surrealism:

Le modèle rouge by René Magritte, 1937. Oil on canvas, 183 x 136 cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

A great paper by Emily Patricia Asplund discusses this work in contrast to Van Gogh’s famous A Pair of Shoes from 1886:

In Van Gogh’s canvas, the ugliness and vulnerability, the lowliness of the shoes are immediately visually accessible through the drab colors, the lack of shading, and the careless brushstrokes. These shoes are tragic, but also cozy, cunning, sweet, looking up at us. Their pliant, worn leather is an index of the time their owner, their absent subject, has spent in the fields. Heidegger is right that their emptiness is evident—the black space yawning out from them, their saggy, flaccid form, are both lamentation and invitation.

Magritte‟s shoes lack this affective facet. They are also empty, in a sense, but they do not seem to be beckoning their wearer to put them on. They say something different about their relationship with the feet that wear them; they are not abandoned, empty husks waiting to be inhabited at last by a living subject. As products of and participants in modern capitalist society, these shoes know that there is no separation between them and their wearer. Magritte‟s boots are finer than Van Gogh’s, less worn, but only slightly; they are ordinary shoes, probably mass-produced. They are not centered in the frame, as Van Gogh‟s are; instead of beckoning and inviting the missing feet for whom they were made and to whom they belong, these empty shoes point an accusing toe at the absent body by leaving its place conspicuously empty. But the body is not gone; it reasserts itself in the shoes themselves.¹

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1. Emily Patricia Asplund, “Les Pas Perdus: Images of Feet and Shoes in Surrealist Art,”Master’s Degree Thesis (Brigham Young University, 2008), 24-25. ↩

surrealism:

Man with a Newspaper by René Magritte, 1928. Oil on canvas, 45½ x 32 inches. Tate Collection, London, England.

From Tate:

Magritte’s disconcertingly deadpan style is seen clearly in these four simply painted scenes, which seem to be indistinguishable apart from the disappearance of the man of the title. They were based on an illustration in a popular health manual. There are slight changes of perspective between the four panels, which add to the disquieting effect, and may relate to the displacement of images in early 3-D viewing devices.

lynndsley:

René Magritte being surreal, photographed by Duane Michals

silly lovely beautiful man.

surrealism:

Pandora’s Box by René Magritte, 1951. Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 55 cm.

In viewing Magritte’s […] Pandora’s Box […], we find ourself at once “looking in an looking out,” thus constantly moving about in the gap that has been created by doubling.¹

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1. Wyantt Prunty, Fallen for the Symboled World: Precedents for the New Formalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 170. Google Books. ↩

surrealism:

Le Viol (The Rape) by René Magritte, 1935. Oil on canvas.

There are many interpretations of this painting. Most of them deal with the imagery and the title of the work. There could be a reason to interpret this painting as a condemnation of a society of men and how they view, or, at least, once viewed women. While this interpretation is logical and backed up by Magritte’s own words, I think there is a more useful interpretation for understanding this piece.¹

From all-art.org:

The Rape, one of Surrealism’s most powerful images — Georges Bataille could never suppress a nervous laugh whenever he was confronted by this painting — likewise works with a subversive idea. The breasts constitute the eyes, the navel the nose, the pubis the mouth. So composed, the face reflects the secret desires of the painter and the observer that some women can convey their sexuality in the way in which they look at one. Painting, the art of rendering things visible, reveals its ability here to record impressively the constant sex-appeal which leaves its mark upon almost every moment of our lives. The selection of the work’s title indicates the ongoing conflict of the voyeuristic observer; Magritte comes very close here to Hans Bellmer’s erotic perversion, albeit without the latter’s sadness. He has destroyed what is most obvious of all, namely the face, replacing it with something even more obvious. It is the shock effect of the picture together with the basic idea lying behind it, the simple together with the reflected view, the sight together with the sight of the sight, which represent the key components of his work, those two fundamental demands which he was ever formulating anew. Magritte is subversively turning customary perception inside out: the objects which he paints are all clearly recognizable, come from the banal and everyday sphere, yet as soon as they are painted in a highly academic fashion, like a primary-school lesson in general knowledge, they change, and everything is plunged into uncertainty. Magritte is presenting things here according to a poetic logic, a set of rules such as depicts them in a completely new light, furnishing them with a totally new power.

I have also read about this piece as a metaphor for post-war Europe. The work was painted at the end of the war and symbolizes the re-arrangement of the continent and violations of humanity caused by both sides.

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1. Magritte once said, “In this painting, a woman’s face is made up of the essential features of her body.” ↩

dipingidinero:

Ehi Amore, vestiamoci bene che oggi vengono a farci delle foto per un paio d’ore.
Ehi Amore, tienimi la mano dietro un tronco,
perfavore.

A visit with Magritte
Duane Michals

If I indulge myself to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte.
It was August, 1965. I was thirty-three years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumption about photography.
Artists and poet I admire always seem to be not real. They are like fictional characters who exist only in printed pages or as a painting on walls. Althought some painters are more celebrities than artists, those rare mystical ones are different. Their art appears here and there like gifts left by an unseen Santa Claus. Magritte’s art was a great gift for me.
I had no idea what he looked like and I realized that I might pass him on the street unaware.

When I pushed the buzzer by the name Magritte, I was not totally sure why I was there.
Being older, I understand a little better, I know that there are some few people in our lives who are great givers, not just mentors in the usual sense. They open our lives, give without taking and free us in the process. They do this unbeknownst. They do it by the example of their lives and in the power of their art. The power and integrity of Magritte’s vision had brought me there to thank him.

On the afternoon that I said my last farewells to Rene and Georgette Magritte, I felt a sense of melancholy knowing that something wonderful had come to an end.
A year and a half later, Magritte died.

-Duane Michals

fly-honey-warehouse:

Rene Magritte | The Red Model, 1935.

weandthecolor:

Surreal Oil Paintings

A collection of oil paintings by Belgian artist René François Ghislain Magritte (November 21, 1898 – August 15, 1967), a master of surrealism. He became famous with a variety of thought-provoking paintings. His work ‘The Son of Man’ is certainly one of the most famous artworks of surrealism.

via: WE AND THE COLOR
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mirkokosmos:

h.r. giger - stadt / city

(Source: dangerousinthedark)