You’ve probably seen a painting of a pipe made for smoking tobacco, with the label, in the painting itself, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“this is not a pipe.”) The artist was Rene Magritte, who was born November 21, 1892 in Belgium. Magritte never said much about his childhood, but we do know he began taking drawing lessons when he was 12 years old. That was the same year his mother died by suicide — drowning in the local river. When her body was found, her face was covered by her clothing, which is an image that’s part of several of Magritte’s paintings.
Speaking of his paintings, he began painting, rather than drawing, around 1915. He briefly studied art at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but reportedly didn’t find it very interesting. He spent 1921 in the Belgian infantry, but it wasn’t wartime, and he never served in battle. The experience didn’t seem to affect him to any great degree, and when he was discharged he got a job in a wallpaper factory creating new wallpaper designs. If you have an old house in Belgium that hasn’t been updated for about a century, who knows — you might have Magritte-designed wallpaper in your study. But unfortunately there’s no record of which designs were his.
After the wallpaper job, he designed posters and ads until 1926, when he got a contract with an art gallery in Brussels and was able to devote himself to painting. He did, and started creating surreal works. His first surrealist painting was The Lost Jockey, which was included in his first solo exhibition in 1927. It didn’t cause an immediate sensation. In fact, his whole exhibition got bad reviews from the critics.
The reviews bothered Magritte so much that he moved to Paris, where he stayed for three years and became a leader of the Surrealist movement. And he got another gallery contract, from the Goemans Gallery in Paris. They also presented work by two of Magritte’s colleagues, Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy.
At the end of 1929 the worldwide depression began, although it was apparently less severe in Europe than in the US. Its immediate effect on Magritte was that his gallery contracts ended, and without any income he went back to Brussels and also back to working in advertising. He even formed his own ad agency with his brother Paul. He kept painting, though, and had his first solo exhibition in the US in 1936. and one in London in 1938.
His paintings from that period were beginning to draw a lot of attention, and his advertising work (which he also kept at) did too — he designed posters for movies from 1934 to 1937, and many of them are preserved in archives and museums. His reputation grew pretty steadily until in the 1960s his work became widely celebrated and a significant influence on contemporary art. He passed away from cancer in 1967, but his work has continued to be important. You can find it in the logo of the Beatles’ company Apple Corps, the Paul Simon song Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War, the Tom Stoppard play After Magritte, the 1994 novel The Forbidden Game by L.J. Smith, and the 1999 movie The Thomas Crown Affair. Among many others. And if you visit Belgium, look for a road called Ceci n’est pas une rue (“This is not a street.”)
