Who Was René Magritte and Why Is He Still So Important?

Early Life and Career

René François Ghislain Magritte was born in Lessines in 1898 to Régina, a former millinery worker, and Léopold Magritte, a merchant tailor. He was the oldest of three boys and started receiving drawing lessons in 1910, years before enrolling in art school.

Magritte’s mother was depressed and known to have made multiple suicide attempts. In early 1912, when he was 13 years old, she made her final attempt when she walked to a bridge near the family home in Châtelet and jumped into the Sambre River. When her body was discovered along the river 17 days later, her nightgown was wrapped around her head. Though Magritte never openly admitted a connection, this may have inspired the recurring theme of shrouded faces in his work. (In The Lovers, 1928, two figures kiss while their heads are enshrouded in cloth; it made an especially meme-able image during the Covid pandemic when masks were ubiquitous.)

A few years later Magritte began studying at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, attending intermittently between 1916 and 1918. His early style was impressionistic, and he also experimented with Cubism and Futurism, but he eventually cut his studies short because he found them lacking. Before long—in 1920—Magritte was conscripted into the Belgian infantry; released the next year, he got a job as a designer in a wallpaper factory.

In 1922 Magritte married a woman he’d known since he was a teenager, Georgette Berger. The Magrittes never had kids but they did have pets: Their Brussels home was filled with dogs, cats, and pigeons (with Paul Simon even alluding to one of their pups in his 1983 ballad “René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War”). From outside their home on quiet Rue des Mimosas their marriage looked sleepily stable, but in fact they both had affairs—he with Surrealist performance artist Sheila Legge and she with Surrealist poet Paul Colinet. (Magritte may have also had a brothel habit.) Still, they stayed together until the end of his life.

The Magrittes Go to Paris

Magritte signed his first gallery contract with Galerie le Centaure in Brussels in 1926, which allowed him to start painting full time. The next year, the gallery hosted his debut solo exhibition. His Surrealist works were torn apart by critics, and the discouraged Magrittes relocated to the more avant-garde Paris. They settled in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, an eastern suburb, and became friendly with the Surrealist circle including André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró. Within a year Magritte was exhibiting with them.

His time on this high-profile Paris circuit was short, though, and when he and Georgette moved back to Belgium in 1930 (likely for financial reasons), he became a more peripheral member of the movement. Being on the outskirts was a recurring theme of his life, actually. Other than the few years he lived in Paris, he eschewed art world centers; he never even visited New York until the very end of his life, for his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Still, Magritte remained in touch with the Surrealists. Among other things, he wrote to them about what he was painting. “It can be supposed that the scene behind the picture is different from what is visible,” Magritte wrote to Breton in 1934, describing his freshly completed The Human Condition (1933). In this painting about painting, an easel supports a canvas of a landscape that blends almost seamlessly with the landscape behind it. Though one is ostensibly more “real” than the other, both are as much simulacrums as the painting itself.

Commercial Success

The 1930s brought a string of professional milestones. Magritte had a solo show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1933, and in 1936 he showed twice in New York—in a solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery and a group show at MoMA titled “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.” That year he also participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, where he caught the attention of collector Edward James.

James commissioned Magritte (and Dalí) to create pieces for his London home, asking the Belgian to paint works for his ballroom. Magritte produced Time Transfixed (1938), depicting a black steam engine emerging from a fireplace as though it were a railway tunnel. “I decided to paint the image of a locomotive,” Magritte later said of the canvas. “In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery—the image of a dining room fireplace—was joined.”

Ceci n’est pas un Titian

Magritte’s good fortune came to an abrupt end at the outbreak of World War II, which he spent at home in Nazi-occupied Belgium. Maybe as a means of supporting himself, or maybe as a way to challenge authority, he started forging artistic masterworks both old and new. Magritte’s list of victims included Titian and the 17th-century Dutch painter Meindert Hobbema as well as contemporaries such as Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso.

Belgian Surrealist Marcel Mariën, who helped Magritte sell the forgeries, exposed this episode in print after Magritte died (Georgette responded by suing Mariën—and losing). This forgery habit extended beyond canvas, too. After the war, Magritte counterfeited banknotes. In his defense, he always warned viewers that things were not as they seemed.

Vaches

In 1945 Magritte formally joined the Belgian Communist Party, making official views that he’d held for years. “The only way poets and painters have of struggling against the bourgeois economic system is to give their work a content that rejects the bourgeois ideological values that underlie the bourgeois economic system,” he wrote in a letter in 1946.

Toward the end of the war, he drastically changed styles. The brightly colored and impressionistic works he created—divided into his Renoir period (1943–47) and “Vache” period (1948)—are not critically acclaimed (and are reviled by some). In both, Magritte borrows styles that are clearly not his own, leaning on the visual language of Renoir and the Fauves.

“I’m taking refuge in the ideal world of art,” Magritte wrote to Mariën in 1944, explaining this aesthetic sharp turn. “The noisier reality becomes, the less reluctant I am to escape from it as much as possible.” In another missive, Magritte wrote that “the German occupation marked the turning point in my art. Before the war, my paintings expressed anxiety, but the experiences of war have taught me that what matters in art is to express charm.”

The Empire of Lights

After exploring other artists’ styles for a few years, Magritte reverted to his own in the late 1940s. Among the works that signaled this triumphant return was The Empire of Lights (1949)—the first of 17 oil paintings and 10 gouaches bearing the same title that he created through the mid 1960s. They vary slightly, but all show a residential neighborhood where two times of day collide inexplicably—a brightly sunlit sky contrasting with darkened homes, lit by a solitary streetlamp. We’re not sure whether the true light source is nature or artifice.

They were immediately prized by collectors. Nelson Rockefeller bought the first one as a gift for his secretary, and the second was purchased by major Magritte collectors Dominique and Jean de Menil, who gave it to MoMA. The eighth and largest version was shown at the 1954 Venice Biennale, then promptly sold to Peggy Guggenheim. And the 1961 version that broke Magritte’s personal auction record earlier this year was painted for Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, daughter of the artist’s patron Pierre Crowet.

While working on this series, Magritte also created several paintings featuring oversize everyday objects such as combs and bars of soap. In Personal Values (1952), what appears to be a human-size wine glass faces a full-length mirror as an enormous shaving brush rests on top of an armoire. The objects suck all the air out of the room, flaunting their outsize significance in bourgeois spaces.

Final Decades

Magritte continued to captivate international art lovers in the 1950s and 60s, even during the height of abstraction. He had frequent shows at the New York, Paris, and Geneva galleries of Alexander Iolas and a string of institutional solo shows in the United States in the 1960s. Leading up to his major retrospective at MoMA in 1965 (which included 81 works and spurred Magritte to finally visit the United States for the first time), he had one-man museum shows in Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, and Little Rock, Arkansas.

By the time of the MoMA show, Pop Art was in full force and almost every review cited Magritte’s relevance to the contemporary trend. Both Magritte and the Pop artists used the stuff of daily life in their work, rendered realistically, which drew comparisons, but Magritte didn’t approve of the correlation. “Do the Pop artists claim me?” Magritte asked in 1965. “Excuse me, but I think Pop is window dressing, advertising art.”

A combination of these institutional showcases and newfound relevance helped spike Magritte’s market values in the 1960s, with artists buying up his work alongside established collectors. Jasper Johns acquired The Interpretation of Dreams (1935) in the early 1960s, and soon afterward Robert Rauschenberg bought The Literal Meaning (1929). By 1965, Magrittes were priced at eight times their value in 1959.

Magritte lived to see these successes but died in 1967 of pancreatic cancer. Until the very end he kept up appearances that he was living a serene, if boring, bourgeois life. “His life is deliberately possessed of the same irradicable air of banality as his painting,” A 1966 Esquire profile of the artist titled “This Is Not Magritte” gave us a glimpse of the man:

“His life is deliberately possessed of the same irradicable air of banality as his painting. He travels rarely, and prefers going home to going out. He is fond of cooking and likes to eat, although he claims that some foods, like dry biscuits, give him electric shocks. He is a passionate reader of philosophy and the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Rex Stout. He plays chess, less now than before, in a dingy café called the Greenwich, and otherwise dandles his fatigue like a retired acrobat. ‘I’m going to bed’ are the words he most enjoys uttering at the end of every day.”

At the end of an August day in 1967, not long after spending three weeks in the hospital, Magritte died at home. This did not signal the end of his legacy, though. Still puzzling us half a century later, his unassuming paintings filled with absurdities are timeless.