This representative of the Belgian surrealism, which carried out a peaceful life distant from any scandal, was made famous for the very broad diffusion which some of its plastic inventions knew, in particular in the form of posters. Creator of strange compositions, it knew, in a resolutely traditional style, to give rise to the most modern works and most enigmatic which are.

Who is Magritte truth? Is this the character dressed in a middle-class way, raising a bowler hat and generally hiding its face? or is this the ironic agitator whose each table seems a new challenge launched to the spectator - floating granite rocks in the clouds, chests of women parcelled out and encased, put in abyme of landscapes -, the painter able to express the blackest humor in the merriest colors? The mystery of the man is less unsoundable than that of work.

The life of Rene Magritte proceeded in an apparently simple and conventional way. Born on on November 21st, 1898 in a family from the Belgian middle class, it is registered in 1916 with the Academy of the fine arts of Brussels and starts to expose its first creations, of a Cubist or futuristic style, in the years 1920. In 1922, he discovers the metaphysical painting of the Giorgio de Chirico Italian. This last will influence it largely until in the years 1930: Magritte will transpose in its fabrics the smooth and empty urban big spaces and the famous mannequins, transformed into passers by solidified, dressed in funereal clothing, capped black felts, and flying away in the clouds. It turns to surrealism as from 1925 and signs the following year the lost Jockey, whom it regards as its first successful surrealist table. At the same time, Magritte, which worked in a wallpaper factory, draws advertizing projects to earn its living.

From 1927 to 1931, Magritte remains in Paris and attends the group of surrealist, dominated by the personality of André Breton. It takes part in the collective exposures of the movement and sees its notoriety developing: in 1928, its first personal exposure is held in Brussels, while the museum of Grenoble becomes purchaser of the one of his tables, the first to enter a public collection. Member as from 1932 of the Belgian Communist party, Magritte continues also literary activities, participant in many reviews, while its art starts to be known in the United States. During the Second world war , it decides to reform its painting to create a more luminous and sensual manner, near to that of the impressionists of last century, but which hardly collects success from the amateurs and of the critics.

In 1945, after this bracket in its art, Magritte takes its distances with the activities of the Communist party and starts to support, in Belgium, of the positions opposed to those of Parisian surrealism, while being based in particular on the key concept of pleasure. Become famous in its country, it receives, in 1953, the ordering of a monumental decoration for the casino of Knokke-le-Zoute, which gives the opportunity to him to make the synthesis of its recent creations. It is the time of the most popular works; Magritte enjoys a reputation which becomes really international, attested by great exposures to Brussels and the Museum off Modern Art of New York. With his death, in 1967, one realizes that its quiet existence, even middle-class, and the peaceful appearance of its work sometimes occulted very critical dimension, and even revolutionist, of this pictorial adventure.

“It is necessary that painting serf for another thing that with painting”, liked to repeat Magritte. Its pictorial project is thus very other than that to invent new manners of painting or of giving an account of significant reality. It mainly consists to question painting itself, and to use it like a means of interrogation about the statute even of the representation. This kind of problems, whose philosophical range remains very current, develop in the course of time and of work with a concerted logic.

After the first fabrics, of a Cubist or futuristic style, the lost Jockey is a mysterious creation. A black rider overlaps in a space very built, framed by curtains, like a scene of theater, and populated feet of table or pawns gigantic.

The Importance of the wonders proposes, since 1927, a new stage in the reflection on painting. There seems not to be, at first sight, no relationship between this title and the subject represented: a female character with the partly cut out body which encases the ones in the others like Russian headstocks. Wouldn't the effect of unreality obtained by painted naked body as an object be ironic with regard to the worship of the woman and the love which André Breton professes, and in which Magritte seems to recognize only one of the last misadventures of the topic of the woman as an object?

The Lovers (1928) constitute another facet of the art of Magritte, the dressing-up. The enigmatic effect is obtained by the veil which recovers the characters. To this same vein belongs Mrs Récamier, table of the end of the lifetime of the artist (1967, after a first version in 1951), who is a pastiche of the famous portrait painted by David: instead of is the alluring body of the queen of a living room attended by the great writers of time appeared, thoroughly painted, a coffin of wood oddly folded into two, “sat” on its bed of rest - eternal? -, like the model of David. The same process is also applied to the characters of the Balcony (1950) of Manet. These macabre jokes are, like any joke, more tragic than it does not appear: they carry in them a warning and constitute a contemporary version of “vanities” baroques.

One could not limit creations of Magritte, and surrealism as a whole, with an art of dispute and parody. Beyond the critical dimension of this work engages also a reflection on the relationship between the words and the images. The artist is well, with the eyes of Magritte, the man of the Attempt of impossible, title of a table of 1928 in which one sees an artist, in whom one easily recognizes Magritte itself, representing a nude woman. This painter tests precisely, and it is perhaps why its attempt is talked nonsense, not to paint on a fabric but in space: it is not a table which it creates, but reality even. He paints, literally, his model.

If such is well the direction of art for Magritte - not to copy reality but to create it -, one understands then easily that he denounces this Treason of the images, titrates of another table of the same time, which represents a pipe decorated with a legend: “This is not a pipe”. Such is the truism, the obvious but desperate observation which the artist makes: the image of a pipe is not a pipe, an image is never reality, it is only one show condemned to uselessness.

This impossibility of reaching with the truth leads the painter to play of the capacity of fraud of the figuration. A face is also a female body (the Rape, 1934), the full day of the sky coexists with the night lighting of a garden (Empire of the lights, 1954), an eagle can become gigantic and to have like body only the transparency of a populated azure of clouds (the Big family , 1963).

All that is about representation fantastic, which is not falser than the figuration known as realistic but leads us to the daydream and, perhaps, with knowledge of this reality which would be in the middle of our life (though we cannot see it), the surreal one. When Magritte illustrates drawings of the literary texts, it chooses the Needs for the life (1946) of Paul Éluard, after the Songs of Maldoror (1945) of Lautréamont, writer considered as a precursor by the surrealist ones.

Mysteriously, it is with such works, whose conceptual dimension is clearly affirmed, that Magritte arrived to the celebrity. It is that it is not, in fact, no need for the spectator of intellectual considerations to feel that with Magritte one enters the era of really modern painting, that which, not satisfies to explore the outside world, questions itself. And if its works are largely represented in the European museums - in particular Belgian, of course - and American, they were the subject of very many purchases of collectors.