Rene Magritte (1898-1967)

Magritte was born on November 21, 1898 in Belgium. He thought there was something magical about painting and at 16, he started attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium, where he took classes in drawing, decorative painting, and ornamental composition. He got married when he was 24 and began working as a graphic artist, doing mostly wallpaper designs. In 1923, he sold his first painting, a portrait of a famous singer of the time. He tried many different modern art styles, including Futurism, Cubism, and Surrealism.

Futurism started in Italy in the early 1900s as a way to show the energy of modern life, especially of machinery. Cubism began in Paris about the same time as a way to show natural things as abstract and sometimes geometric structures. The third style, Surrealism, which had also started in France, used images that came more from the artist's imagination and dreams than from nature.

Magritte and his wife moved to Paris in 1927 and became friends with other well-known modern artists. He tried many different styles, not all of which were popular, but he was always trying. "Everything we see hides another thing," he said. "We always want to see what is hidden by what we see." In his art, he would paint things with as much realistic detail as possible and put the objects in strange environments so that he could "challenge the real world." Like most artists, he was fascinated by light and the way it was reflected on things. He also liked to paint objects and people as if they were floating in mid-air. Sometimes he would put the same object several times in the painting.

Magritte made his first and only trip to the United States in 1965 to attend the opening of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He died on August 15, 1967 in Brussels.