René MagritteLa Comtesse de Monte Christo - Magritte, Boutteilles, Bottles, black and white1966
1966
About the Item
- Creator:René Magritte (1898-1967, Belgian)
- Creation Year:1966
- Dimensions:Height: 12.21 in (31 cm)Width: 9.85 in (25 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Köln, DE
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1496212601002
René Magritte
René Magritte is celebrated today as one of Surrealism’s most talented artists, and, alongside Salvador Dalí, the cheeky, subversive Belgian painter and author is the movement’s best-known representative, having cemented his legacy with what may be the most iconic five words in all of art history: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe).
Magritte’s success, though, hardly came overnight. Born in 1898 in Lessines to a wealthy manufacturer, he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1916 to 1918 but quit before graduation. His early artistic work wavered between Cubism and semi-abstraction, and he found work as a graphic designer while experimenting with his own creative oeuvre. In the mid-1920s, he began to experiment with Surrealism, then a relatively nascent movement that had grown out of the absurdist Dada. Led by André Breton, Surrealism endeavored to record elements of the subconscious and present contradictory, sometimes even nonsensical, narratives that challenged the notion of an absolute reality.
Magritte’s first widely recognized work within this genre was 1927’s The Menaced Assassin, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Shortly after completing this work, Magritte relocated to Paris, to be closer to Breton and the center of the Surrealist movement. This decision would prove critical in his life — and in the trajectory of Surrealist art history. The three years Magritte spent in Paris were his most prolific, and by the close of the 1920s he had completed some of his best-known work, including the seminal 1929 The Treachery of Images, a simple picture of what appears to be a pipe, with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” in neat script below it.
Magritte returned to Brussels in the early 1930s but continued experimenting with work that wavered between dreamlike and nonsensical. His influences throughout this part of his career ranged from Breton to Giorgio de Chirico and Dalí. While living in German-occupied Belgium beginning in the early 1940s, Magritte entered what is often called his Renoir period or what he labeled “Sunlit Surrealism.” He worked in comparatively brighter, more vibrant colors and produced oil paintings and gouaches that were overrun with light and the type of brushstrokes that are usually associated with Impressionist art.
Like many artists during and after the war, Magritte thought deeply about art’s role in answering big existential questions and broke with Surrealism as a result. His Impressionistic The Fifth Season in 1943 resembled little of what he’d painted in years past. His so-called Vache period that followed would represent another stylistic shift that owed to German Expressionism. Not everything changed, however; Magritte would go on to revisit his earliest creative impulses, in some cases appropriating elements from fellow artists in his own depictions, as with his Perspective II: Manet’s Balcony in 1950, a playful and probing reinterpretation of Edouard Manet’s The Balcony. Later in his career, the artist dabbled in sculpture, before dying in 1967.
Find original René Magritte prints and other art on 1stDibs.
- ShippingRetrieving quote...Ships From: Köln, Germany
- Return PolicyA return for this item may be initiated within 14 days of delivery.
- "She fled along the avenue" by Patrick Caulfield, 20th Century, Still Life PrintBy Patrick CaulfieldLocated in Köln, DE"She fled along the avenue" is from the series "Some poems by Jules Laforgue". Patrick Caulfied was deeply inspired by these poems and found to his very own depiction of these poems....Category
1970s Pop Art Still-life Prints
MaterialsScreen
- "Bonjour" by Max Ernst, Good Day, Surrealism, Light Colors, FigurativeBy Max ErnstLocated in Köln, DEEtching in colours by Max Ernst. "Bonjour", 1966 66,5 x 50,1 cm Copy 7/99 Edition of 111 copies (approx.)Category
1960s Surrealist Figurative Prints
MaterialsEtching, Aquatint
- "Terre des nébuleuses" by Max Ernst, Blue, Fog, SurrealismBy Max ErnstLocated in Köln, DEEtching and aquatint in colours (colour variation) by Max Ernst. "Terre des nébuleuses", 1965 38 x 27,5 cm Copy essai 1/1Category
1960s Surrealist Figurative Prints
MaterialsEtching, Aquatint
- "Oiseau sur fond carmin (Oiseau XIV)"By Georges BraqueLocated in Köln, DEOne of the main motifs in Georges Braques late printmaking oeuvre is the bird. By depicting the bird as itself or the flight of birds, Braque found what he called the "still life of ...Category
1950s Modern Animal Prints
MaterialsAquatint
- no title / "Oiseau bleu"By Georges BraqueLocated in Köln, DEOne of the main motifs in Georges Braques late printmaking oeuvre is the bird. By depicting the bird as itself or the flight of birds, Braque found what he called the "still life of ...Category
1950s Modern Animal Prints
MaterialsAquatint
- Beauty 5 - etching, black and white, Katz, Ada, sunglassesBy Alex KatzLocated in Köln, DE"Beauty 5" is from Alex Katz' Beauty series. The topic "beauty" is a very important one for Katz. His whole body of work is due to beauty and it is a reminiscence to his wife Ada, to...Category
2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints
MaterialsEtching, Aquatint
- Israeli Modernist Surrealist Etching Cut PearBy Shlomo ZafrirLocated in Surfside, FL20.75x14.5 sheet size. 9.5x7.75 image size Shlomo Zafrir is active/lives in Israel, France. Shlomo Zafrir is known for cubist painting. Shlomo Zafrir is a painter and, at the same t...Category
20th Century Surrealist Still-life Prints
MaterialsEtching
- Samuel Bak Surrealist Etching Israeli Bezalel Artist "Hidden Pear", Fruit BowlBy Samuel BakLocated in Surfside, FLHIDDEN PEAR, color etching, signed in pencil, numbered 7/50, Jerusalem Print workshop blind stamp, image 7 ½ x 5 ½”, sheet 15 x 10 ¼”. Samuel Bak (born 12 August 1933) is a Polish- American painter and writer who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel in 1948. Since 1993, he has lived in the United States. Samuel Bak was born in Wilno, Poland, Bak was recognized from an early age as having an artistic talent. He describes his family as secular, but proud of their Jewish identity. By 1939 when Bak was six years old, the war began and Wilno was transferred from Poland to Lithuania. When Wilno was occupied by the Germans on June 24, 1941, Bak and his family were forced to move into the ghetto. At the age of nine, he held his first exhibition inside the Ghetto. Bak and his mother sought refuge in a Benedictine convent where a Catholic nun named Maria Mikulska tried to help them. After returning to the ghetto, they were deported to a forced labour camp, but took shelter again in the convent where they remained in hiding until the end of the war. By the end of the war, Samuel and his mother were the only members of his extensive family to survive. His father, Jonas, was shot by the Germans in July 1944, only a few days before Samuel's own liberation. As Bak described the situation, "when in 1944 the Soviets liberated us, we were two among two hundred of Vilna's survivors--from a community that had counted 70 or 80 thousand." Bak and his mother as pre-war Polish citizens were allowed to leave Soviet-occupied Wilno and travel to central Poland, at first settling briefly in Lodz. They soon left Poland and traveled into the American occupied zone of Germany. From 1945 to 1948, he and his mother lived in Displaced Persons camps in Germany. He spent most of this period at the Landsberg am Lech DP camp in Germany. It was there he painted a self-portrait shortly before repudiating his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Bak also studied painting in Munich during this period, and painted "A Mother and Son", 1947, which evokes some of his dark memories of the Holocaust and escape from Soviet-occupied Poland. In 1948, Bak and his mother immigrated to Israel. In 1952, he studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, he continued his studies in Paris (from 1956 at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts) and spent various periods of time in Rome, Paris, Switzerland and Israel before settling permanently in the United States. In 2001, Bak returned to Vilnius for the first time and has since visited his hometown several times. Samuel Bak is a conceptual artist with elements of post-modernism as he employs different styles and visual vernaculars, i.e. surrealism (Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte), analytical cubism (Picasso), pop art (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein) and quotations from the old masters. The artist never paints direct scenes of mass death. Instead, he employs allegory, metaphor and certain artistic devices such as substitution: toys instead of the murdered children who played with them, books, instead of the people who read them. Further devices are quotations of iconographical prototypes, i.e. Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" on the Sistine Ceiling or Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving entitled "Melencholia" . In the late 1980s Bak opened up about his paintings, stating they convey “a sense of a world that was shattered.” He turns these prototypes into ironical statements. Irony in the art of Samuel Bak does not mean parody or derision, but rather disenchantment, and the attempt to achieve distance from pain. Recurring symbols are: the Warsaw Ghetto Child, Crematorium Chimneys or vast backgrounds of Renaissance landscape that symbolize the indifference of the outside world. These form a disturbing contrast with the broken and damaged images in the foreground. Samuel Bak's paintings cause discomfort, they are a warning against complacency, a bulwark against collective amnesia with reference to all acts of barbarism, worldwide and throughout the ages, through his personal experience of genocide. In Bak's piece entitled Trains Bak creates a vast grey landscape with large mounts creating the structure of a train. Massive taper candles burn in the distance further down the train tracks, surrounding an eruption. The smoke from the candles and volcano pour into a sky of dark ominous clouds that lurk over the landscape. Here Bak has created a whole new meaning for “trains.” Many of Bak’s pieces incorporate aspects of Jewish culture and the holocaust with a dark and creative twist, such as Shema Israel, Alone, and Ghetto. Chess as a theme of life has always fascinated Bak. In the DP camps and in Israel, he often played chess with his stepfather Markusha. Underground II, 1997, portrays chess pieces in a sunken, subterranean evocation of the Vilna ghetto. Select Group Exhibitions Graphic Works by Contemporary Israeli artists - Israel Museum, Jerusalem Avraham Ofek, Igael Tumarkin, Shmuel Bak, Avigdor Arikha,Jakob Steinhardt, Anna Ticho Artist and Society in Israeli Art, Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv Moshe Gat, Marcel Janco, Yohanan Simon, Ruth Schloss, Menashe Kadishman, Samuel Bak, Yosl Bergner. Selected museum exhibitions Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel – 1963 Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel – 1963 Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA – 1976 Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany – 1977 Heidelberg Museum, Heidelberg, Germany – 1977 Haifa University, Haifa, Israel – 1978 Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany – 1978 Jüdisches Museum, Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Germany – 1993 Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, NY – 1994 South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, South Africa. 2013-2014. B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, Washington, DC – 1997 Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, TX – 1997 National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania – 2001 Felix Nussbaum...Category
20th Century Surrealist Figurative Prints
MaterialsEtching
- Salvador Dali - Statue of Liberty - Original Handsigned EtchingBy Salvador DalíLocated in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CHSalvador Dali - Original Handsigned Etching Title: Statue of Liberty Dimensions: 63.5 x 43.5 cm Sheet: 75.7 X 56.5 cm Handsigned Edition: EA Catalogue raisonné: Michler/Löpsinger 113Category
1960s Surrealist Figurative Prints
MaterialsEtching
- Characters XVIII ∞-CBy Guntars SietinsLocated in Palm Springs, CAThe illusions and reflections in Sietins prints often bring M.C. Escher to mind, but his prints have a distinctive feel all their own. The numbers reflect up into the ball, along wit...Category
2010s Surrealist Still-life Prints
MaterialsAquatint, Mezzotint
- The Music Lesson or The Sound of the BellBy (after) René MagritteLocated in London, GBRENE MAGRITTE 1898-1967 Lessines, Belgium 1898 - Bruxelles 1967 (Belgian) Title: The Music Lesson or The Sound of the Bell / La Lecon de Musique o...Category
1960s Surrealist Still-life Prints
MaterialsEtching
- A Sculpture Framed by a PrintBy Valton TylerLocated in Dallas, TXIn The New York Times Arts in America column, Edward M. Gomez writes of Valton Tyler, "visionary seems the right word for describing his vivid, unusual and technically refined painti...Category
Late 20th Century Surrealist Prints and Multiples
MaterialsRag Paper, Etching, Aquatint