René MagritteBelgian surrealist artist René Magritte was a master not only of the obvious, but also of the obscure. In his works, Magritte plays with everyday objects, habits and human emotions, placing them in foreign contexts and questioning their familiar meanings. He suggested new interpretations of old things in his deceptively simple paintings, making the mundane profound and the rational irrational. He paints his paintings the same way he lives his life: with a strange modesty and constant analysis. Magritte was born in 1898 in the small town of Lessines, a cosmopolitan region of Belgium heavily influenced by the French. Twelve years later, Magritte settled with his parents and two younger brothers in Châtelet, where the future artist studied drawing. On vacation with his grandmother and aunt Flora during the summer months, Magritte frequented an old cemetery in Soignies. In this cemetery, Magritte often played with a little girl, opening trapdoors and descending into underground vaults. This experience would prove a great influence on his later works, as wooden coffins and granite headstones recur in many of his paintings. Magritte also developed a fascination with religion during this time, often disguising himself as a priest and holding mock masses in all seriousness. In 1912, Régina Bertinchamp, Magritte's mother, committed suicide by drowning in the Sambre. The night of her suicide, the Magrittes followed Bertinchamp's tracks to the river, where they found her dead with her nightgown wrapped around her face. Magritte was then 14 years old. He would claim years later that his only memory of his mother's death was his pride in being the center of attention and his subsequent identity formation as "the son of a dead woman". Some critics point out that several of the subjects in Magritte's paintings are veiled in white sheets in reference to his mother's suicide. A year later, Magritte's father moved the family to Charleroi. It was in Charleroi that Magritte met his future wife Georgette Berger on a carousel at the funfair. However, the two men would not see each other again until a chance meeting in Brussels years later. In Charleroi, Magritte quickly lost interest in his studies and asked his father for permission to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. ...... middle of paper ...... Faubourg in Paris. The exhibition caused a lot of scandal, but won few admirers. Soon after, Magritte resigned himself to his original style, although he bitterly attributed this feedback to his desire to please Georgette, who preferred his earlier paintings. He continued to gain much worldwide acclaim with paintings such as L'Empire des Lumières (L'Empire des Lumières, 1954), which used standard surrealist techniques and Magritte's precise lines. On August 15, 1967, Magritte died in Brussels. Unlike many of his surrealist counterparts, Magritte lived humbly and incongruously. He did not attract much attention to himself and lived his life relatively uneventfully. Despite his modest lifestyle, Magritte managed to leave an artistic legacy by transforming the ordinary into the fantastic. While some art historians attribute Magritte's art to his desire to oppose and combat the triviality of everyday life, others suggest that his work goes beyond escapism and serves to reveal some of the most obscure and complex aspects of the human condition. Whatever the impetus for his art, it is certain that Magritte's works are both hauntingly beautiful and deeply provocative..