Rene Magritte

By the 1930s, Magritte's painting had found its vocabulary of obsessive imagery, for example the use of the "grelot," a small bell used on the harness of horses. Its first appearance came in "The Silvered Chasm" (1926) and appeared in countless other canvases. He also made many landscapes of blue skies populated by white clouds and absurdly exaggerated objects, as in "The Matches of Summer" (1938) and "The Universe Unmasked" (1932). He also began representing objects by breaking up images into four or five separate canvases of a small size as in "The Depth of the Earth" (1930) and "The Eternally Obvious" (1930).

Magritte took part in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition held in London, and soon after he began visiting London more and Mesens organized shows that featured Magritte as well as fellow Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux .

In the 1940s Magritte began painting in a radically different style that left his standard iconography behind. His works now looked as if they were inspired by Impressionist such as Renoir rather than surrealism. Canvases like "The First Day" (1943) and "Treatise on Sensation" (1944) marked this new direction that nevertheless retained a wonderful, playful sense of humor.

In the 1950s, Magritte found something of a new career in mural painting. His first omission was a small theater in Brussels on which he painted clouds on a circular ceiling. In 1953 he painted the Casino Communal of Knokke -le-Zoute, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi in 1956 and the Palais des Congres in Brussles in 1961.

Magritte continued to paint and sculpt until his death in 1967, often returning to the obsessive imagery of his surrealist work.

The most complete site for Magritte's work is the exhaustive "official" Magritte site at http://www.magritte.com, that features a complete gallery of images and a biography with photographs - it is an essentail art site. Another first-rate Magritte site is The Gallery of the Surreal, located at http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/hthl/etuds/br....

- Nick Burton

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