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BIRTH:
1898 MAGRITTE
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| ^ Died
on 21 November 1927: Laurits Regner Tuxen,
Danish artist born on 09 December 1853. — Tuxen came to Skagen a couple af times in the 1870's, before becoming a much sought-for portrait painter in the courts of Europe. But after the death in 1899 of his first wife, the Belgian-born Ursula de Baisieux, and his second marriage in 1901 with Frederikke Treschow, he bought a house in Skagen. Here, in the "Tuxen Villa", he spent much of his time together with Krøyer and Michael and Anna Ancher. In this period as an artist he was mainly occupied by the subjects of family life, his wife and daughters, and of Skagen in the changing light of summertime. The "Tuxen Villa" is today a museum. — First Wife (1890) — Artist's Mother and Daughter (1902) — From the Studio (1895) — Bathing Children (1907) — F.L. Smiths (1911) — The Lifeboat (1877) — Model in Sunshine (1881) — Returning Home (1905) — The Drowned (1913) — Coronation of Nicholas II (1898) — Wedding of Nicholas II (1896) — Venus (1905) — Susanne in the Bath (1879) |
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Died on 21 November 1717: Jean-Baptiste
Santerre, French painter born on 23 March 1651. — [descendant
de Jean Sans Terre? John
Lackland (24 Dec 1167 – 18 Oct 1216)] [Etait-il sans terre Santerre?]
[Un Santerre qui s'enterre sent la terre.] — LINKS — Susanna at the Bath (1704, 205x145cm) _ Santerre was mainly a religious painter but his paintings lacked true inspiration. However, his Susanna at the Bath reveals an almost disturbing eroticism and something of that peculiarly chilly Rococo quality which is to be found in Falconet's nude statuettes. Few comparable pictures were to be produced at Venice, whereas Santerre initiates a whole troop of 'baigneuses' who go on dabbling with the erotic possibilities of water as late as Fragonard, all seeming ultimately to derive from Correggio's Leda. And out of this revolution was to come the achievement of Boucher as well as Fragonard. |
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Died on 21 November 1874: Mariano
Fortuny y Marsal (or: y Carbo?), Spanish painter born on 11
June 1838. — [Etait-il fortuné Fortuny?] — LINKS — The Choice of a Model (1874) — The Painter's Children in the Japanese Hall _ (44x93 cms) _ This painting is without doubt a small jewel. Though, because of its size it might be considered a minor work, it is actually one of his most brilliant. The painter, the first Spaniard to become a trully cosmopolitan artist, enjoyed international fame and earned a large number of commissions throughout his short life. However in this small work — Fortuny was certainly a specialist in small formats — he wasn't working "on commission". He painted it just a few months before he died, never really finishing it, and is a reflection of his search in the last years of his life to find new roads and outlets for his painting. Thus, while some elements of the scene - such as the girl's leg - are perfectly drawn with meticulous detail, other parts of the painting show such loose, separated brush strokes that one might say that this presages Impressionism. The children in the painting are Mariano and Maria Luisa, the product of his marriage to Cecila Madrazo, the daughter of Federico Madrazo. |
| ^ Born
on 21 November 1898: René François Ghislain
Magritte, Belgian Surrealist painter who died on 15 August
1967. — René François-Ghislain Magritte was born in Lessines, Hainaut, Belgium on 21st November 1898. On 12th March 1912 his mother drowned herself and the family moved to Charleroi. The following year he met his future wife, Georgette Berger. In 1914 Rene enroled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, in 1918 the rest of his family join him. After his military service, Rene married Georgette on 28th June 1922. In 1923 he sold his first picture, a portrait of the singer Evelyne Brelia, but it wasn't until 1926 that he produced his first surrealist work, "Le Jockey Perdu". Rene and Georgette travelled widely around Europe and meet other surrealists such as Dali, Eluard, Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Man Ray. By 1965 Magrittes's health was declining, he died on 15th August 1967. He left a legacy of 1300 works for us to wonder at. — Magritte was born in Lessines. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. His first one-man exhibition was in Brussels in 1927. At that time Magritte had already begun to paint in the style, closely akin to surrealism, that was predominant throughout his long career. A meticulous, skillful technician, he is noted for works that contain an extraordinary juxtaposition of ordinary objects or an unusual context that gives new meaning to familiar things. This juxtaposition is frequently termed magic realism, of which Magritte was the prime exponent. In addition to fantastic elements, he displayed a mordant wit, creating surrealist versions of famous paintings, as in Perspective I: Madame Récamier de David (1950) [the original Madame Récamier of 1800, by Jacques-Louis David], in which an elaborate coffin is substituted for the reclining woman in the famous portrait by Jacques Louis David. Magritte's work was first shown in the United States in New York City in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospectives, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 (U.S. tour, 1966), and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992. — LINKS — Les Bijoux Indiscrets, — Untitled Poster for Magritte Exhibition, Rose..., (1966) — Clairvoyance (Self-Portrait) (1936) — Homesickness (1940) — Homesickness 1940 — Le Viol (1934) _ Le viol a été choisi par André Breton pour illustrer la couverture de Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme?, en 1934. — Ceci n'est pas une pipe (1929) — Perspective II: Manet's Balcony (1950) [after Manet's The Balcony] — The Blank Check (1965) — The Big Family (1963) [a sky-with-white-clouds-colored flying dove] — Attempting the Impossible (1926) [the artist creating a real woman by painting] — The Red Model (1937) [a pair of feet] — The Therapist (1936) [NOT “The rapist” — a bird cage with cloak, hat, and legs sitting on a chair] — Eternal Evidence (1930) [five sections of the artist's nude wife] — Voice [a tree] — The Listening Room [a canvas-filling room-filling green apple] (1958) — Le Thérapeute (1936) _ la photo semblable que Magritte a faite en 1937: Dieu le huitième jour — — La Durée Poignardée (Time Transfixed) (1938; 147x99cm) In this painting, Magritte depicts a miniature train suspended and coming out of a fireplace. This was one of the rare occasions in which a sudden image, almost a hallucination, appeared to Magritte. Although Magritte’s paintings may seem a little psychedelic, Magritte disliked many artists’ dependency on visions from dreams and delusions. Instead, he preferred complete, thorough, and deliberate paintings. _ From the 1920s on, the Surrealists, following laws of chance and the inspiration of dreams, sought to weave inner and outer experience into a totally new expression of reality. In his witty paintings, the Belgian René Magritte created absurd juxtapositions and visual puns. His Time Transfixed features improbable elements, a locomotive emerging from a fireplace, clock, empty candlesticks, plain room, and mirror without reflections, all painted with a realistic technique that paradoxically heightens the mysterious quality of this vivid but dreamlike image. — Le Jockey Perdu (The Lost Jockey) (1925) This is Magritte’s first major work. Magritte considered The Lost Jockey his first "’realized’" painting, since it was the first in which he played with a poetic idea. Magritte painted The Lost Jockey after seeing de Chirico’s The Song of Love, which demonstrated, according to Magritte, "the ascendancy of poetry over painting." In this painting, a jockey is situated in the middle of a forest composed of trees looking like giant balustrades. Here, Magritte juxtaposes the immobility of the trees with the fleeting motion of the horse and rider. In classic Magritte manner, common objects are disoriented. Balustrades, normally used to support stair rails, appear in exaggerated proportions as tree trunks. Max Ernst coined the word "phallustrade" in describing Magritte’s handling of the balustrades, which reoccur in many of Magritte’s other works. Magritte skips back and forth from the real to the unreal, from the conscious to the unconscious. — L’Assassin Menacé (The Threatened Assassin) (1926) Magritte painted this piece while in the Parisian Surrealism scene. In this painting, two men in bowler hats, one holding a human limb as a club and the other holding a net, wait outside a room. In the room, a man listens to a record while a bleeding, nude female lies on a bed. Three men observe the scene from the outside. Here, Magritte explores space and perspective by playing with the foreground and background. Some critics liken this painting to an episode of Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas, the evil genius of crime whom the Surrealists adopted as their corrupt hero. Fantômas was the sly criminal who never once, in a long lifetime of thirty-two volumes, got caught for any sort of wrongdoing. He turned human values and morality upside-down and always outsmarted the law. — La Condition Humaine I (The Human Condition I) (1933) In this painting, Magritte plays with space frames and the notion of the "inside" versus the "outside." Magritte best describes this piece in his own words: "In front of a window, as seen from the interior of a room, I placed a picture that represented precisely the portion of landscape blotted out by the picture… For the spectator it [the tree in the painting] was simultaneously inside the room; in the picture, and outside, in the real landscape, in thought." The contradiction lies in the relation between and treatment of three-dimensional space versus two-dimensional space. Writer Suzi Gablik comments on the piece: "In this single image he has defined the whole complexity of modern art — a complexity which has led to a devaluation of the imitation of nature as the basic premise of painting." — The Human Condition II (1935). Same idea, but this time it is the view of the sea that is expanded to the right by the painting inside the room. — L’Empire des Lumières (The Empire of Lights) (1954) Magritte seemed to divide the world into bipolar halves — night and day, real and unreal, inside and outside. At the same time, he placed these halves together in a precariously balanced whole. In this painting, he depicts night and day simultaneously, disrupting commonsense conceptions of time. A house is found in complete darkness, except for a bright (perhaps artificial) light. Magritte uses the Surrealist device of the double image, and one cannot tell whether the house should be more lit or plunged into complete darkness. Magritte said of this and other related paintings, "A thought limited to similarities can only contemplate a starry sky with a nocturnal sky. An inspired thought which evoked the mystery of a visible thing can be described by painting: indeed, it consists uniquely of visible things: skies, trees, people, solids, inscriptions, etc." — Euclidean Promenades (1955, 163x130cm) _ Surrealism was an art of fantasy, dream, and the unconscious, delving into the recesses of the human psyche to discover mysterious, bizarre, and often disturbing images. René Magritte, however, was a Surrealist painter more fascinated by puzz les and paradoxes than by the nature of the unconscious. The Promenades of Euclid presents the age-old problem of illusion versus reality. In this witty picture within a picture, the canvas in front of the window seems to exactly replicate the section of city it blocks from view. But does it? Could the twin forms of tower and street exist only in the artist's imagination? Or do we view the actual city through a transparent canvas? — Le 16 Septembre (1955, 36x27cm) _ Magritte ranks among the greatest Surrealist painters. Trees are a recurrent subject in his work. As Magritte stated: "Growing from the earth to the sun, a tree is an image of certain happiness. To perceive this image we must be immobile like the tree. When we are moving, it is the tree which becomes the spectator. It is witness, equally, in the shape of chairs, tables and doors, to the more or less agitated spectacle of our life. The tree, having become a coffin, disappears into the earth. And when it is transformed into fire, it vanishes into air." Here Magritte superimposes a crescent moon in front of the tree. The artist referred to his intentional juxtaposition of incongruous objects as "objective stimulus." In reference to this image, Magritte observed: "I have just painted the moon on a tree in the grey-blue colors of evening." Typically, the titles of Magritte's paintings were determined after they were completed. In this case, the title was the idea of Magritte's friend, Louis Scutenaire, a famous Surrealist poet. — Lola de Valence (46x38cm) _ Lola de Valence was one of a group of gouaches shown in Magritte's first one-man show in Paris in 1948. Disgruntled that it took the Parisian art world so long to appreciate his art, Magritte called these gouaches the "vache," or "cow" paintings, after their deliberately provocative style and content. The title of this work refers to a scandalous portrait of a Spanish dancer painted by the French artist Edouard Manet in 1862, and then immortalized in a poem by Charles Baudelaire. Magritte takes images from his own work of the 1930s, the naked woman leaning against a rock and a female torso, and arranges them in a cold and artificial way. Rather than being a painting about a woman, Lola de Valence is a parody on Magritte's own reputation as a painter of enigmatic nudes and the artificiality of the Surrealist encounter with the female body. |
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