Rene Magritte - Le fil’s de homme

René Magritte - The Son of Man (after) - Offset printing/poster print - 70 x 50 cm

Name: René Magritte
Title: The Son of Man
Type: Original art poster - High-quality offset printing/poster print based on the original work from 1964
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 1964

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 produced many posters.

Magritte's debut in painting was in a style that was Cubist, Futurist, and abstract, influenced by 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 depicts objects in a very realistic manner but within entirely different causal and temporal contexts. Thus De Chirico emphasizes the mystery of the object world. The conventional order and placement of things are thus ironized.

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 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 by the friendship of Paul Éluard and André Breton, who had written The Surrealist Manifesto 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", with whom Magritte worked under contract, went bankrupt, E.L.T. Mesens was able to buy all of his works, at that time about 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, 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 support himself. It mainly concerned 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 impressionist emphasis (the so-called 'Renoir period'). This style is believed to have sold better.

In 1945, after returning to Belgium, he joined the Communist Party of Belgium. In 1948 he briefly began painting in a cartoon-like style, but also without success.[1] But soon Magritte returned to his earlier, almost photorealistic style, albeit somewhat more aggressive due to the increasingly strained relationship with his former surrealist circle (Goemans, Scutenaire, Nougé, Lecomte, Souris, E.L.T. Mesens). Magritte's black humor often led to morbid imagery, further sur surrealized by the sometimes impossibly improbable names he attached to his works.

In 1953 Magritte created 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 Prize was awarded to a painter.

In the 1950s Magritte's work was very popular with New York collectors. This explains the strong presence of Magritte's work in American collections today. His most famous icon La Trahison des Images is also located 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 probably a reference to the fact that Magritte found his mother naked in the Sambre after she had committed suicide.

Magritte's work, like that of Salvador Dalí and Carel Willink, is painted with exquisite precision, which emphasizes the realistic effect of otherwise non-existent representations.

The best-known work of 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, René Magritte paints a pipe with the caption below: "This is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe). He wants to remind himself and the viewer that this is a painting, a canvas painted with oil, not a real pipe. Any reference to a real pipe betrays the fact that a pipe is essentially an idea and thus has its origin in the mind.

By constantly questioning ourselves and seemingly deceiving, Magritte compels us to think about art. In that sense, 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 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 a different frame. His art always raises more questions than it can answer. This is exemplified by the painting of a mermaid, depicted with a fish head and human legs. Also notable is the painting of a very realistically depicted fish that, at its tail end, becomes a smoking cigar with curling smoke (painting "l'Exception" 1963). Magritte's work also demonstrates an exceptionally 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 impossible in other respects, for example the series of houses at night, with a clear daytime sky above. Or a moon hanging behind 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