From Publishers Weekly
Though full of subconscious upwellings and startling conjunctions of seemingly unrelated objects, Rene Magritte's paintings are not dreamscapes, according to French art critic Meuris. With every painting, the Belgian surrealist, whose work is "governed by 'thought,' " challenges his viewer's intellect and assumptions about reality. Observes Meuris in Magrittian fashion: "Magritte is not a painter, while yet being a great painter." While the paradox of the paintings of burning tubas remains largely unsolved, other images are successfully unraveled and the heavy French intellectual baggage one might expect is avoided. Meuris also looks at Magritte's little-known photographs, short films, sculptures and surreal objects in this illuminating, delightfully illustrated volume that reaffirms the artist's stature as it traces the fine line he toes between reality and illusion.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Book Description
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.
