Biography
René Magritte is today remembered as Belgium's greatest 20th-century artist and one of the godfathers of Surrealism. He stands on the summit of surrealism with Salvador Dalí, looking down on the likes of Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
— René Magritte
Unlike other Surrealists who delved into the subconscious through automatic drawing or dream imagery, Magritte approached surrealism intellectually. His paintings are philosophical puzzles, visual paradoxes that challenge our perception of reality and the relationship between objects, words, and images.
His most famous work, The Treachery of Images (1929), featuring a pipe with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), perfectly encapsulates his approach. It's not a pipe—it's a painting of a pipe. This simple observation reveals the complex relationship between representation and reality that fascinated Magritte throughout his career.
Key Dates & Timeline
1898
Born in Lessines, Belgium, on 21 November.
1910
Begins taking art classes in Châtelet, where he and his family have just moved.
1912
Magritte's mother tragically kills herself in the Sambre river—an event that would haunt his imagery throughout his life.
1913
Meets Georgette Berger for the first time.
1916
Quits high school and enrols at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he attends classes in drawing, decorative painting, and ornamental composition. Undertakes landscapes showing the Sambre river in which his mother had died—these pictures are among his first works.
1916-1920
Magritte's best friend is the young poet Pierre Bourgeois, of whom he makes several portraits. They become interested in modernity and the Italian Futurists and invite Theo van Doesburg to give a lecture on the Dutch movement De Stijl.
1920
Exhibits his first Futurist-inspired paintings along with works by the painter Pierre Flouquet. Pure geometric abstraction seems too radical to Magritte, who begins to search for a different pictorial language, finding it in Cubism and Futurism. Again meets Georgette Berger.
1922
Marries Georgette Berger. Georgette becomes his model and chief inspiration. He also becomes friendly with Victor Servranckx, who had developed a very personal geometric-abstract style. This style becomes the beginning of a new direction for Magritte.
1922-1923
Creates his first really outstanding works, characterized by Cubo-Futurist reminiscences and the presence of very sensual representation in which women and colors are the dominant elements. He realizes that resorting to abstraction has not enabled him to 'make reality manifest.' What he wants to establish is a disturbing relationship between the world and objects.
1925
Decides "only to paint objects with all their visible details." By placing them in situations unfamiliar to the spectator, he "challenges the real world." Magritte abandons the plastic qualities of pictorial art in favor of a more remote, colder style that portrays images from which all aestheticism had to be banished. Nocturne is one of the first works to reveal this change of emphasis, containing elements from the iconography that Magritte will use throughout his life: the painting within a painting, the bird in flight, fire, the stage curtain, and the wooden bilboquet.
1926
Completes The Last Jockey, which, according to Magritte years later, was a critical milestone in his entry into Surrealism. The piece has a mysterious feeling, an anxiety without reason. This feeling of anxiety, which manifests itself in dark tonalities, lugubrious shapes, and mysterious juxtaposition of objects, first appears in his work in the mid-1920s.
1927
Magritte and Georgette move to Paris to be closer to where it all happens. He starts to take part in the activities of the Surrealists and becomes friends with André Breton, the self-appointed leader of the Surrealist movement.
1925-1930
Begins combining words and images in his paintings. These word-pictures are not mere illustrations of an object or a concept. On the contrary, his work is intended to gently destabilize our mental habits of representation. Magritte elaborates on a didactic classification of this type of painting, the simplest of which consists of denying an image through words, or vice versa.
1929
Travels to Cadaqués to stay with the Surrealist painters Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard for a holiday. Completes The Treachery of Images, the famous 'pipe' picture. But this is not a pipe since we cannot smoke it—it is only a representation of one. Magritte also first uses another technique around this time: that of representing a familiar object and giving it a name other than its conventional one. Through this gallery of word-paintings, Magritte plays on the discrepancies, paradox, clarity, and obscurity of common sense.
1930
Still waiting to have a one-man exhibition. Paris is in the midst of recession, and the effect of the economic crisis is all too apparent. His friend Goemans is forced to close his Paris gallery, and collectors and galleries become bankrupt. Magritte no longer has a steady income, and his relationship with Breton has deteriorated due to their different interpretations of Surrealism. Discouraged, he returns to Brussels and turns to commercial work.
1930-1939
A network of friends and sponsors support him and enable him to sustain his daily life and exhibit on several occasions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Magritte is able to pull through these difficult years. At the same time, he is earning a reputation abroad, and his work is being exhibited in one-man shows or in group shows with other Surrealists in London, New York, and Paris. In Black Magic, a naked woman leaning on a rock gradually merges into the blue sky. In The Rape, he pushes to the point of obsession with the features of a woman's face replaced by sexual attributes. To avoid a scandal, this painting is hidden by a velvet curtain at the Minotaure Exhibition in Brussels.
1940
The Second World War is in full swing and the German army has swept into Belgium. Magritte goes through a crisis resulting not just from the German Occupation but his precarious financial situation and dissatisfaction with his painting. He decides that a feeling of pleasure and an atmosphere of happiness has to predominate over the sense of anxiety and suffocation which had previously inhabited his work. In order to show the 'bright side of life,' Magritte thinks about changing his iconography and begins to paint leaf-birds.
1943
Struck by a reproduction of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Bathers, which leads to a decisive transformation in his work. Enticed by the sensuality of the colors, he opts for a more luminous palette. While continuing to draw objects and figures with the meticulousness for which he has become known, he adds to them a touch clearly inspired by Impressionism, unleashing color in new, warmer, and more cheerful tonalities. Magritte calls this period his "Sunlit" period.
1947
Alexander Iolas, who became Magritte's principal dealer in the United States, successfully exhibits the artist's work in New York. Iolas suggests that Magritte forget Renoir and focus his output on images which overwhelmingly appealed to the public, like Treasure Island. Obligated to come to terms with the necessities of life, Magritte creates new combinations out of old images.
1949
Completes The Domain of Arnheim, a work originally painted in 1936. Magritte enjoys the game of juxtaposing and manipulating motifs. An image could exercise such powers of seduction that the painter felt compelled to reproduce it many times. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Empire of Light, an evocation of the simultaneous presence of day and night. There are sixteen versions of this work.
1953
In Golconda, Magritte brilliantly unites different motifs from his repertory: small men in overcoats and bowler hats float weightlessly in a blue sky in front of facades of houses. Present since 1927, this bowler-hatted figure finally finds his true dimension. He becomes Magritte's emblem par excellence and appears in many works after the 1950s.
1958
Completes The Intimate Friend with bowler-hatted figure.
1964
Completes The Great War with bowler-hatted figure, further cementing this mysterious everyman as his signature image.
1965
Large retrospective of Magritte's work is held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—a clear manifestation of his worldwide recognition. Magritte refers to his work of the latest period (1958-1965) as his "found children." The iconographic elements, between them, in a reverting manner, finish by binding everything together in the last ten years of Magritte's life.
1967
On 15 August, René Magritte dies in Brussels. He is 68 years old.
Legacy & Influence
René Magritte in front of Attempting the Impossible, Le Perreux-sur-Marne, 1928
© Gabriel Brachot Gallery
Magritte's influence on contemporary art, advertising, and popular culture is immeasurable. His clean, illustrative style and conceptual approach to imagery made surrealism accessible while maintaining its intellectual depth.
The bowler-hatted man—anonymous, middle-class, mysteriously concealed—became Magritte's most enduring symbol. Whether his face is obscured by an apple (The Son of Man), multiplied across the sky (Golconda), or caught in impossible situations, this figure represents modern man: conformist yet unknowable, ordinary yet mysterious.
Unlike Dalí's melting clocks or Ernst's fantastical creatures, Magritte's imagery consists of ordinary objects—pipes, apples, bowler hats, clouds, doors, windows. His genius lay in placing these mundane items in unexpected contexts, forcing us to question our most basic assumptions about reality, representation, and language.
His work anticipated conceptual art by decades, influencing everyone from Andy Warhol to contemporary artists like Banksy. The questions Magritte posed about the relationship between images, words, and reality remain as relevant today in our image-saturated world as they were in 1929.
The Treachery of Images has become one of the most referenced artworks in philosophy, semiotics, and popular culture—a testament to Magritte's ability to create images that are simultaneously simple and profoundly complex.