René Magritte

René Magritte (1898–1967) was a Belgian painter born in Lessines, who is among the central figures of Surrealism. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and spent a formative period in Paris from 1927 to 1930 in close contact with the French Surrealist group before returning permanently to Brussels — working, briefly, in commercial art and wallpaper design — while producing a body of painting that ranks among the most identifiable in Western art history.

His paintings work through the unexpected conjunction of recognizable objects placed in impossible or contradictory relationships, and through the consistent disruption of the expected relationship between image and word. The Treachery of Images (1929), in which a painted pipe bears the inscription "This is not a pipe," is the most famous example of this latter strategy; Son of Man (1964), The Empire of Light, and Personal Values are among the most recognizable works of the twentieth century. Magritte refused any single interpretive framework for his paintings and resisted the psychoanalytic readings Breton encouraged within the movement. His late work — the so-called « vache » period of 1948 — adopted a deliberately coarse, parodic style that anticipated aspects of later figuration. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Menil Collection, the Musée Magritte in Brussels, and major institutions internationally.