I decided to write about Rene Magritte as his paintings make you think. They dazzle. You sit and think. You think and think. And a whole life is not enough to understand them. We can just have ideas what he meant.
Rene Magritte was born in Belgium in 1898. He was a child with fantasies: for some reason he was afraid of chess and musical notes. Rene lost his mom when he was 14. She tried to commit suicide before. Her husband was locking her up with the younger son as he was scared for her life. But once she disappeared. Later she was found in the river. She was naked but her face was covered with a night gown. That tragedy shocked Rene. That image of a naked woman with a covered face stuck in his memory forever.
Another unusual memory of childhood was an airplane crash. The pilot's face was covered with a helmet and glasses.
Those covered faces tortured Magritte all his life. They had a secret. They made him think about life and death.
But life kept going and when he was 15, they moved to Charleroi. Once at the city fair he met a girl, Georgette Berger, who became the woman of his life.
He entered the Academy of Art in Brussels in 1961 and in 10 years after they met they got married.
They didn't have children and all love and tenderness were directed to each other. He pampered her like a baby and her attitude to him was like a mother's. She didn't mind his painting, meeting friends and even visiting brothels. She set a very strict daily regimen and never wavered from it. Magritte was happy. It made his life stable and gave him assurance that his wife would never disappear during the night forever. Just once she let him have doubts when she had romance with one of his friends. He was so shocked that he brought a policeman to bring her home.
He worked hard. And his exhibition attracted a lot of spectacles and critics with his strange and secret paintings. Then Rene with his wife moved to Paris, the center of surrealism. But he was not crazy about psychoanalysis as other surrealists. They met Dali there who wrote an article about Magritte. Later Dali invited the Magrittes to Spain and in their company Salvador met his future wife Gala who was accompanied by her then husband Paul Eluard.
Georgette and Rene moved back to Belgium because of an accident that happened at one of the surrealist's parties. The upset Eluard, because of his separation with Gala, chastised Georgette for wearing a Catholic cross and Andre Breton, a French writer and a surrealism founder, demanded she take it off. The couple left the party and France altogether later. Another version is that Magritte was driven away by Breton as Rene came back temporarily to impressionistic symbolism.
His fame grew fast and he considered himself a magic surrealist. All his life he tried to resolve the puzzle of the Woman. The main topic which touched him was sense of dualism, separation of genders. Separation and conjunction.
His painting "Megalomania (La folie des grandeurs II )" was born thanks to a magnificent masterpiece of art "The Birth of Venus" by Botichelli, Russian Matreshkas and Venus di Milo.
Botichelli's Venus is an image depicting the secret of a Woman, her double nature: innocence and depravity. Matreshka looks simple by a form but also hides a secret. All that inspired Magritte to paint his Megalomania. It is the process of a woman's birth. That inside she is sophisticated. Around is the world with its death and life but it is warmed with a candle on the foreground, a symbol of the soul. Blocks of clouds could mean that world is changing but there is a place for clean thoughts, a balloon.
"Lovers". There are two variants of this painting. On one there are a man and a woman joined in a long kiss. Their heads are covered with cloth.
On the other one they look at us.
There is a deep sense in it. You can interpret it as people are unable to open themselves even when they are in a very close relation. Another interpretation could be that Magritte wanted to show love's blindness. Lovers are so involved in each other that they don't notice anything around them.
There is a 3rd version. Lovers don't see anything as they don't need it. They feel closeness even through cloth. For real love there are no obstacles.
I like the 1st interpretation most. It is really true. We are like "waterproof tea bags" which can not make tea as they are waterproof. We are so afraid to open, to get hurt. But what is the meaning of relations then?
But may be all these versions are too primitive and the meaning is much deeper.
"The son of a Man" was painted like a self - portrait where man symbolizes a modern man who lost his individuality but he stayed a son of Adam who can not resist his passions therefore there is an apple hiding his face.
"The treachery of images" became one of the most famous works of Rene Magritte due to the signing to it. He wrote:" This is not a pipe". Later when somebody contradicted, he replied that you could not fill it with tobacco, it was a just a painting and that he would lie if he would say it was a pipe.
Nostalgy. There is nothing to do on the bridge for neither lion or a person with folded wings. They embody grief of those who know that real life is something different, something that doesn't exist.
We can try to solve the puzzles made by Magritte from ordinary things but we will never guess their real meaning. We will be moving to the light but we will never reach it. But that path would be valuable and could be an important part of art.
The writting of this post was inspired by the book "100 Masterpieces" by N. Sinelnikova.
