Frankfurt, Germany - René Magritte numbers not only among the most important, but also among the most popular artists of the twentieth century. Often against the grain of the tendencies in the arts of his time, the Belgian Surrealist painter developed a unique and unmistakable pictorial language. His work’s continuing crucial influence on later generations of artists and his impact on today’s visual culture are almost without par. Many of his equally enigmatic and hard-to-forget solutions have been reproduced in the millions and become famous icons far beyond the world of art. On exhibition 30 October 2008 – 4 January 2009.

However, a fascinating period of the artist’s landmark oeuvre has remained nearly unknown: his so-called période vache. In 1948, Magritte made a group of paintings and gouaches distinctly different from the rest of his work for his first solo exhibition in Paris. Relying on a new, fast and aggressive style of painting – and particularly inspired by popular sources such as caricatures and comics, but also interspersing his works with stylistic quotations from artists like James Ensor or Henri Matisse – Magritte, within only a few weeks, produced about thirty entirely uncharacteristic works that caused an outrage in Paris.

The artist deliberately conceived the exhibition as a provocation of and an assault on the Parisian public. Painting in an unexpectedly crude, playful, and intentionally “bad” manner, he reflected his own work and painting in general. Magritte thus anticipated strategies of painting current in the 1970s and 1980s, which are highly topical again today.

While only sporadically included in most retrospectives of Magritte’s oeuvre, the works from the période vache  will be assembled in the exhibition at the Schirn outside France and Belgium for the first time. Especially against the background of the last thirty years’ art, this concentrated presentation will shed a new, surprising light on an extraordinary artist.

With “René Magritte 1948. La Période Vache,” the Schirn continues a series of exhibitions that started with “Henri Matisse. Drawing with Scissors” and “Paul Klee. 1933” and was followed by “Max Beckmann. The Watercolors and Pastels” or “Picasso and the Theater,” focusing on specific groups of works or certain aspects in the oeuvre of established masters of classical modernism.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by Ludion.

The SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT is one of Europe’s most renowned exhibition institutions. Since 1986, more than 180 exhibitions have been realized, among them major surveys dedicated to Vienna Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, to "Women Impressionists" and the history of photography, to subjects like shopping and the relationship between art and consumerism, the visual art of the Stalin era, the Nazarenes, or the new Romanticism in present-day art. Artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Frida Kahlo, Bill Viola, Arnold Schönberg, Henri Matisse, Julian Schnabel, James Lee Byars, Yves Klein, and Carsten Nicolai were presented in comprehensive solo shows. The SCHIRN, with Max Hollein as director, presents explosive issues and topical aspects of artistic oeuvres in a concise language under contemporary aspects. Being a venue of discoveries, the SCHIRN offers both sides to its visitors: an original sensuous experience and committed involvement in cultural discussion.