Rene Magritte
Bowler hats, pipes that are not pipes, and skies painted with a commercial artist's discipline.
Rene Magritte was born at Lessines in Belgium in 1898; his mother drowned herself when he was thirteen, and he was said to have seen the body recovered with her nightdress over her face, an image the biographers have made much of and which he dismissed. He worked in wallpaper design and advertising, which accounts for the deliberately unremarkable technique, and made the paintings that define him from the late 1920s: the pipe captioned Ceci n'est pas une pipe, men in bowler hats, day and night in one picture, objects at impossible scale. He forged Picassos and Braques during the war to survive, and painted in his dining room in Brussels until his death in 1967.
Magritte repeated his own successful compositions many times over decades, in oil, gouache and drawing, so an image existing in several versions is normal rather than suspicious — but it makes identification against the Sylvester catalogue raisonne essential. He is also very heavily forged. Gouaches are numerous and are the most accessible unique works. The wartime period, the vache paintings of 1948 and the acknowledged forgeries all complicate the record. The Magritte Foundation is the authority on attribution.
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