The Tate Liverpool Shows Major René Magritte Retrospective This Summer

Written by Julian Hatton Sunday, 06 May 2012 00:55

Liverpool.- The Tate Liverpool is proud to present "René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle", the biggest exhibition of the Belgian surrealist’s work in England for twenty years from June 24th through October 16th. Renowned for witty images depicting everyday objects such as apples, bowler hats and pipes in unusual settings, Magritte’s art plays with the idea of reality and illusion. Magritte’s work has had an enduring effect on the art world, inspiring artists ranging from John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha to Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Magritte’s impact has also been felt throughout popular culture. Musicians such as Paul Simon, directors Jean-Luc Goddard and Terry Gilliam, and many writers and advertisers have all been influenced by Magritte’s famous images.

Tate Liverpool’s exhibition will reveal the inspiration behind the artist’s celebrated style, focusing on the less explored aspects of Magritte’s life and artistic practice. Paintings will feature alongside drawings, collages, examples of Magritte’s early commercial work and rarely seen photographs and films. The exhibition will include iconic pieces by the artist as well as some more surprising works, offering visitors a fresh insight into the intriguing world of Magritte.

René Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, who was a tailor and textile merchant,  and Régina (née Bertinchamps), a milliner until her marriage. Little is known about Magritte's early life, but he began lessons in drawing in 1910. On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Léopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. She was later discovered a mile or so down the nearby river, dead. According to a legend, 13-year-old Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but recent research has discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse. Supposedly, when his mother was found, her dress was covering her face, an image that has been suggested as the source of several of Magritte's paintings in 1927–1928 of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants. Magritte's earliest paintings, which date from about 1915, were Impressionistic in style. From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, under Constant Montald, but found the instruction uninspiring.

The paintings he produced during the years 1918–1924 were influenced by Futurism and by the offshoot of Cubism practiced by Metzinger. Most of his works of this period are female nudes. In 1922 Magritte married Georgette Berger, whom he had met as a child in 1913. From December 1920 until September 1921, Magritte served in the Belgian infantry in the Flemish town of Beverlo near Leopoldsburg. In 1922–1923, he worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie le Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, "The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu)", and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.

Galerie la Centaure closed at the end of 1929, ending Magritte's contract income. Having made little impact in Paris, Magritte returned to Brussels in 1930 and resumed working in advertising. He and his brother, Paul, formed an agency which earned him a living wage. Surrealist patron Edward James allowed Magritte, in the early stages of his career, to stay rent free in his London home and paint. James is featured in two of Magritte's pieces, "Le Principe du Plaisir (The Pleasure Principle)" and "La Reproduction Interdite", a painting also known as "Not to be Reproduced". During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. He briefly adopted a colorful, painterly style in 1943–44, an interlude known as his "Renoir Period", as a reaction to his feelings of alienation and abandonment that came with living in German-occupied Belgium. In 1946, renouncing the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, he joined several other Belgian artists in signing the manifesto 'Surrealism in Full Sunlight'. During 1947–48—Magritte's "Vache Period" — he painted in a provocative and crude Fauve style.


During this time, Magritte supported himself through the production of faked works purporting to be by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Giorgio de Chirico - a fraudulent repertoire he was later to expand into the printing of forged banknotes during the lean postwar period. This venture was undertaken alongside his brother Paul Magritte and fellow Surrealist and 'surrogate son' Marcel Mariën, to whom had fallen the task of selling the forgeries. At the end of 1948, he returned to the style and themes of his prewar surrealistic art. His work was exhibited in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992. Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on 15 August 1967 in his own bed, and was interred in Schaerbeek Cemetery, Evere, Brussels. Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art. In 2005 he came 9th in the Walloon version of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian); in the Flemish version he was 18th.

Tate Liverpool presents displays of work from the Tate collection alongside special exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. The special exhibition programme, presented on the Gallery’s fourth floor, brings together works from national and international collections, both public and private. Since the gallery opened in 1988, Tate Liverpool has presented over 150 different exhibitions and collection displays of work by hundreds of different artists, some seen for the first time in the UK at Tate Liverpool. Major exhibitions in the past five years include Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era (2005), Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People (2006-7), Peter Blake: A Retrospective (2007) and The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China (2007), Turner Prize (2007) and Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900 (2008). Tate Liverpool continues to play an active role in the Liverpool Biennial. Tate Liverpool has an established reputation for working with, and touring exhibitions to international institutions as far afield as France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, United States, Canada, Ireland, Korea, Austria, Italy and Japan, as well as other institutions within the UK. Visit the Tate Liverpool website at ... http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool

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