Magritte : a life / Alex Danchev ; with Sarah Whitfield.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Danchev, Alex, author.

Whitfield, Sarah, 1942- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Magritte, René, 1898-1967.

Magritte, René.

Painters--Belgium--Biography.

Painters.

Belgium.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xxxiv, 439 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Pantheon Books, [2020]

Summary:

"The first major biography for our time of René Magritte, from the celebrated biographer of Braque and Cézanne. In this stimulating life of René Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a case for the artist as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. His surreal sensibility, his deadpan melodrama, and his fine-tuned outrageousness have all become inescapably part of our times through legendary works such as The Treachery of Images (we know it as Ceci n'est pas une pipe), and through his iterations of the man in a bowler hat, raining down in multiples from the sky, or with an apple where his face should be. These pathbreaking subversions all came from a middle-class Belgian gent, who kept a modest house in a Brussels suburb; who led a small, brilliant band of Belgian surrealists, and famously clashed with André Breton; whose first one-man show, in the style he famously dubbed "Vache" ("Cow"), sold absolutely nothing. In 1965 a major retrospective traveling throughout the United States gave birth to his international reputation. Using thirty-two pages of color inserts and black-and-white illustrations throughout the text, Danchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist who posed profound questions about the relationship between image and reality and the very nature of authenticity. Danchev delves into a deep examination of Magritte's artistic development, surveys his intimate friendships, and plumbs the mystery of an iconoclast whose influence can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. His Secret Jungle

2. Normal Madness

3. Cupid's Curse

4. The Aura of the Extraordinary

5. Charm and Menace

6. The Cuckoo's Egg

7. Through the Keyhole

8. Surfeit and Subversion

9. The True and the False

10. 1948

1967.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Danchev, Alex. Magritte

ISBN:

9780307908193

0307908194

OCLC:

1141109077