2.9 - Rene Magritte Worksheet - Grade 12

AVI3M/AVI4M – SURREALISM
RENE MAGRITTE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr3oDz7CDMo
René Magritte, in full René-François-Ghislain Magritte, (born November 21, 1898,

Lessines, Belgium—died August 15, 1967, Brussels), Belgian artist, one of the most
prominent Surrealist painters, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril,
comedy, and mystery. His works were characterized by particular symbols—the female
torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and
others.
Magritte’s father was a tailor, and his mother was a milliner who drowned herself in the
River Sambre when Magritte was about 14 years old. Thereafter, he and his two brothers
were raised by his grandmother. As a teenager, he met Georgette Berger, who would
become his wife nearly 10 years later. After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine
Arts (1916–18), Magritte became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches
for advertisements. In 1922 he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The
Song of Love (1914), an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements (a classical
bust and a rubber glove among them) in a dreamlike architectural space. The work had a
great influence on Magritte’s artistic approach. For the next few years he developed a
singular style that comprised carefully rendered everyday objects often placed
in enigmatic juxtapositions.
In 1926 Magritte signed a contract with a Brussels art gallery, which allowed him to
become a full-time painter. The following year the gallery held his first solo show, which
included The Lost Jockey (1926), a collage that he regarded as his first Surrealist work.
The exhibition, however, was not well received by the art critics of the day. In 1927 he
and his wife moved to a suburb of Paris. There he met and befriended several of the Paris
Surrealists, including poets André Breton and Paul Éluard, and he became familiar with
the collages of Max Ernst. Magritte began to integrate text into some of his works, and
during this time he painted one of his most famous pieces, The Treachery of
Images (1929), in which a detailed representation of a pipe is combined with the cursive
statement: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). The painting questioned the
authority of both images and words.
After three years, Magritte and his wife returned to Brussels, where he was active once
again in the Belgian Surrealist movement and where he (except for the occasional
journey) remained for the rest of his life. He had his first solo show in the United States
at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1936 and in England at the London Gallery in
1938, gaining international popularity. He also received a fair amount of large
commissions beginning in the late 1930s.
During the 1940s Magritte experimented with a variety of styles, sometimes

incorporating elements of Impressionism, for example, in what has come to be called his
“Renoir Period.” In such works as The Forbidden Universe (1943), Magritte painted a
mermaidlike figure reclining on a sofa using broad brushstrokes and a soft palette
reminiscent of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The paintings he
produced in this period, however, were not successful by most accounts, and he
eventually abandoned his experiments. For the rest of his life he continued to produce his
enigmatic and illogical images in a readily identifiable style. In his last year he
supervised the construction of eight bronze sculptures derived from images in his
paintings.
As a child, Magritte was enthusiastic about the sea and wide skies, which figure strongly
in his paintings. In Threatening Weather (1929) the clouds have the shapes of a torso, a
tuba, and a chair. In The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959) a huge stone topped by a small
castle floats above the sea. Other representative fancies were a fish with human legs, a
man with a bird cage for a torso, and a gentleman leaning over a wall beside his pet lion.
Dislocations of space, time, and scale were common elements. In Time
Transfixed (1938), for example, a steaming locomotive is suspended from the centre of a
mantelpiece in a middle-class sitting room, looking as if it had just emerged from a
tunnel. In Golconda (1953) bourgeois, bowler-hatted men fall like rain toward a street
lined with houses.
Two museums in Brussels celebrate Magritte: the René Magritte Museum, largely a
biographical museum, is located in the house occupied by the artist and his wife between
1930 and 1954; and the Magritte Museum, featuring some 250 of the artist’s works,
opened in 2009 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Magritte
Answer the questions about Rene Magritte based on the above information
1. Who raised Rene Magritte? Explain in 2 or more sentences?
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
2. What academy did Rene Magritte attend and how long did he study there?
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
3. What year did Magritte have his first solo art show and where was it held?
_____________________________________________________________
6. What year did Magritte become a full-time painter?
_____________________________________________________________
7. Magritte’s work was characterized by what symbols?
_____________________________________________________________
8. Magritte became a designer for a what factory?
____________________________________________________________
Make a detailed pencil sketch of Rene Magritte’s “the son of
man” in your sketchbook or draw digitally.
Use Line, Proportion, shading and detail throughout your drawing.
The son of man

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AVI3M/AVI4M – SURREALISM

René Magritte, in full René-François-Ghislain Magritte, (born November 21, 1898,

During the 1940s Magritte experimented with a variety of styles, sometimes

1. Who raised Rene Magritte? Explain in 2 or more sentences?

6. What year did Magritte become a full-time painter?

7. Magritte’s work was characterized by what symbols?

8. Magritte became a designer for a what factory?

Use Line, Proportion, shading and detail throughout your drawing.

The son of man

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