Collection: René Magritte
(Lessines 1898 - Brussels 1967)
René Magritte, one of the leading figures of Surrealism, built his work on an idea that was as simple as it was disconcerting: painting familiar objects (a pipe, a bowler hat, a door, an apple) in an entirely realistic way and placing them in an unexpected context, to the point of making the boundary between reality and its representation waver.
Between 1916 and 1918, he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, which he found uninspiring, and worked as a designer in a wallpaper factory and later as a creator of posters and advertisements. In 1926, thanks to a contract with the Le Centaure gallery in Brussels, he was able to devote himself entirely to painting: Le jockey perdu, considered his first Surrealist painting, dates from that year. After his first solo exhibition in 1927, which was harshly received by critics, he moved to the outskirts of Paris, to Le Perreux-sur-Marne, where he mixed with André Breton’s group and painted at an intense pace, culminating in the Trahison des images of 1929, the famous pipe bearing the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. That same year, he published the essay Les mots et les images in «La Révolution surréaliste».
In 1930, he returned to Brussels, where he lived permanently and resumed working in advertising. In 1946, he signed the manifesto Surrealism in Full Sunlight, during a period of brighter colors. He died in Brussels in 1967, shortly after the opening of a major exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
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MAGRITTE RENÉ, Le seize septembre, 1956
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MAGRITTE RENÉ, La page blanche, 1967
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MAGRITTE RENÉ, La grande famille, 1963
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René Magritte: original prints and d’après editions
Magritte was active as an illustrator (in 1948, he illustrated with his drawings the Brussels edition of Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror, published by La Boétie), while prints occupy a marginal place in his work. The catalogue raisonné by Gilbert Kaplan and Timothy Baum, The Graphic Work of René Magritte (1982), records only 20 original prints, and only 5 or 6, depending on the source, were executed directly by the artist on a plate; the others were produced by printers, based on his drawings.
Alongside the original prints, there is a second group of works, created after his death: color lithographs based on his paintings and published with the agreement of the Magritte Estate, represented by Charly Herscovici, president of the Fondation Magritte. The editions released in Paris in 2010, at Philippe Moreno’s workshop, were printed on pure-cotton BFK Rives paper, in 275 numbered copies plus 45 hors commerce proofs, 15 of which were reserved for the Estate. They bear the artist’s signature reproduced in the plate, not applied by hand, the number in pencil and, in the margin, the blind stamps of ADAGP and the Estate, together with the initials of its representative. For these reasons, they should be considered d’après editions, rather than original prints by Magritte: they are not included among those recorded in the catalogue raisonné, and their value is not that of prints made by him. They nevertheless have an independent and recognized market, thanks to the technical quality of the printing, the limited and controlled edition, the guarantee of authenticity provided by the Estate’s stamps and the power of the images.