René Magritte was an enigmatic and strange man who painted surrealist paintings. Little is known about his childhood, except that his mother, Régine Magritte, committed suicide by drowning in the Sambre River. The young Magritte would have discovered his body floating with his nightwear covering his face. It is assumed that this trauma had an influence on many of Magritte's works. When René Magritte picked up his paintbrushes, he created beautiful visual puzzles that delight and confuse the viewer. Its clean lines and highly detailed finishes made its brushstrokes almost invisible; his paintings seem to come from a printing press. Magritte described his paintings as “his works”. He worked on the paintings and the questions and answers that spawned them in his imagination. His art asks questions, seeks answers and challenges the conventional definition of ideas. He discovered the surrealist art style in the 1920s and produced some of the most beautiful and moving works of art in the world. He was a shy, introverted man who hated the social familiarity that society imposed on its celebrities. He liked to maintain social boundaries and was quite reclusive. Ironically, he regularly used people as objects and removed the boundaries of association between objects to create his visual puzzles. He did not like being recognized and this became one of the recurring themes of his works. Always an enigmatic secret agent, Magritte is as much an enigma as his paintings. Surrealism began as a literary movement in the 1920s, but was adopted by painters attracted to the surrealists' freedom of expression. It began in France with a writer, André Breton, and is closely linked to Dadaism and Abstrac...... middle of paper ...... the ism of dreams and the expressive images generated by the subconscious were far more stimulating than the representational and logical images of the conscious mind. Surrealist artists created art from what others considered confusing and unintelligible. In effect, they were taking a concept created for healing and using it to create art. The movement spread and soon surrealist groups were popping up in metropolitan areas around the world. It was around the same time that René Magritte discovered a painting by Giorgio de Chirico and quickly became a member of the surrealist group. This painting is not intended to make the viewer think about blowjobs, but rather to examine how we perceive reality. To quote Magritte: “An object never fulfills the same function as its image – or its name. » http://quote.robertgenn.com/auth_search.php?authid=704