René Magritte (1898-1967), after - La Promesse

René Magritte - La Promesse / The Promise / De belofte - Offset lithography/poster print - 70 x 50 cm

Name: René Magritte
Title: La Promesse / The Promise / De belofte
Type: Original art poster - High-quality Offset lithography/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 Magritte work from 1954

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

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

Magritte’s debut in painting was in a cubist, futuristic and abstract style, 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 manner but in entirely different causal and temporal contexts. Thus De Chirico emphasizes the mysteriousness of the world of objects. The conventional order and placement of things are 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 he had his first solo exhibition in 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 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 worked under contract, went bankrupt, E.L.T. Mesens was able to buy all his works, at that time about 200.

In 1934 Magritte and his entourage also applied the technique of the cadavre exquis with images following the language 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 lived in the French town of Carcassonne. He forged art to make a living. It mainly involved 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 touch (the so-called 'Renoir period'). 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 cartoonish style, but also without success.[1] But after a short time Magritte returned to his earlier, near-photorealistic style, somewhat more aggressive due to the already unsettled relationship with his former surrealist circle (Goemans, Scutenaire, Nougé, Lecomte, Souris, E.L.T. Mesens). Magritte’s black humor often led him to a morbid figurativeness, further surrealized by the sometimes impossibly unlikely names he assigned 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 large presence today of Magritte’s work in American collections. 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, 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 nature-realistically painted fish. This is probably a reference to the fact that Magritte found his mother naked in the Sambre after she committed suicide.

Magritte’s work, like that of Salvador Dalí and Carel Willink, is painted with exquisite precision, emphasizing the realistic effect of otherwise nonexistent depictions.

The most famous Magritte work is undoubtedly La Trahison des Images (1928-29) or "The Treachery of Images" with the painted caption Ceci n’est pas une pipe below 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 painting, 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 questioning ourselves and, as it were, misleading 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 little to do with the subject of the painting. Later conceptual artists extended this line to the 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 that it is the task of the painter to place reality in another 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. Notably also 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 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 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 growing 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