This is Not an Article About Rene Magritte’s Shift to Surrealism

A hundred years ago, René Magritte abandoned the Cubism of his early career and leapt into Surrealism with subversive representations of reality that would influence everything from Pop Art to Minimalism and Conceptual Art, and make him a major force in Modern Art in the process.

Like so many of his artistic contemporaries born in the late 19^th century, René Magritte followed a typical path; studying at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and serving in the Belgian infantry, but unlike others, Magritte had yet to settle on an artistic style.

Magritte’s earliest paintings from around 1915 were Impressionistic, before his style evolved to embrace Futurism and the figurative Cubism of Metzinger, with paintings like Landscape (1920), The Station and L’Écuyère (1922), and Self-portrait, Sixth Nocturne, Georgette at the Piano, and Donna (1923) all showing off his early influences.

That changed in 1926. It was a year of flux, as a hurricane devastated southern Florida and parts of the Caribbean, Marshal Józef Piłsudski overthrew the Polish government in a three-day military coup, Hirohito ascended the throne as Emperor of Japan, and Magritte painted The Lost Jockey (Le Jockey Perdu). It was what he considered his first surreal painting, but audiences weren’t ready for his representations of reality and his first solo exhibition in Brussels in 1927 was poorly received.

Despite the initial setback, Magritte’s adoption of Surrealism laid the foundation for his style, in which ordinary scenes are transformed into thought-provoking visual puzzles that question what’s real and how something is represented.

Magritte wasn’t alone in his questioning approach to art. The word surrealism was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire, and by October 1924, two rival Surrealist groups, including Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and Man Ray, published the Surrealist Manifesto.

Dejected by the negative reaction to his exhibition, Magritte moved to Paris, where he remained for three years until a disagreement with the atheist Breton over his wife wearing a crucifix led to a return to Belgium. It was in Paris where he became a leading member of the movement and developed the illusionistic, dream-like art that would come to define his version of Surrealism.

Familiar Depictions, Unexpected Scenarios

In the French capital in the mid-1920s, the likes of André Masson, Joan Miró, and Breton largely pursued semi-abstract “automatic” drawing, or art without conscious thought. Magritte’s art, by contrast, was considered and conveyed a message. A lack of finance pushed him into renting a flat in the suburbs with his wife and model, Georgette Berger, away from the surrealist epicentre.

Yet, despite this detachment from the Surrealist group, Magritte’s art revolutionized the movement. During his three years in Paris, he began to develop his depictions of familiar objects in unexpected scenarios; men in suits falling from the sky, a self-portrait with an apple obscuring the face.

These personal and poetic images often featured recurring motifs like apples, curtains, toys, and clouds, which he incorporated into his accessible art, which shared widely understood ideals of what a painting should look like, while also leaning into the more abstract side of contemporary art.

This can be seen in the word pictures he developed while in France, with The Literal Meaning (Le sens propre)” (1929) and perhaps most famously, The Treachery of Images (1929) (also known as Ceci n’est pas une pipe, or This is not a pipe). Today, it’s regarded as a landmark in the history of European modern art, but it wasn’t so well received by a New York Times critic when it was exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1936.

“When, for instance, the artist paints a pipe and informs us underneath that “This Is Not a Pipe,” we can rise up with authority and cry: “No, sir, you don’t on any account fool us again!” For if Gertrude Stein has taught us to perceive that “a rose is a rose is a rose,” it will take more than a Magritte to overwhelm us a second time with his sly, horrendous shocks.”

Magritte remained true to his assertion though, even in the face of criticism: “The famous pipe, haven’t I been reproached enough for that! Anyway, can you fill my pipe? No, you can’t, it’s just a representation. So, if I had written on my picture, “this is a pipe” I would have been lying!”

Critical acclaim for Magritte’s art would have to wait, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that he began to enjoy any sort of recognition. In fact, The Treachery of Images only found a buyer in 1957, nearly 30 years after it was painted, when it was sold to Surrealist patron William Copley, who later sold it at auction to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1978 for $115,000.

Many of Magritte’s most famous works were painted during his Paris stay. And while they struggled for attention at the time, their influence would be apparent decades later, even if it’s not immediately obvious. Take his realistic painting of an eye with a cloudy sky in place of the iris, The False Mirror (1929), which challenges us to question what we see and what we think we know, and would later be adopted by CBS television in their logo.

Depiction of an Idea

That philosophical approach to question what’s presented endured throughout Magritte’s career, as even a century after he first embraced Surrealism, Magritte’s art still provokes thought about how we all see, experience, and make sense of the world around us.

The first flushes of recognition for Magritte in the 1950s mirrored the rise of Pop Art and later Conceptual Art. And in the following decades, generation after generation of young artists, musicians, filmmakers, and authors seemingly discovered Magritte and felt compelled to express their admiration in their own art.

In 1969, The Jeff Beck Group’s Beck-Ola album cover paid homage to Magritte’s The Listening Room (1952) and eight years later Styx’s album The Grand Illusion featured an adaptation of The Blank Signature (Le Blanc Seing). The Beatles’ famous Apple Corps logo drew inspiration from Magritte’s 1966 Le Jeu de Mourre painting, while the artist’s work has even inspired filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Bernardo Bertolucci, Nicolas Roeg, and Terry Gilliam.

And Magritte’s fondness for pushing the boundaries of reality and representation found a new audience at the dawn of the millennium, when his The Son of Man was cast as a central feature in the plot of the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair, while his home country honored him when a street in Brussels was named Ceci n’est pas une rue (This is not a road).

Even if that honor might pose a surrealist headache for road users, Magritte’s popularity has gradually multiplied in the decades following his first surrealist painting, as his art has transcended trends to something greater than just being aesthetically pleasing.

This is evident in La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition), which like so much of his work, raises questions about perception and the nature of human consciousness, as it asks if we’re looking at a painting of the scene out the window, or a representation of reality? “Everything we see conceals something else,” explained Magritte.

Creating works that transformed reality, Magritte’s decision to move away from Cubism and dive into the subversive world of Surrealism not only helped to redefine the new movement, but also created a modern artist of great influence, whose paintings inspired artists enchanted by his unique depictions of reality drawn from his imagination. In his own words, “The art of painting is really only limited by a depiction of an idea which shows a certain resemblance to the way it is seen by the world”.