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Renè
Magritte/Works and
biography
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Voice
of Space
1931 |
Empire
of Light
1953-54 |
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René François Ghislain Magritte was born
on November 21, 1898, in Lessines, Belgium. He studied
intermittently between 1916 and 1918 at the Académie
Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Magritte first exhibited
at the Centre d’Art in Brussels in 1920. After
completing military service in 1921, he worked briefly
as a designer in a wallpaper factory. In 1923 he participated
with Lyonel Feininger, El Lissitzky, László
Moholy-Nagy, and the Belgian Paul Joostens in an exhibition
at the Cercle Royal Artistique in Antwerp. In 1924 he
collaborated with E. L. T. Mesens on the review Oesophage.
In 1927 Magritte was given his first solo exhibition
at the Galerie le Centaure in Brussels. Later that year
the artist left Brussels to establish himself in Le
Perreux-sur-Marne, near Paris, where he frequented the
Surrealist circle, which included Jean Arp, André
Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, and Joan
Miró. In 1928 Magritte took part in the Exposition
surréaliste at the Galerie Goemans in Paris.
He returned to Belgium in 1930, and three years later
was given a solo show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in
Brussels. Magritte’s first solo exhibition in
the United States took place at the Julien Levy Gallery
in New York in 1936 and the first in England at the
London Gallery in 1938. He was represented as well in
the 1936 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Throughout the 1940s Magritte showed frequently at the
Galerie Dietrich in Brussels. During the following two
decades he executed various mural commissions in Belgium.
From 1953 he exhibited frequently at the galleries of
Alexander Iolas in New York, Paris, and Geneva. Magritte
retrospectives were held in 1954 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts
in Brussels and in 1960 at the Museum for Contemporary
Arts, Dallas, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
On the occasion of his retrospective at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 1965, Magritte traveled to
the United States for the first time, and the following
year he visited Israel. Magritte died on August 15,
1967, in Brussels, shortly after the opening of a major
exhibition of his work at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen
in Rotterdam.
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