49 Fun Facts About Rene Magritte

In which country was René Magritte born?

Belgium: born in Lessines, he spent three years among the Surrealists abroad, then came home for good, choosing a quiet middle-class life over a bohemian one.

What does the French caption on Magritte's The Treachery of Images say, in English?

This is not a pipe: Magritte's defence was that nobody could stuff it with tobacco, so writing 'This is a pipe' would have been a lie.

In Magritte's The Son of Man, what hovers in front of the man's face?

A green apple: it is one of the few pictures Magritte meant as a self-portrait, and he painted it with his own face hidden.

In which US city is Magritte's The Treachery of Images on display?

Los Angeles: its county museum, LACMA, named a whole 2006 exhibition after the painting, tracing its pull on later artists such as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns.

What hat do the dozens of floating men wear in Magritte's Golconda?

Bowler hats: Magritte wore one himself as the uniform of the anonymous middle-class man, only for it to become his personal trademark.

Which Houston institution owns Magritte's Golconda?

Menil Collection: its founders, John and Dominique de Menil, were such devoted collectors that their foundation paid for the complete catalogue of his work.

What is paradoxical about the scenes in Magritte's The Empire of Light paintings?

Night street under a daylight sky: the swap makes the bright sky, normally reassuring, the unsettling part, and the darkness below seems deeper for it.

Who bought the Empire of Light Magritte showed in Venice?

Peggy Guggenheim: several collectors had expected to buy the same canvas at the 1954 Biennale, so Magritte painted fresh versions that year for the ones who lost out.

What covers the faces of the kissing couple in Magritte's The Lovers?

White cloth: it is often traced to a tale that young Magritte saw his dead mother's face covered by her dress, but scholars now call that a myth.

How did Magritte's mother, Régina, die in 1912?

Drowning: Régina Magritte drowned herself in the River Sambre, and the old tale that her young son watched the body recovered is now doubted by scholars.

Which Italian painter's The Song of Love moved Magritte to tears when he saw a reproduction of it?

Giorgio de Chirico: his canvas sets a classical bust beside a rubber glove, and Magritte said that on seeing it 'my eyes saw thought for the first time'.

Which 1926 work did Magritte regard as his first Surrealist picture?

The Lost Jockey: it hung in his first solo show the next year, which reviewers panned so badly that he soon moved abroad.

Where did the young Magritte work as a draughtsman before designing adverts?

A wallpaper factory: he drew designs there beside the painter Victor Servranckx, then made posters and adverts until a 1926 gallery contract let him paint full-time.

Which childhood friend from Charleroi did Magritte marry in 1922?

Georgette Berger: they had lost touch for years when they ran into each other again by chance in 1920, and she went on to model for many of his paintings.

After his first solo show flopped in 1927, where did Magritte move to join the Surrealists?

Paris: he befriended André Breton and the Surrealists there, then fell out with Breton and went home after three years.

In Magritte's Not to Be Reproduced, what does the man looking into a mirror see?

The back of his head: a patron had commissioned the picture as his own portrait, yet Magritte managed to paint it without ever showing the sitter's face.

In Magritte's Personal Values, what is odd about the comb, glass and shaving brush in the bedroom?

They are giant-sized: his New York dealer complained that the picture made him feel ill, and Magritte replied that this was proof it worked.

Which political movement did Magritte join in 1932, leaving and rejoining over the years?

Communism: he joined the Party more than once yet argued with it too, insisting that workers deserved luxury for the mind as well as bread.

In Magritte's Hegel's Holiday, what balances on top of an open umbrella?

A glass of water: Magritte pictured the philosopher amused, as if on holiday, by an object that both repels water and holds it.

Magritte's garish 1948 'vache' ('cow') paintings are widely read as a parody of which earlier art movement?

Fauvism: the Fauves were art's 'wild beasts', so Magritte offered a domesticated cow, dashing the pictures off in weeks to outrage the French art world.

Which wealthy British poet commissioned paintings from Magritte for his London home?

Edward James: the eccentric heir was bankrolling Salvador Dalí in the same years, and filled his houses with Surrealist art made to order.

What bursts out of a fireplace in Magritte's Time Transfixed?

A steam locomotive: the fireplace vent stands in for a railway tunnel, and smoke, at home in chimneys and engines alike, is what ties the two together.

Which US city's Art Institute bought Magritte's Time Transfixed at auction in 1970?

Chicago: the seller was auctioning his Surrealist collection to pay for Las Pozas, a concrete dreamscape he was building in the Mexican jungle.

Which American writer's novel lies on the mantelpiece in Magritte's Not to Be Reproduced?

Edgar Allan Poe: the book is a French edition of his sea novel about Arthur Gordon Pym, a nod to a writer the Surrealists revered.

Besides fake Picassos, what did a close friend later claim Magritte and his brother had forged?

Banknotes: the story comes from a younger friend who said he sold the fakes himself, and scholars still dispute how much of it is true.

Which 1946 manifesto did Magritte sign, renouncing violence and pessimism?

Surrealism in Full Sunlight: it argued that after the war the movement should offer charm and joy, not dread, and its leader André Breton denounced Magritte for it.

Whose portrait of Madame Récamier did Magritte repaint with a coffin sitting in her place?

David: Magritte copied the Neoclassical couch and colours faithfully, then sat a coffin where the celebrated beauty reclined, and gave Manet's The Balcony the same treatment.

Which object recurs in Magritte's The Human Condition paintings to question what a picture is?

An easel: we assume its canvas copies the 'real' view behind it, then notice that both are only paint, which is the trap Magritte set.

Which Beatle did art dealer Robert Fraser surprise with Magritte's painting Le Jeu de Mourre in the 1960s?

Paul McCartney: the dealer propped the picture on a table and slipped away unseen, which Paul called the coolest thing anyone had done with him; it went on to inspire the band's company logo.

Which singer-songwriter's 1983 song imagines the Magrittes and their dog as secret doo-wop fans after the war?

Paul Simon: in it the respectable painter and his wife secretly thrill to doo-wop groups like the Penguins, the music Simon himself had fallen for as a boy.

Which 1973 horror film's poster image was inspired by Magritte's The Empire of Light?

The Exorcist: director William Friedkin gave his crew a whole day to light the priest's arrival outside the house so that it would echo the painting.

Which heist film builds its museum finale around Magritte's The Son of Man?

The Thomas Crown Affair: Pierce Brosnan's thief hires dozens of men to dress exactly like the figure in the painting, so the police can't tell which one is him.

Which 1970 Tom Stoppard comedy takes its title from Magritte?

After Magritte: it opens on a household frozen in a bizarre tableau worthy of the painter, then shows that every odd detail has a perfectly sensible cause.

Which Netflix survival drama plants Magritte's The Empire of Light in a missing brother's room in its second episode?

Squid Game: the picture turns up three times in the room, on a book, a postcard and a poster, an early hint about the brother the detective is hunting.

Which Magritte nude of his wife was stolen at gunpoint from his former home in 2009?

Olympia: after two years the thieves handed it back through an insurer's go-between, having found so recognisable a picture impossible to sell.

Where in his rented flat did Magritte paint for more than twenty years?

The dining room: the studio at the bottom of his garden was kept for advertising work, and about half his life's output was painted in the flat.

In Magritte's Elective Affinities, what fills the birdcage in place of a bird?

A giant egg: Magritte said he woke one night and mistook a caged bird for an egg, and the shock taught him to pair objects that secretly belong together.

Which Robin Williams film borrowed the look of its sets from Magritte's paintings?

Toys: the film flopped, but Ferdinando Scarfiotti's Magritte-style sets earned an Oscar nomination for art direction.

In Magritte's The Red Model, what does a pair of leather boots turn into halfway along?

Human feet: the joke is that a leather shoe is already skin wrapped around skin, so Magritte simply let the two grow together.

In Magritte's The Castle of the Pyrenees, what is the castle perched on?

A floating boulder: his lawyer friend Harry Torczyner commissioned the picture and chose the subject himself, then gave it to the Israel Museum.

Which American photographer owned Magritte's The False Mirror, a giant eye filled with sky, in the 1930s?

Man Ray: he kept it for three years before selling it to a New York museum, and the staring eye is often said to have helped inspire the CBS logo.

What is the killer calmly listening to in Magritte's The Menaced Assassin?

A gramophone: he lingers over the music while men wait with a club and a net, a staging Magritte lifted from a silent crime serial he loved.

Where was the young Magritte exploring underground vaults when he met a painter whose work struck him as magic?

An old cemetery: he and a girl would climb out of its burial vaults into the daylight, where a painter from the capital was at work among the broken columns.

Which singer-songwriter's 1974 album Late for the Sky has a cover modelled on Magritte's The Empire of Light?

Jackson Browne: the idea was his own, and photographer Bob Seidemann restaged the painting with a car parked outside a house.

Which New York museum owns the first of Magritte's The Lovers paintings?

Museum of Modern Art: a New York collector, Richard Zeisler, bought the canvas in 1958 and lived with it for forty years before it passed to the museum.

Which Magritte painting shares its name with a 1979 Gary Numan album?

The Pleasure Principle: Numan's sleeve restages the portrait, with the singer at the same table and the painter's stone swapped for a glowing purple pyramid.

Which American rock band put a version of Magritte's The Blank Signature on the cover of The Grand Illusion?

Styx: the painting's horse and rider slip in front of some trees and behind others, an eye-fooling image for an album about fame not being what it seems.

Which masked arch-criminal of French pulp novels and silent films did Magritte adore and borrow from in The Menaced Assassin?

Fantômas: Magritte devoured the books and films as a student, and posed the painting's lurking men like the villain's henchmen in the 1913 screen version.

Which French philosopher wrote a celebrated book-length essay on Magritte's The Treachery of Images?

Michel Foucault: the painter and the philosopher corresponded, and Magritte's letters to him are printed in the book.