Magritte

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MAGRITTE
Richard Calvocoressi
With 48 colour plates
The paintings of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898—1967) have exerted an extraordinary fascination, particularly since the enormous increase in awareness and popularity of his work during the 1960s, when artists found in it an expression of preoccupations that corresponded to their own. At once the most accessible and the most self-consciously enigmatic of the Surrealists, Magritte shows us a world of silence and isolation in which familiar objects are altered or juxtaposed in 'impossible' combinations in order to create a sense of disorientation and the absurd. Many of his most memorable paintings date from his three prolific years 1927-1930, when he lived near Paris and was in close touch with the writer André Breton and other French Surreahsts.
Stylistic and formal concerns were of secondary... Tovább

Fülszöveg

i' ''iilvi'^li i'tu
i^î« ^f^î'fv I
fW't'M
'v f
wi^m
it l-'l' I P ' M . ¦ if.
it ' ' k It ,1 1 Vl'lS'lU, 1 h
i^éhii
MAGRITTE
Richard Calvocoressi
With 48 colour plates
The paintings of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898—1967) have exerted an extraordinary fascination, particularly since the enormous increase in awareness and popularity of his work during the 1960s, when artists found in it an expression of preoccupations that corresponded to their own. At once the most accessible and the most self-consciously enigmatic of the Surrealists, Magritte shows us a world of silence and isolation in which familiar objects are altered or juxtaposed in 'impossible' combinations in order to create a sense of disorientation and the absurd. Many of his most memorable paintings date from his three prolific years 1927-1930, when he lived near Paris and was in close touch with the writer André Breton and other French Surreahsts.
Stylistic and formal concerns were of secondary importance to Magritte, whose main interest was in ideas or propositions about the world; for example, many of his paintings explore the relation between objects and words, or between the image of an object and the object itself. He deliberately cultivated a cold, unemotive, 'styleless' style, by which such concerns could be most directly conveyed to the spectator. This quality renders the images of violence and macabre sexuality in some of his works all the more disturbing.
Many of the illustrations in this book have been specially photographed from paintings in the 1979 Magritte exhibition in Paris. They represent the whole of his career, with particular emphasis on the early years, when many of his best ideas were conceived.
Richard Calvocoressi is Research Assistant at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. He is the author of Marine Painting (1978) and has contributed reviews to a number of well-known art journals.
Jacket: La Reproduction Interdite (Rotterdam, Museum Boymans — van Beuningen)
PHAIDON Vissza