A richly illustrated book that dives into Ren� Magritte's photo and film archive, revealing a lesser-known side of the surrealist master. In this richly illustrated book, Xavier Canonne, director of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi, dives into Ren� Magritte's photo and film archive, revealing a lesser-known side of the surrealist master. Discovered in the 1970s, more than ten years after the artist's death, this collection gives us access to a family album, an informal Magritte, from his childhood to the last years of his life. We see Magritte with his parents and brothers, as a newly married man with his wife Georgette, and with his contemporaries in the Brussels Surrealist group. Spontaneous snapshots are complemented by posed scenes, including improvised tableaux with his fellow artists, parodies of famous movies consciously arranged with Georgette, portraits of Magritte at his easel at home, and staged photographs as models for his paintings. Images where the artist and his friends hide their faces or turn away from the camera particularly resonate with his paintings and his investigation of the 'hidden visible'. While other Surrealists such as Man Ray and Raoul Ubac made photography an essential part of their work, Magritte remained a true painter. Yet this book demonstrates that his photographs and home movies are so pervaded with his spirit that they are inseparable from his oeuvre of paintings.

"This lavishly illustrated book assembles a wide range of Magritte's work, providing a thorough overview that focuses on all aspects of his oeuvre: paintings, drawings, collages, graphic design, prints and sculptures."--Inside jacket.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition ... held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2013-Jan. 12, 2014, the Menil Collection, Houston, Feb. 14-June 1, 2014, and at the Art Institute of Chicago, June 29-Oct. 12, 2014.

The first major biography of the pathbreaking, perpetually influential surrealist artist and iconoclast whose inspiration can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé—by the celebrated biographer of Cézanne and Braque In this thought-provoking life of René Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte’s surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape, through such legendary works as The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) and his celebrated iterations of Man in a Bowler Hat. Danchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist from his middle-class Belgian beginnings to the years during which he led a small, brilliant band of surrealists (and famously clashed with André Breton) to his first major retrospective, which traveled to the United States in 1965 and gave rise to his international reputation. Using 50 color images and more than 160 black-and-white illustrations, Danchev delves deeply into Magritte’s artistic development and the profound questions he raised in his work about the very nature of authenticity. This is a vital biography for our time that plumbs the mystery of an iconoclast whose influence can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé.

Ren� Magritte (1898-1967) was one of the most intriguing painters associated with Surrealism, but he did not fully find his voice until after breaking ties with the movement. This book, the first to look exclusively at Magritte's late career, examines his most important bodies of work from the 1940s through the 1960s, and shows how they marked a fundamental shift in painting from Modernism to our own time. Featuring more than sixty artworks, Ren� Magritte: The Fifth Season explores how Magritte balanced irony and conviction, philosophy and fantasy, to illuminate the gaps between what we see and what we know. Subjects explored in this volume include the artist's Renoir period; the p�riode vache, with its Fauvist- and Expressionist-style paintings that are little known to American audiences; the 'hypertrophy of objects' paintings, a series that plays with the scale of familiar objects; and the enigmatic Dominion of Light suite, paintings that suggest the simultaneous experience of day and night. Together, the works reveal Magritte as an artist acutely attuned to the paradoxes at work within reality, and an enduring champion of the role of mystery in life and art.

From men in bowler hats, floating in the sky, to a painting of a pipe above the caption "this is not a pipe", René Magritte (1898-1967) created an echo chamber of object and image, name and thing, reality and representation. Like other Surrealist works, Magritte's paintings combine a precise, mimetic technique with abnormal, alienating configurations which defy the laws of scale, logic, and science: a comb the size of a wardrobe, rocks that float in the sky, clouds that drift through an open door. The result is a direct yet disorientating realm, often witty, often unsettling, and always prompting us to look beyond the visible, to "what is hidden by what we see." This introductory book explores Magritte's vast repertoire of visual humor, paradox, and surprise which to this day makes us look and look again, not only at the painting, but at our sense of self and the world.

Through more than 450 masterpieces, the author unfolds the story of 800 years of Western painting from Giotto, the Renaissance and Impressionism, to Pop Art and the present day.

Tracing the movement from its origins in the 1920s to its decline in the 1950s and 1960s, Durozoi tells the history of Surrealism through its activities, publications, and reviews, demonstrating its close ties to some of the most explosive political, as well as creative, debates of the twentieth century. Unlike other histories, which focus mainly on the pre-World War II years of the movement in Paris, Durozoi covers both a wider chronological and geographic range, treating in detail the postwar years and Surrealism's colonization of Latin America, the United States, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Italy, and North Africa. Drawing on documentary and visual evidence--including 1,000 photos, many of them in color--he illuminates all the intellectual and artistic aspects of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography, and film. All the Surrealist stars and their most important works are here--Aragon, Borges, Breton, Buñuel, Cocteau, Crevel, Dalí, Desnos, Ernst, Man Ray, Soupault, and many more--for all of whom Durozoi has provided brief biographical notes in addition to featuring them in the main text.

Available for the first time in an English translation, this selection of Ren� Magritte's writings gives non-Francophone readers the chance to encounter the many incarnations of the renowned Belgian painter--the artist, the man, the aspiring noirist, the fire-breathing theorist--in his own words. Through whimsical personal letters, biting apologia, appreciations of fellow artists, pugnacious interviews, farcical film scripts, prose poems, manifestos, and much more, a new Magritte emerges: part Surrealist, part literalist, part celebrity, part rascal.While this book is sure to appeal to admirers of Magritte's art and those who are curious about his personal life, there is also much to delight readers interested in the history and theory of art, philosophy and politics, as well as lovers of creativity and the inner workings of a probing, inquisitive mind unrestricted by genre, medium, or fashion.