Rene Magritte - “The Son of Man’ (1964)

Rene Magritte
Surrealism Movement

Surrealism is an artistic movement that had a significant influence on visual arts,

philosophy, and cinema during the twentieth century. The main proposal of this
movement is to use the unconscious, giving people permission to open the way to the
mystery of life through their own art (Brodska 2009, p.63).

Rene Magritte (November 21, 1898 - August 15, 1967) was a painter who had a
significant impact on the surrealist movement. Magritte created a visual vocabulary
with images that presented multiple transformations with supreme ambiguities and
flexible indeterminacies (Allmer, 2019 p.8). His style was marked by illusory realism,
Trompe-l'oiel and word games exploring the limits of reality and leaving the public
intrigued, making it unique among modern painters and questioning from the beginning
its relationship with the various traditions that constituted Surrealism (Allmer, 2019).
Cinematography was a crucial part of the development of his style of surrealist images.
Magritte incorporated cinematographic references and scenes into his paintings
throughout his career (Allmer, 2019 p.96). He was also inspired by the basic tricks of
magicians and put similar effects in his paintings for the creation and transformation of
familiar objects thus changing the constitution of certain objects. (Almmer, 2019 p.
170/171).

Magritte's contributions to surrealism go beyond his paintings' aesthetics. His works

intelligently addressed the fundamental principles of movement. Magritte provides
communities with the opportunity to develop their own opinions about the world through
his surrealist images ( Kathleen, 2016 p. 19). In "Betrayal of Images" (1929), one of his
most famous works, he challenges the relationship between words and the image
depicting a pipe with the description "Insto is not a pipe.". Magritte challenged
conventional logic thus impacting contemporary art inspiring several artists to explore
visual limits and reality.

Allmer, P. (2019). René Magritte [eBook]. London: Reaktion Books. Available via: ProQuest Ebook Central [Accessed 15
October 2023].

Brodskaia, N. (2009). Surrealism. 1st ed. New York: Parkstone International. Available at:
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ntuuk/reader.action?docID=915249&ppg=191 [Accessed 2 October 2023].

Magritte, R. (2016). René Magritte: Selected Writings (K. Rooney, Ed.). Minneapolis, Minnesota : University of Minnesota
Press. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1f89t9s.6 [Accesssed 1 November 2023].