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Rene Magritte

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Rene Magritte
Rene Magritte was born in 1898 and was the eldest son of Leopold and Regina Magritte. He worked as a commercial artist to support himself, producing advertising and book designs, which I think you can see in his paintings as they some what have a visual impact of an advertisement. Magritte started out as an impressionist early on in his career before arriving at his trademark surrealist style after several years of study. His early influences were Fernand Leger and his earliest works were based on cubism and futurism. He produced his first surrealist painting in 1926, The Lost Jockey. Magritte’s paintings seem to encourage people to consider the reality that is around them and look at things and not accept them as they seem to be.

The Son of Man is amongst one of the most recognized surrealist oil paintings and was created by Rene Magritte in1964, three years prior to his death. The painting is said to be a self portrait of Magritte. It is of a man in a long black coat and bowler hat, standing very stiff and upright in front of a low wall with the sea and stormy skies behind him. A large green apple is covering most of his face, except for a small corner of his eyes which can be seen around the side of the apple. His right arm appears to be normal until you look more carefully and see that it appears that it is bending backwards from the elbow as if you are looking at it from behind.

The main focus of the painting seems to be neither the man nor the apple and possibly more about the curiosity of people. You want to know what the mans face looks like behind that apple because you can not see it.

Rene Magritte said of this painting in 1965 that - “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and

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