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Painters Magritte & Legros

RenT Magritte (1898-1967) was born in Lessines, Belgium and his art education took place at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts from 1916 to 1918. Magritte took a job as a designer in a wallpaper factory and drew advertisements. In 1922, however, Magritte first saw a painting by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico entitled The Song of Love (1914). The painting's mixture of odd objects that were placed together without any apparent logic "revealed the unforeseen potential in mystery and evocation" that was to become the heart of Magritte's art (Gale 262).

In his commercial work Magritte had developed "a cool illustrational realism using simplified forms" that was to remain the hallmark of his style for the rest of his life (Gale 262). Magritte then joined with other artists in the Belgian Surrealist movement in 1926. A year later he moved to Paris where he associated with the French Surrealists such as AndrT Breton and Paul +luard. But Magritte's "anonymous pictorial style" did not appeal to the Parisians and his only major exhibition took place in Brussels. Somewhat discouraged, Magritte returned to Belgium in 1930 where he resided for the rest of his life. Magritte continued to paint and was an influential force in Surrealism throughout the 1930s. In the period 1934-36 the Belgian Surrealist movement raised its profile by identifying more publicly with international Surrealism and mounted an exhibition at the MusTe Royal in Brussels featuring works by the French Surrealists and, at the center, one of Magritte's most famous paintings, The Rape (1934), was hidden behind a curtain because it was considered so shocking (Gale 339).

The Rape features a woman's head, shown from the neck up and set against a simple background of empty sky and bare ground. But, in place of the face, Magritte has painted a woman's torso which is situated so that the breasts are in the place of the eyes, the navel at the nose's position, and th...

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Painters Magritte & Legros. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 14:26, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689637.html