After a brief stint in a wallpaper factory, he found work as a freelance poster and advertisement designer while he continued to paint. Around this time, Magritte saw the painting The Song of Love by Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and was so struck by its imagery that it sent his own work off in the new direction for which he would become known.
Placing familiar, mundane objects such as bowler hats, pipes and rocks in unusual contexts and juxtapositions, Magritte evoked themes of mystery and madness to challenge the assumptions of human perception. With early works such as The Lost Jockey and The Menaced Assassin , Magritte quickly became one of the most important artists in Belgium and found himself at the center of its nascent surrealist movement.
But when his first one-man show—in at the Galerie le Centaure—was poorly received, a disheartened Magritte left his homeland for France.
Over the next few years, he produced important works such as The Lovers and The False Mirror and also began to experiment with the use of text, as seen in his painting The Treachery of Images. But despite the progress Magritte was making in his art, he had yet to find significant financial success, and in , he and Georgette returned to Brussels, where he set up an ad agency with his younger brother Paul.
Though the demands of their studio left Magritte little time for his own work over the next few years, interest in his paintings began to grow and soon he was selling enough to leave his commercial work behind. However, the onset of World War II would soon alter the course of his life and art. With the arrival of the s, Magritte enjoyed the ongoing international interest in his work and continued his prolific output. In he began work as a freelance graphic designer in Brussels. Over the next five years he produced advertisements for many clients, including a Belgian fashion house and Alfa Romeo.
Indeed, he later adopted the now iconic bowler hat precisely because it was the uniform of the Belgian fonctionnaire. Magritte left Paris after his wife Georgette was publicly criticised for wearing a crucifix, returning to the more bourgeois and familiar sphere of Belgian Surrealism.
From the s onwards, Magritte explored the arbitrary way in which letters and sounds are attached to concepts and objects in the world. He was an early explorer of notions of signs and signifiers, and some of his pictures tap into ideas about perception.
The artist himself had little to say about his childhood beyond a few vivid memories that shaped his way of seeing. Perhaps this relative silence about his early life was born when his mother committed suicide in On the night she escaped, she immediately went to the nearest bridge and threw herself into the River Sambre that flowed behind the Magrittes' property. He was certainly not there. The only public comment he ever made on the subject was that he'd felt guiltily happy to be the focal point of sensation and sympathy, both at school and in his neighborhood.
However, veils, curtains, faceless people, and headless faces and torsos did become recurring themes in his paintings. He found none of the former but one of his classmates at the Academie introduced him to cubism , futurism, and purism, three movements he found exciting and which significantly changed the style of his work.
Magritte emerged from the Academie qualified to do commercial art. After a compulsory year of service in the military in , Magritte returned home and found work as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and worked freelance in advertising to pay the bills while he continued to paint. During this time he saw a painting by the Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico , called "The Song of Love," which greatly influenced his own art. This gave him money to live on while continuing to paint.
April 18, at pm. May 29, at pm. Jarrah says:. August 15, at am. October 29, at pm. November 15, at pm. Madi Ms. November 19, at pm. May 5, at pm.
September 16, at pm. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. The Treachery of Images , — The Human Condition , The Listening Room , The False Mirror , Elective Affinities ,
0コメント