Paper On Magritte

On November 21, 1898, the artist known world-wide, Rene Magritte, was born in Lessines Belgium. An artist like Rene Magritte was a once-in-a-lifetime rare gem.

Therefore, this essay will focus on the origin of the brilliance of the two painters, Salvador Dalí and Rene Magritte, by focusing on the different approaches to achieve their status as masters of surrealism, emphasising their painted works only.

Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France. He moved to LeHavre with his family at age five (Skira 21). As a child Monet would be found drawing on his work throughout class. This was the beginning to a brilliant career. These drawings would spawn into a passion for art.

The artist I chose to do research on was Rene François Ghislain Magritte. Magritte was born November 21, 1898, Lessines, Belgium to a wealthy family. He had three younger brothers, his father was in the manufacturing business, and his mother was thought to be a milliner before getting married. A man painting in a crematory and his mother’s suicide in 1912 influenced Magritte’s progress as an artist. Magritte painted to find comfort from his mother’s death. In 1916, he left home and studied art at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for the next two years. Although he was not interested in his classes, he became friends with Victor Servranckx, who taught Magritte the three styles: Futurism, Cubism, and Purism. Then, in 1921, he joined the

Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.

The influence of surrealist art on society on the past centuries has been powerful, and artists like Salvador Dali contributed a lot to this form of art, in this research paper I piece together the career and life then by focusing on one of his remarkable artworks and trying to analyze it and how it affected the target audience of the culture and society and for all these topics which makes the main questions in my research paper I did a research to know more about them so that I can be able to link them together and understands how they affected the society.(1)

Rene Magritte was an enigmatic and strange man who painted surrealism paintings. Little is known about his childhood except that his mother, Regine Magritte took her own life by drowning herself in the Sambre river. Young Magritte is thought to have discovered her body floating with her night garment covering her face. There is speculation that this trauma was an influence on many of Magritte’s works. When Rene Magritte took up his brushes, he created beautiful visual riddles that delight and bewilder the viewer. His clean lines and highly detailed finishes made his brush strokes nearly invisible; his paintings look as if they came from a printing press. Magritte referred to his paintings as “his labors.” He did labor over the paintings

Pablo Picasso, born Pablo Ruiz, was destined to become an artist at a very young age. Born in Malaga, Spain on October 15, 1881, the young artist began to follow in the footsteps of Jose Ruiz Blasco—his father. Many say that Picasso's love for art was

Art overall is created and adored by numerous amount of people for many reasons, such as amplifying shared common visual language. The word art often branches into many different movements and components. Modern art or Contemporary art is one those components; this specific genre began mainly in the 1860’s to the 1970’s. During, this time period artists began throwing aside their own beliefs in a spirit of experimentation and the bringing of new ideas. The purpose of Modern art is to beautify one’s surroundings with intrigue, its often very diverse and cannot be easily defined through a list of visual characteristics, artistic themes or cultural concern. Moreover, Modern art is often hard to understand by people because, unlike Egyptian tomb paintings or Greek sculptures, it speaks to the dramatic social, political and technological changes of the last 50-60 years, and questions many of society’s values and assumptions. Also, Modern artists known for incorporating a great deal of abstraction into their works and representational forms to convey their ideas more elaborately; Rene Magritte is one of those artists.

Most of us connect surrealism with art and images from Dali and his generation. However, the artists of the surrealist movement regard their work as an expression of the original philosophical movement with the works being an artefact that philosophy. André Breton was clearly in his view that surrealism was above all, a revolutionary and radical philosophical movement, explaining that is not a matter of aesthetics, but rather a way of thinking, a point of view (Waldberg 1997; Pass 2011:29-30).

The Human Condition, or La condition humaine was two paintings created by Rene Magritte, one in 1933 and the other in 1935. Both contain many formal similarities, yet the main point of the painting is that there is a painting of a landscape, yet that painting perfectly fits with, or completes, the landscape, as if it was perfectly drawn. In this analysis, I will be analyzing Magritte’s first painting, made in 1933. Magritte’s works often include objects hiding behind others, such as with Magritte’s The Son of Man, where a man in a bowler hat is hiding his face behind a floating apple. Magritte does this also in the Human Condition, yet to express a different meaning. Magritte is one of the major spearheads of the surrealist movement, a type of modernism, in which the fabric of realism and definitions are questions. One of Magritte’s more famous works, The Treachery of Images, Magritte shows a picture of what obviously is a pipe, yet, written in French beneath the image, states “This is not a pipe.” This was the dawn of a philosophy which would take the western art world by storm, called structuralism/post-structuralism. This is the philosophy where ideas/words and their meanings can be flexible depending on the viewer or the circumstance. This philosophy believes in the subconscious identification with images/colors that people have with art. In Magritte’s Treachery of the Images, his statement that “this is not a pipe” can be interpreted in different ways. One could say,

Much of my work revolves around identity, domestic spaces and human condition because they are elements that everyone is forced to deal with in their lifetime, which brings me to the first artist, Rene Magritte. I officially fell in love with Magritte in 2013 at his retrospective at MoMA. I was really drawn to Magritte because he used everyday scenes and objects and alters them in a way that was obviously unnatural but not to the point of being considered fantastical. By depicting these common moments or objects in a minimalistic way, Magritte forced people to take notice of the world around them yet not in an overwhelming manner. In a sense, I feel like Magritte and myself both are literally and conceptually making a world of our own based on the reality that

Salvador Dali is one of the most famous surrealist artists. His artwork is fascinating to look at and analyze. All of his work is very imaginative, rendered at a high level of realism, and is filled with extensive symbolism. First I will talk about the history of Surrealism, then how Dali studied and admired Sigmund Freud's theories which greatly influenced his art, he used Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of dream interpretation to invent a technique for his work, and then using this technique he painted his bizarre dreams.

Born on October 25, 1881, Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain. He was the son of an artist, Jose Ruiz, and Maria Picasso. He took after his mother’s last name, being that is was unique and different. Being an artist genius, at age fourteen, Picasso completed the qualifying examination of the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona, in just a day. He later then attended the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, returning to Barcelona in the 1900’s.

Born on October 25, 1881, Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain. He was the son of an artist, Jose Ruiz, and Maria Picasso. He took after his mother’s last name, being that is was unique and different. Being an artist genius, at age fourteen, Picasso completed the qualifying examination of the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona, in just a day. He later then attended the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, returning to Barcelona in the 1900’s.