Philip Hensher

The life of René Magritte was even more surprising than his art

While appearing the model of respectability, he seems to have had a sideline forging paintings and even banknotes, according to Alex Danchev

René Magritte. Credit: Alamy

We live at a time in which we could (until recently) travel without difficulty and take for granted access to cultural treasures. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case, and minds were shaped by what possibilities were available. The Belgian painter René Magritte is a good example of huge talent pushed through a very narrow opening. His art has now become an exemplar of the striking image that commerce can feature. Advertising regularly uses his paradoxical visual combinations of faces replaced by apples, of skies in the shape of doves, of roses filling rooms and, supremely, the conundrum of the pipe demurely labelled ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’.

In the case of some painters this might seem a diminishment, an ugly annexation of a larger whole. But with Magritte I’m not sure. His origins lie firmly in what he has become — commercial art, posters and even wallpaper designs — and he was most inspired by art when it came to him in reproduction. Much of his work was influenced by illustrations in the Larousse Universal Encyclopaedia. The painting which made the greatest impact on him was Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘Le chant d’amour’, but he only saw it in a black-and-white version in the review Les Feuilles Libres in 1923. Did he ever see the painting itself, which passed from De Chirico’s studio into the Rockefeller collection? It’s not clear that he did; but it doesn’t seem to have been necessary. A bad black-and-white reproduction and the idea of it was enough for him.

This is, apparently, the first biography of Magritte. It’s curious that it’s taken so long, because his life exerts an uncanny fascination. He went to great trouble to maintain a surface existence of the utmost bourgeois respectability. He lived in a middle-class flat in Brussels, painting in the corner of the dining room rather than in a studio.

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