Surrealism blog

For this Surrealism blog I have selected a painting by Rene Magritte – 1898-1967. He was a Belgian Surrealist artist who is known for depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context. His work is known for challenging the viewers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality.

He had a traumatic childhood as his mum committed suicide in 1912 after previous attempts. She drowned herself in a river and supposedly when she was found her dress was over her face which influenced some of his future paintings which featured people with covered faces. During the latter years of his childhood he would have been impacted by WW1.

His first exhibition in 1927 in Belgium was heavily criticised which led him to go to Paris where he became friends with Andre Breton. Breton, who was the founder of Surrealism, served in a neurological hospital during WW1 where he used Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical methods with soldiers suffering from shell shock. Freud’s work with free association, dream analysis and the unconscious was of the utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate their imagination. An illusionistic, dream-like quality is characteristic of Magritte’s Surrealism.

While Surrealism is considered a more positive form of Dada (as the atmosphere was more optimistic after WW1), it still presents the bizarre and illogical – it doesn’t make sense. Like the Dadaists, Surrealists saw it as a way of life and their aim was to release the creative powers from the unconscious minds and they drew heavily on Freud’s theories.

There are two main styles of Surrealist art. There are the conventional painting techniques to depict fantastic images and inventive techniques such as frottage and automatism.

Magritte used conventional painting techniques to portray scenes with photographic precision.

In the Treachery of Images (1927) Magritte has painted a picture of a pipe with the caption underneath in French – this is not a pipe. He is pointing out that no matter how realistically we depict an object in a painting, we can never make the object real – it is just a representation, the pipe can’t be filled with tobacco.

Magritte extended this theme to e.g this is not an apple.

He describes his images as evoking mystery, making the viewer ask the simple question – what do they mean? However, they don’t mean anything (he says) but that hasn’t stopped people analysing them over the years!

Magritte’s use of simple graphic and everyday images (influenced by his earlier career in advertising) has led to the view that his work impacted the development of pop art.