René Magritte

Belgian surrealist artist (Nov. 21, 1898 - Aug. 15 1967)

"The fascinating and challenging images in Magritte's works stem from revelations of the mystery of the visible world. To him this world was a more than adequate source of lucid revelations, so that he did not need to draw on dreams, hallucinations, occult phenomena, cabalism. Nonetheless, preconsciousness - that is, the state before and during waking up - always played an important role in his work."

The Difficult Crossing, 1926	The Menaced Assassin, 1927	Elective Affinities, 1933	The Portrait, 1935
On the Threshold of Liberty, 1937	Portrait of Edward James, 1937	Time Transfixed, 1938	The Mysteries of the Horizon, 1955

Probably the artist whom I feel most identified with.

Style:
1) he exploits irrational displacements by bringing the outside sky into the inside room; 2) he condenses dissimilarly scaled things--intimate, personal objects rendered bigger than the furniture--to form one composite image; and 3) he turns these personal items into overcharged, overscaled fetish objects. The laws of space and scale, thus, correspond to personal desire (hence, the title, "Personal Values"). Magritte is precisionist in technique, using a seemingly straightforward, descriptive style, but his content is always a disturbing riddle.




Here one of my favorite artists, Cocteau Twins, does René Magritte.