Page 22 - Andre Breton News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Exhibition of Surrealist masterpieces rings differently during uneasy pandemic age

Despite creating over a thousand oil paintings, Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) didn’t consider himself an artist. The surrealist, instead, called himself a “thinker in paint.” A new biography, Magritte, A Life, by Alex Danchev, attempts to demonstrate why.

When viewed as a vehicle for various forms of liberation, the movement remains highly resonant even a century after its heyday.

Unlike his surrealist contemporaries, Rene Magritte tended to keep Freud at a distance from his work — though few artists offer as much scope for armchair analysis. Speaking in 1961, he observed that “psychology doesn’t interest me. It claims to reveal the flow of our thoughts and emotions. Its efforts are contrary to what I know; it seeks to explain a mystery. There is only one mystery: the world.” One conclusion in reading Alex Danchev’s recreation of Magritte’s formative years, in this diligent and insightful biography (almost complete at the time of Danchev’s death in 2016), ...

Article printed in the journal Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion no.3, 1976, including The Manifesto of the Arab Surrealist Movement, 1975.