The great modern master René Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, in 1898, and began taking drawing lessons at the age of 10. His father, Léopold, was a textile merchant. His mother, Régina, committed suicide (after several attempts) when Magritte was only 13, and this traumatic memory is thought to have been a catalyst for the play on illusion and reality in his paintings. By the mid-1920s, Magritte had committed to the Surrealist movement in painting, and he would persist in painting images that could never occur in reality throughout his life. He died in 1967, of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 68.
Now the Centre Pompidou, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, is holding an exhibition of his work. “Magritte: La trahison des images“ (“The Treachery of Images”) takes its name from the title of one of his paintings, the image of a pipe, under which Magritte painted the line, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). When he was once asked about this line, he replied that of course it was not a pipe—just try to fill it with tobacco! There are 100 paintings, drawings and documents in the show, curated so as to give a fresh look at the man who was one of the major inspirations for Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Here, for PROVOKR readers, is a portfolio of a dozen throughly provocative works from the exhibition.
