This Is Not a Book. Everyday enigma from Belgium's leading Surrealist

Meet the Belgian Surrealist forever on the hunt for magic and mystery. This introduction to Magritte presents key works from the artist's vast repertoire of visual humour, paradox, and surprise which makes us look and look again, not only at the painting but at our sense of self and the world.

From men in bowler hats, floating in the sky, to a painting of a pipe above the caption "this is not a pipe", René Magritte (1898–1967) created an echo chamber of object and image, name and thing, reality and representation.

Like other Surrealist works, Magritte’s paintings combine a precise, mimetic technique with abnormal, alienating configurations which defy the laws of scale, logic, and science: a comb the size of a wardrobe, rocks that float in the sky, clouds that drift through an open door. The result is a direct yet disorientating realm, often witty, often unsettling, and always prompting us to look beyond the visible, to “what is hidden by what we see.”

This introductory book explores Magritte's vast repertoire of visual humour, paradox, and surprise which to this day makes us look and look again, not only at the painting but at our sense of self and the world.

About the author:

Marcel Paquet (1947–2014) obtained his doctorate in 1978 from the Free University of Brussels with a thesis entitled La différence des penseés de Kant et de Hegel dans la question de l’essence de l’art. He published a number of books on such subjects as Paul Delvaux, Fernando Botero, and Hans Bellmer.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series features:

- a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
- a concise biography
- approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with the Menil Collection, Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 focuses on the breakthrough surrealist years of René Magritte, creator of some of the 20th century's most extraordinary images. 

Bringing together nearly 80 paintings, periodicals and early commercial work, it offers fresh insight into Magritte's identity as a revolutionary painter and surrealist artist. Beginning in 1926, when Magritte first aimed to create paintings that would, in his words, challenge the real world and concluding in 1938 a historically and biographically significant moment just before the outbreak of World War II the publication traces central strategies and themes from this seminal period, particularly those of displacement, transformation, metamorphosis, the misnaming of objects, and the representation of visions seen in half-waking states. 

The publication also presents new conservation research on Magritte's materials and techniques, and an illustrated chronology outlining significant moments in the artist's life during this significant period, including travel, connections with other surrealist artists and writers, contributions to journals, and important exhibitions and reviews.

Magritte in 400 images offers a selection of the most iconic paintings by René Magritte, along with a multitude of lesser-known jewels from his expansive oeuvre. The novel choice of works will surprise and delight readers as they continue to uncover ever more facets of the master Surrealist, from his unique gouaches to his painted bottles.

Spanning seven chapters, this book brings together the myriad aspects of Magritte’s pictorial vision. Beginning with his first forays into abstract painting in the 1920s, navigating his search for solace in his Sunlit Period, as well as his brittle ‘Vache’ Period, before finally moving on to his Surrealist masterpieces of the 1950s and 1960s, it gently guides the reader through Magritte’s world.

Each chapter opens with a summary of the artistic stakes at play during that period and Magritte’s place in them, immersing the reader in the contemporary artistic milieu. The 400 reproductions of Magritte’s work are complemented by a unique selection of historical photographs. Alive with images and information, this compact gem is a must-have for all art enthusiasts and connoisseurs.

This major new book on René Magritte offers fresh interpretations of the artist’s use of symbols and imagery to articulate his particular brand of surrealism.

In this beautiful monograph, a collection of revelatory essays focuses on five common images in Rene Magritte’s work — fire, shadows, curtains, words, and the fragmented body. Featuring vibrant reproductions of more than 100 works, this book helps readers understand how the artist employed these images in ways both deceptive and realistic. 

The book explores how he distorted accepted interpretations of classic symbols; why he so often used words as elements of his paintings; and how he applied aspects of the theater in his works. As Magritte’s paintings have become subsumed by the very commercialism they sought to ridicule, this volume takes a fresh look at an artist whose familiarity masks an incredible gift for deception and rapier-like intellect.

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Пролистать книгу Magritte: The Treachery of Images

René Magritte (1898–1967) was one of the most intriguing painters associated with Surrealism, but he did not fully find his voice until after breaking ties with the movement. This book, the first to look exclusively at Magritte’s late career, examines his most important bodies of work from the 1940s through the 1960s, and shows how they marked a fundamental shift in painting from Modernism to our own time.

Featuring more than sixty artworks, René Magritte: The Fifth Season explores how Magritte balanced irony and conviction, philosophy and fantasy, to illuminate the gaps between what we see and what we know. Subjects explored in this volume include the artist’s Renoir period; the période vache, with its Fauvist- and Expressionist-style paintings that are little known to American audiences; the ‘hypertrophy of objects’ paintings, a series that plays with the scale of familiar objects; and the enigmatic Dominion of Light suite, paintings that suggest the simultaneous experience of day and night. Together, the works reveal Magritte as an artist acutely attuned to the paradoxes at work within reality, and an enduring champion of the role of mystery in life and art.

In this richly illustrated book, Xavier Canonne, director of the Museum of Photography in Charleroi, dives into René Magritte’s photo and film archive, revealing a lesser-known side of the surrealist master.

Discovered in the 1970s, more than 10 years after the artist’s death, this collection gives us access to a family album, an informal Magritte, from his childhood to the last years of his life. We see Magritte with his parents and brothers, as a newly married man with his wife Georgette, and with his contemporaries in the Brussels Surrealist group. Spontaneous snapshots are complemented by posed scenes, including improvised tableaus with his fellow artists, parodies of famous movies consciously arranged with Georgette, portraits of Magritte at his easel at home, and staged photographs as models for his paintings.

Images where the artist and his friends hide their faces or turn away from the camera particularly resonate with his paintings and his investigation of the ‘hidden visible’. While other Surrealists such as Man Ray and Raoul Ubac made photography an essential part of their work, Magritte remained a true painter. Yet this book demonstrates that his photographs and films are so pervaded with his spirit that they are inseparable from his oeuvre of paintings. Far from being merely entertaining occasional images, they shed a familiar light on the painter’s thought and evidence the same investigation of the mysteries of the world.

Рене Магритт — классик сюрреализма, работы которого отличаются невероятной поэтичностью и остроумием. Он не старался трансформировать реальность, его сдержанный невозмутимый стиль отличался чёткостью и глубиной. Художник никогда не уходил от предметности изображаемого на картине. Играя со связями между разными субъектами, Магритт написал множество полотен, которые навсегда вошли в историю мирового искусства.

В альбоме, составленном и прокомментированном искусствоведом Марселем Паке, вы найдёте все самые известные и значимые для истории картины Рене Магритта, познакомитесь с жизненной и творческой биографией живописца, узнаете о его идеях, концепциях и решениях.

Книга о бельгийском художнике-сюрреалисте Рене Магритт (1898–1967). В своих ранних работах Магритт был близок к абстракционизму и кубизму. В дальнейшем он стал одним из главных представителей сюрреалистического движения. Однако реальные предметы на его картинах не подвергаются деформации; как правило, художник трансформирует связи, существующие между этими предметами. В отличие от Дали, он не создавал галлюцинаторных фантазмов, а играл на столкновении точной предметной изобразительности и внутреннего противоречивого содержания. Сами названия магриттовских картин нередко поэтичные, но они абсолютно лишены видимой связи с мотивом изображения. В пейзажах, интерьерах и безликих портретах он прибегал к технике гиперреализма. Магритт изображал на картинах в первую очередь идеи, зримые образы, а не предметы. Он ни в грош не ставил ни лирическую, ни экспрессионистическую абстракцию. По его мнению, авторы подобных произведений, изображая предметы, не создают ничего достойного внимания, заставляющего человека думать. Магритт создал также ряд сюрреалистических фотографий, которые были опубликованы только после смерти художника. Издание состоит из шести глав, рассказывающих о жизни художника и об истории создания каждой картины, представленной в издании. Все иллюстрации имеют аннотации. В конце книги приводятся летопись жизни и творчества мастера, проиллюстрированная документальными фотографиями, а также подробный список иллюстраций.

Large-format hardcover edition at a new low price

The works of René Magritte (1898 – 1967) and the ideas that underlie them are a special case both in the history of modern art and in surrealist painting. In the search for the "mystery" in which things and organisms are enveloped, Magritte created pictures which, taking everyday reality as their starting point, were to follow a different logic from that to which we are accustomed. Magritte depicts the world of reality in such unsecretive superficiality that the beholder of his pictures is forced to reflect that the mystery of it is not evoked by some sentimental transfiguration, but rather by the logic of his thoughts and associations. Magritte thus invented an inimitable pictorial language which he uses to question our usual comprehension of pictures. In this book, Jacques Meuris traces Magritte`s artistic development from its beginnings until the end of his life, and in doing so underlines the originality of this great Belgian Surrealist.

The author:

Jacques Meuris is a writer, photographer, and art critic; he is the author of numerous books, catalogue articles and commentaries on modern art, literature and photography. Meuris is Professor Emeritus of the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels (La Cambre, Brussels), a member of the Libre Académie de Belgique, and a director of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA).