Paris, France - Musée Maillol presents Rene Magritte - All In Paper.  The number of retrospectives dedicated to Magritte's work has multiplied over the last fifteen years, and it is now internationally recognized as one of the essential moments of 20th century art.  This exhibition is different. On the one hand it offers an aspect of his work that is hardly known letters, sketches, etchings on paper, preparatory drawings, gouache studies, squared preparations, gouaches taken from paintings, collages...  On the other hand, the exhibition represents an original insight into the making of a subversive mind.  This is a true retrospective of his work with its traditional images and its unknown aspects.

Magritte considers the collage as an essential component of modernist culture.  It introduces a break in the principal itself of representation.  But, while it represents a fundamental aspect in Magritte's procedure, it has also changed its language radically.  Here we reach a major point in Surrealist poetry.  From the beginning, drawing has been an important element in the research Magritte carried out and covers all of his work.

From the etchings to the sketches introduced in the letters, he built the image while testing the idea according to which all drawings are a story in action.  By showing how Magritte used the supports and techniques we find his creative process.  From the letter to the image, the laboratory of the work functions according to the example of a mind in perpetual movement. 

A consummate technician, Margritte's work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects, or an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things.  The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement.  Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe.

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