Long before luxury fashion houses were commissioning artists to redesign bottles and packaging, René Magritte was quietly turning an ordinary wine bottle into a work of Surrealist sculpture.
Created in 1955, Femme Bouteille (Woman Bottle) transforms the curved form of a glass bottle into the elongated figure of a nude woman. Rather than simply painting an image onto the surface, Magritte cleverly incorporated the shape of the bottle itself into the composition, allowing the object to become the body. The result is elegant, slightly strange, and unmistakably Magritte. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Rene Magritte, Femme Bouteille→
Decades after completing his most famous painting — a depiction of a pipe inscribed This is Not a Pipe — Rene Magritte here revisits this iconography with The Shadows (1966). The same masculine- identified object covers ominously behind a tree, inspired by a Surrealist play with arbitrary scale, and what the artist would term the “logic“ of dreams.
Belgian artist René Magritte (1899 – 1967) is famous for his surrealist works, which often challenge the viewer’s perception of reality and the ordinary. In The Portrait (1935), a simply laid-out meal is not as simple as it seems. Each object is rendered with equally sharp focus and pictorial realism, yet any expectation of everyday reality is overturned, above all by the unblinking eye that stares inexplicably from a slice of ham on a plate. The perspective of this still life tilts dramatically toward the surface of the picture plane, as if to confront or perhaps invite the viewer to join the table.
Surrealism was identified by its proponents as a way of reuniting the conscious and unconscious realms of experience so that the world of dream and fantasy could be joined to the everyday rational world — or what one critic called “an absolute reality, a surreality.” René Magritte accomplished this by merging dreamlike imagery and naturalistic detail, as in his iconic canvas Time Transfixed (1938). Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: René Magritte, Time Transfixed→
One of Surrealism’s most important patrons, Edward James, was a willing collaborator whose sense of play initiated commissions for his homes from such artists as Salvador Dali and Leonora Carrington. James was impressed with the work of Rene Magritte, which was displayed in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, so he invited the artist to paint three decorative canvases for the ballroom of his London home. Magritte painted On The Threshold of Liberty during his stay there in 1937, as the centerpiece of the three works. Originally set behind two-way mirrors, the works would become visible when James changed the lighting, provoking what he called “a profound sensation.”
