I think he was a prodigiously talented attention-grabber with a sophisticated trick inside, hacking into everyday life and planting little weirdness puzzle. Born in the Belgian provinces in 1898, Magritte was tight-lipped about his early years. We know that his father was a tailor and cloth merchant, and that his mother committed suicide when he was 13. He trained as a painter at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. In his early 20s he married Georgette Berger, who would be his lifetime partner and model.
He supported himself as a commercial illustrator and graphic designer. By 1926, Magritte was moving in Surrealist circles in Brussels and making logic-defying collages and paintings that brought together landscape elements, domestic items and figures in stagelike settings. Ostensibly, Magritte’s art, like most early modernism, had utopian dimensions: the shattering of social norms and perceptual givens in the interest of changing the world. These paintings convey what was innovative about Magritte’s art: its acknowledgment of the inherent bizarreness of the material world, and its insistence, far in advance of Conceptualism, that art was a world of its own, a world of ideas.
The art market being tanked due to the Great depression, he opened a commercial design studio in a cramped suburban apartment. There he also took up Surrealism painting and rarely strayed far from home. He didn’t like the association neither. He tried to suffuse his painting with a sense of mystery unlike so called Pop artists who just painted reality as it was. Magritte eventually achieved the status that critics to say anything slighting about him. I believe his paintings still continues to leave so many of its greater obligations to art history as well as aesthetics.
