René Magritte (1898-1967), after - Summertime

René Magritte - The Summer Months - Offset printing/poster print - 70 x 50 cm

Name: René Magritte
Title: The Summer Months
Type: Original art poster - High-quality offset print/poster print of the original work from 1953
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 1953

EXTRA INFO ABOUT THE ARTIST:
René François Ghislain Magritte (Lessen, November 21, 1898 – Schaarbeek, 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 work, under the influence of his supervisor Victor Servranckx at the wallpaper factory UPL (Les Usines Peters-Lacroix, in Machelen). After his introduction to Giorgio de Chirico's work, in 1925, Magritte began to assimilate surrealist elements. De Chirico depicts objects in a very realistic way 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 is likewise ridiculed in this way.

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

Under the direction 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 Parisian suburb, where his surrealist vision was crowned by the friendship of Paul Eluard and André Breton, who had already written The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. When Breton 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 buy all of his works, around 200 at the time.

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 multiple 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 preserves 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 short period, between 1940 and 1946, Magritte slightly enriched his palette with an impressionistic accent at the suggestion of his agent (the so-called 'Renoir period'). This style would sell better.

In 1945, after his return to Belgium, he joined the Belgian Communist Party. In 1948 he briefly painted in a cartoonish style, but also without success.[1] But after a short time Magritte returned to his earlier, nearly 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 him to morbid figuration, even more 'surrealized' by the sometimes impossibly unlikely labels he attached to his works.

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

Magritte died in 1967 in Schaarbeek 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 fish painted in a very lifelike manner. 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 Dali and Carel Willink, is painted with exquisite technique, which emphasizes the realistic effect of otherwise nonexistent representations.

The best-known work by Magritte is without a doubt La Trahison des Images (1928-29) or "The Treachery of Images" with the painted text: Ceci n'est pas une pipe under a highly realistic image of a pipe. In this work 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 painted canvas, i.e., a painting, 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 continually questioning ourselves and, as it were, deceiving ourselves, 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 followed this line to an extreme with installations, performances, or happenings and reduced the artwork to an idea. This is also a critique of artists who believe they must depict reality so truthfully, as the hyperrealists later did. René Magritte believed it was the painter's task to place reality in another 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. Also characteristic is the painting of a very realistically rendered fish that at the tail end changes into a lit cigarette with curling smoke (painting "l'Exception" 1963). Magritte's work also testifies to an extremely high mastery of the technique of painting with oil on canvas.

Many of Magritte's works show metamorphosis, a change of one object into another. Or the work is, in other respects, impossible, for example the series of houses at night, with a clear day sky above. Or a moon hanging in front of the leaves of a tree. Owls or other birds sprouting from the ground like 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