Magritte - Hardcover

Sylvester, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810936267 ISBN 13: 9780810936263

Publisher: The Menil Foundation and Abrams, 1992

Synopsis

A book on the works of Rene Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Rene Magritte's mother drowned herself when he was 12; the future painter saw her water-ravaged corpse with its face covered. This trauma, Sylvester asserts, helps explain the Belgian surrealist's consuming preoccupation with hidden faces and things. A curator of the major Magritte retrospective on display in New York, Houston and Chicago in 1992 and 1993, Sylvester pierces the tranquil bourgeois facade of the painter's marriage to Georgette Berger, whom Magritte virtually forced into a long affair with one of his closest friends. Every Magritte fan will want to own this monograph, both for its extraordinary wealth of illustrations (470, including 340 color plates) and its sensitive biographical-critical account of Magritte's career, from his earliest cubist- and futurist-influenced work through his discovery of Giorgio de Chirico to his development of a meticulously precise style that coolly confronted the world in all its terrible mystery and improbability.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Sylvester provides an in-depth portrait of Rene Magritte, a master of the surreal, who, in his own words, produced pictures "in which the eye must 'think' in a completely different way from the usual one." Magritte's imagination and poetic vision created illuminating paradoxes in paint that eventually influenced Pop Art. This biography, published in conjunction with the Magritte catalogue raisonne, of which Sylvester is editor, contains material "outside the scope of that publication." It details Magritte's early world in Belgium; his lifelong marriage; the artistic influences, especially de Chirico; his dealers and colleagues; and the impact of World War II in a well-written narrative developed with the support of the Menil Foundation. There are 470 reproductions here, with over 340 in beautiful color. An excellent choice for libraries collecting widely in modern art.
-Ellen Bates, New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Menil Foundation and Abrams
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0810936267
• ISBN 13: 9780810936263
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352