works, 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. De Chirico depicted objects very realistically, but in entirely different causal and temporal contexts. Thus, De Chirico emphasizes the enigmatic character of the object world. The conventional order and placement of things are also ironized in this way.

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

Under E.L.T. Mesens's leadership, 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 resided in a Paris suburb, where his surrealist vision was crowned by the friendship of Paul Éluard and André Breton, who had 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.[1]

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

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

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

During World War II Magritte worked and resided in the French town of Carcassonne. He forged art to support himself, mainly works by De Chirico, Picasso and Braque.[1] During a brief period, between 1940 and 1946, Magritte, on the advice of his agent, slightly enriched his palette with an Impressionistic emphasis (the so-called 'Renoir period'). This style tended to sell 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 without success.[1] But after a short time Magritte returned to his former, almost photorealistic style, somewhat more aggressive due to the unrest in his previous surrealist circle (Goemans, Scutenaire, Nougé, Lecomte, Souris, E.L.T. Mesens). Magritte's black humor often led him to morbid figuration, further surrealized by sometimes impossibly unlikely names he attached to his works.

In 1953 Magritte created the wall paintings 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 today of Magritte's work in American collections. His best-known icon La Trahison des Images also resides there.

Magritte died in 1967 in Schaerbeek from pancreatic cancer, where he is also 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 there are nude women and realistically painted fish. This is likely 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, emphasizing the realistic effect of impossible representations.

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 inscription beneath: "This is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe). He wants to remind himself and the viewer that this is a painted canvas, i.e., a painting, and not a real pipe. Any reference to a real pipe betrays the fact that a pipe is really an idea and thus has its origin in the mind.

By continually questioning ourselves and, as it were, deceiving, Magritte forces us to think about art. In that 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 very far with installations, performances, or happenings, reducing the artwork to an idea. This is also a critique of artists who believe they must depict reality so truthfully, as later the hyperrealists do. René Magritte believed the task of the painter is to place reality in another frame. His art always raises more questions than it can answer. Evidence of this is the painting of a mermaid, depicted with a fish head and human legs. Also noteworthy is the painting of a very realistically depicted fish that at the 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 transformation of one object into another. Or the work is otherwise impossible, for example the series of houses at night with a clear daytime sky above, or a moon hanging in front of leaves of a tree, owls or other birds growing 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