Rene Magritte Paintings

The most celebrated Belgian artist of the twentieth century, Rene Magritte has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. His imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality.   The illustrative quality of Magritte's pictures often results in a powerful paradox: images that are witty and beautiful in their clarity and simplicity, but which also provoke unsettling thoughts. They seem to declare that they hide no mystery, and yet they are also marvellously strange. Magrite's earliest paintings, were Impressionistic in style. The paintings he produced during the years 1918–1924 were influenced by Futurism and by the figurative Cubism.