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Rene Magritte

© Nick Burton

Rene Magritte was born on November 21, 1898, in Hainaut, Belgium. His father was a salesman and his mother was a very unhappy woman who made many attempts at suicide. In February of 1912, she ran away and her body was found seventeen days later, and it was assumed she had drowned herself. When they found her body, her face was covered by her white nightdress, an image which would crop up many times in Magritte's paintings.

Magritte began making paintings at the early age of 12, and his father put one of his paintings on display in the hallway of the family home. At school, Rene met his future wife, Georgette Beger, then his 12-year-old school mate. He left home for Brussels in 1915, and in 1916 enrolled at the Academie des Beaux Arts, where he took a landscape drawing course from Emile Vandamme - Sylva as well as classes in painting and Oriental art. Magritte also met writer Pierre Bourgeois at the Academie , who started an arts center called Le Centre d'Art that hosted a lecture on the Dutch De Stijl movement by its leader, Theo Van, Doesburg. Magritte himself exhibited twice at the Centre, the second time in a shared exhibition with abstract artist Pierre Flouquet. Magritte's work at the time was very much influenced by Cubism and Italian Futurists such as Gino Serverini.

Magritte did his military service from December 1920 to September 1921 as a member of the Eighth Line Regiment , stationed in both Belgium and Germany. Near the end of 1922, he collaborated on a book with an abstract painter named Victor Sevrackx called L'art pur: defense se L'esthetique, which maintained that the sole purpose of a work of art is to elicit an aesthetic reaction .

In 1925, Magritte's painting turned away from Cubism and Futurism when he saw the works of Giorgio de Chirico. Magritte's "The Two Sisters" (1925) is obviously inspired by de Chirico, as is "The Shooting Gallery." In 1927 he began to paint pictures on the theme of the double, as in "Foolhardy" (1927) and "The Secret Double." Another theme was that of the canvas, and painted canvases appeared in "Nocturne" (1925), "The Signs of the Evening" (1926) and "The Message to the Earth" (1926).

Magritte quit his job at a wall paper factory to go into graphic design in 1924, and he did much commercial work from 1924-1929. He designed covers for sheet music, magazines and advertisements for Alfa Romeo. He continued his painting however, and in April of 1927, Margitte had his first one-man exhibit. Magritte was by now very much part of the Surrealist movement, largely from his association with E.L.T. Mesens , who ran the review "Esophage" and Paul Nouge, who was considered the Andre Breton of Belgium.