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Compared to some of the most unruly surrealists of his time, rené magritte looks decent. He lacks the high profile of Salvador dalí, who does not wear a weird moustache, leads an anteaters, and deliberately flaunts the streets of Paris; nor is he known as andré Breton, who is known for his chaotic private life and mischievous temper.
As Magritte has repeatedly reiterated, he is more concerned with the people and things most familiar in everyday mediocrity, and he cannot stand Dalí collage of all kinds of incompatible things at will, nor can he accept radical abstraction like Joan Miró. But here's Magritte's secret: he always tried to reconstruct the meaning of the appearance of everyday life by a means of defamiliarization.
However, in contrast to the weirdness, mystery and gloominess expressed in his works, Magritte is almost a cautious person in his daily life, except for wearing an old-school black dome top hat (which was popular in the 20s and 30s of the last century), he looks almost an ordinary person who is not good-looking, even a little mediocre and a little stereotyped.
● Artist René Magritte
What kind of person is this surromagist Magritte, who doesn't look typical?
Magritte was secretive about his life, and although he occasionally revealed some incredible details from his writings, it was often impossible not to associate these anecdotes with his artistic style. Although Magritte himself was very resistant to comparing the artist's life with his artwork, it was unacceptable to do a Freudian interpretation, including a general symbolist interpretation.
One of the most frequently mentioned things is that at the age of 14, Magritte's mother committed suicide by jumping into the river due to a mental breakdown, and it was about three weeks before her body was found: her pajamas caged her head, revealing a swollen, white naked body underneath. One can't help but think of this scene in a series of magritte's future works, such as the naked female dead in l'assassin menacé (1926) and the bizarre images of the les amants (1928) series (1928) and la ruse symétrique (1928) or other works with masks or naked lower bodies.
● The Threatened Assassin (1926)
But Magritte strenuously denies this, denying that there is a Freudian connection between the two. Remarkably, this is not so much a denial of the relevance of events per se as to The Consistent Assertion that Margaret always wanted to maintain ambiguity and mystique.
Magritte once mentioned another equally bizarre childhood experience. When he was a child, one day a huge hot air balloon landed on the roof of his house without warning, and two leather-clad, helmet-clad hot air balloon drivers suddenly appeared in the stairwell of his house and appeared right in front of him: they picked up the deflated hot air balloon from the roof, dragged it behind, and walked down the stairs.
He was still young at the time, but this scene remains in his memory, like setting the first incredible tone of his life. As Magritte recalls this strange experience on an exceptional basis, we see that many of his works also have different levels of adventure. Even the huge rock that floats like a hot air balloon in Le Château des pyrénées (1959) may constitute some sort of metaphorical response.
● Château de the Pyrenees (1959)
If his mother's death in a sense extends a sense of weirdness, from the fall of a hot air balloon to a sense of adventure, another small childhood incident that Magritte actively mentions maintains the gloomy and mysterious side of his personality.
Margaret grew up with a quirk: he liked to play in cemeteries. One afternoon, as usual, little Magritte was playing alone in an abandoned cemetery in the town of Soignies. He moved the large iron door of the catacombs and ran to the catacombs to explore, and when he came out again, he was suddenly stunned by the scene in front of him: he saw a foreign painter painting, surrounded by stone pillars that were crooked from side to side, and thick leaves were everywhere.
Magritte recalled that the scene was like a magic show to him, and from that moment on, painting was far removed from something common sense.
The Impossible Attempt (1928)
This fragment of Gothic memory, peculiar to Magritte, seems to have repeatedly chewed on the images that emerge from it, which has led him to mention it repeatedly in different places. Magritte saw the artist as a magician, and the most mysterious aspect of art, of course, is as ineffable as juggling.
This gloomy mystique permeates almost all of Magritte's peak works, such as tentative de l'impossible (1928), la reproduction interdite (1937), and so on.
Prohibition of Reproduction (1937)
Among them, "Prohibition of Reproduction" has the typical characteristics of what Freud called "unheimlich". Here, the role of the mirror is no longer an optical reflection, but a producer of another order of reality. Meanwhile, like many of Magritte's works with hidden faces, Forbidden to Reproduce is a double shelving of visible and invisible faces.
For emmanuel levinas, the face (le visage) is the foundation of the relationship between subjectivity and social ethics. Unlike the phenomenological shelving (epoché), Magritte shelved the certainty of meaning in the living world. From this point of view, "Prohibition of Reproduction", like other works of hidden faces, is highly vigilant and skeptical about the world of life in which the subject and society dominate its meaning, and the tone is almost mystical.
In Jeune Fille Mangeant un oiseau / le plaisir (1927), a typical Magritte gloomy accentuates its eerie and frightening side.
● The Little Girl Who Ate Birds (1927)
So, is it weirdness, adventure, gloom, and mystery that make up Magritte's main personality traits? Obviously this is not the case.
In fact, Margaret was a man who did not dare to go out of the ordinary in private. His marriage was mediocre, and he could hardly see anything involved with his affair (on the contrary, from Picasso to Dali to Breton, contemporaries were more or less inextricably linked to the most bizarre private lives).
Magritte was very fond of his wife, Georgette. Georgette's personal taste is very different from Magritte's artistic talent, especially her devotion to popular aesthetics and the mediocre lifestyle of the bourgeoisie, which are the objects of Magritte's criticism in her writing. But the size of their home is taken care of by Georgette, including furniture, antiques, sofas, armchairs, small pianos, small carpets... I am afraid that even the clothes he himself wears are selected according to Georgette's taste.
● L'homme au chapeau melon (date unknown)
Harry Torczyner recalls that a few years before Magritte's death, he once accompanied Margaret on a stroll in Nice, France. Magritte suddenly spotted a porcelain rooster (a bit tacky) and said he must buy it for Georgette. Toktsner asked him if he was still pursuing her. Margaret smiled sheepishly and said yes.
Regarding Magritte's wife, a more well-known public case is related to Breton. While living with Georgette in Paris, Magritte joined the Surrealist group, during which time he became acquainted with Breton and became close friends. But this friendship did not last long.
One day the Magrittes, along with other friends, were visiting the Bullerdon house as usual. Breton's hot temper is notorious, coupled with a bohemian lifestyle, and he is a person who does not get along very well. Suddenly, Breton saw Georgette wearing a cross necklace around his neck, when Breton's rebellious nature suddenly struck: he demanded without warning that Georgette tear it off. This request infuriated Magritte, who left breton's residence with Magritte in exasperation and has since broken with the Parisian surrealist circles.
● 《人之子》(the son of man,1964)
But that's not all magritte. After returning to Brussels from Paris, Margaret teamed up with her two brothers to open an advertising agency, doing chores he had always despised, such as advertising cigarettes, alcohol, candy and other general merchandise, and sometimes designing and illustrating sheet music. In contrast, the high-profile, brash and eclectic Dalí has become a hot target in the luxury and jewelry industries.
Abstract art emerged in the 1930s and 1950s, and while Magritte gained fame overseas, the art market grew snubbed him (during which time he made some less successful artistic transitions). After the outbreak of World War II, Jojit had to go out to work because of his livelihood.
She worked for a supplier, and Magritte used to buy paints, canvases, paintbrushes and other consumables in the store so that his wife could give him some discounts. But even so, livelihoods are strained. In wartime, the canvas was scarce, and Magritte could not afford it. In order to support her family, Magritte had to entrust her friends with some chores, such as painting wine labels for various bottles.
● The Betrayal of Images (la trahison des images, 1929)
By the 1960s, pop art was on the rise, and many pop artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol had made Magritte famous internationally, although he still expressed great disdain for Pop art.
At this point, we can almost say that Magritte was not a high-profile surrealist, and his daily life was not at all as avant-garde and avant-garde as he appeared in art. Most of the time, he always bowed to reality, although this did not dampen his sharp brushstrokes in the slightest.
Unlike Dalí, who deliberately led anteaters through the streets of Paris, Margaret has always lived a small civic life, and even after his fame, he went out to the grocery store to buy groceries as usual, and walked his wife's beloved Pomeranian every day (this pet is very much in line with the general petty-bourgeois taste, but the most avant-garde artists are probably not worthy of it).
● Gorrida, 1953
Finally, let's take a look at what a magritte looks like in everyday life through another little thing worth mentioning.
Once, Margaret went to the grocery store to buy Dutch cheese. The female shopkeeper picked up a case of cheese from the window and was about to take it out when Margaret stopped her. "No, ma'am. Don't want that one. Give me the others. He said, pointing to another piece not far away. The female shopkeeper was puzzled: "But it's all the same kind of cheese!" Margaret replied, "No, ma'am." The one on the side of the window had been watched by passers-by all day. ”
Magritte always seemed to have a peculiar ability to discern disturbing, even perverse, aspects of the mediocrity of everyday things. Magritte wrote in a mysterious tone: "The visible always obscures the other visible." It is based on this understanding that Magritte often uses an anomalous means to defamiliarize everyday experience, synthesizing discordant components together to form a strong ironic effect.
bibliography:
axel müller: rené magritte. the nature of man. insel verlag, 1989.
rené jongen: rené magritte, or, the pictorial thought of the invisible. Saint-Louis university faculties, 1994.
robert hughes: the portable magritte. universe, 2001.
todd alden: the essential rené magritte by todd alden. the wonderland press, 1999.
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