Rene Magritte Paintings

René Magritte: The artist who turned the world on its head

Ever since the birth of the advertising industry in the late 19th century, there has been a great deal of overlap between publicity and fine art. Ad agencies must come up with eye-catching campaigns, and one time-honoured tactic for beleaguered art directors and “creatives” is to plunder famous paintings, in the spirit of homage or comical pastiche.

But with the possible exception of Salvador Dalí, no painter has had a bigger impact on the advertising industry than the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967). His poetical pictures, with their signature motifs of flaming tubas and men in bowler hats, have been imitated in countless advertisements, for everything from Volkswagen cars to the French state railway.

Arguably, Magritte’s career as an illustrator and designer of publicity material even shaped his vision as an artist. Next week, this theory can be put to the test, when examples of his commercial work will be displayed alongside more than 100 paintings, including masterpieces such as The Menaced Assassin (1927), Time Transfixed (1938), and Golconda (1953), in a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool.

Despite winning international acclaim during his thirties, Magritte didn’t become rich until fairly late in his career. As a result, he was obliged to seek work as a commercial artist, so that he and his wife Georgette could live comfortably in their cramped flat in the suburbs of Brussels.

Shortly before their marriage in 1922, Magritte accepted a job as a designer at a wallpaper factory – in a bid, as he put it in a letter, “to make Georgette as happy as possible in the calm of a nice steady bourgeois life”. This only lasted for a year or so, but in 1924, he began working as a freelance graphic designer.

Over the next five years, he produced posters and advertisements in brochures and magazines, predominantly for the Belgian couture house Norine, but also for a number of other clients, including bookshops, a jeweller, and the car manufacturer Alfa Romeo.

He also designed around 25 covers for sheet music of popular songs. Several of his paintings from this period, such as Bather and Cinéma bleu (both 1925), are suffused with the kind of languorous, elegant spirit and faintly Art Deco style that characterised the advertising of the time.

In 1926, a Brussels furrier, Maison Samuel, commissioned Magritte to illustrate their autumn catalogue. They repeated the commission the following year – and the second booklet is practically a Surrealist work of art in its own right (two copies will be shown in Liverpool).

FRIDAY NIGHT BOYS: Terry Gilliam on Rene Magritte

It wasn't until I'd seen Magritte's work collected together in an exhibition at the Tate, at the end of the 1960s I think, that I realised just how incredibly funny his stuff was. People walk around these exhibitions in a religious state of awe and I just walked round this one laughing uncontrollably. Until then, I'd always thought of Magritte as having an interesting and intriguing mind – the way he would turn things inside out or make that which was solid suddenly not solid. But suddenly here he was, this wonderfully dry joke teller. The work that really struck me that day was The Man in the Bowler Hat [1964]. He'd spent months painting a guy in a bowler hat and then, for his last brush strokes, paints a dove flying in front of the man's face. What's happened there could happen only in a photograph and he's done a painting of it. What a comedian! I thought he was so clever. If it wasn't for the ideas I wouldn't say he was a great painter because others have a better technique. But he does what he needs to do and does it so well. All of the surrealists got into my head, but Magritte was so direct. I liked how immediate his work was, whereas the others were more abstract. His work can be complex but in a sense he takes cliché images and puts them together in ways that surprise you. There's a night scene, but the sky is day [The Dominion of Light, 1953], there's a pair of shoes that are actually feet [The Red Model, 1934]. His work has an initial gag, but the stuff sticks with you because it's in some ways profound. He is so firmly lodged in my brain that frequently I'll see something and think, "Oh, that's a bit Magrittean". I'll look out of my window at dusk and see the house across the street catching the last bit of sunlight, except the sky behind it is already night. He captures moments of light in the day that are just odd. I used to think it was a fantasy of his, but I now find it happening all the time. Like every good artist, he makes us see the everyday differently but he does it without the pretension of so many other artists. That's another thing I like about him, that he didn't have this serious "I am an artist" approach. He went to work with a suit and a briefcase, everything about him was taking the piss out of art yet at the same time he was a wonderful artist.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Paintings

Magritte

Rene Magritte, paintings

René Magritte, beyond painting