Catalogue raisonné.

The first book-length material study of the works of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. René Magritte (1898–1967) is the most famous Belgian artist of the twentieth century and a celebrated representative of the Surrealist movement. Much has been written about his practices, artistic community, and significance within the history of modernism, but little has been documented regarding his process. This volume examines fifty oil paintings made by Magritte between 1921 and 1967, now held at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. This technical study of his works using noninvasive scientific imaging and chemical analysis reveals the artist’s painting materials, his habit of overpainting previous compositions, and the origins and mechanisms of surface and pigment degradation. Of interest to conservators, scientists, curators, and enthusiasts of twentieth-century art, this book expands our understanding of Magritte the artist and provides new and useful findings that will inform strategies for the future care of his works.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of the Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to the Getty’s collections, initiatives, and research. This issue features essays on works by Bolognese painter Guido Reni and his studio; a collection of late nineteenth-century images by one of Iran’s most prolific photographers, Antoin Sevruguin; Le Corbusier’s encounters with and monumentalization of the konak, a type of Ottoman house; the correspondence between René Magritte and his wife while he stayed at the London home of patron and collector Edward James; the activities of Belgian surrealist Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens as art dealer and collector; and art historian and critic Leo Steinberg’s unpublished research on Titian. Shorter texts include notices on three joining fragments of an Urartian bronze belt; a sketchbook newly attributed to Florentine architect, engineer, and set designer Giulio Parigi; photo albums documenting the plague pandemic in late nineteenth-century Bombay; four scrapbooks produced by Neue Sachlichkeit photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch; and the correspondence between Swiss curator Harald Szeemann and Russian artist Lev Nusberg.

The first major biography of the pathbreaking, perpetually influential surrealist artist and iconoclast whose inspiration can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé—by the celebrated biographer of Cézanne and Braque In this thought-provoking life of René Magritte (1898-1967), Alex Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte’s surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape, through such legendary works as The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) and his celebrated iterations of Man in a Bowler Hat. Danchev explores the path of this highly unconventional artist from his middle-class Belgian beginnings to the years during which he led a small, brilliant band of surrealists (and famously clashed with André Breton) to his first major retrospective, which traveled to the United States in 1965 and gave rise to his international reputation. Using 50 color images and more than 160 black-and-white illustrations, Danchev delves deeply into Magritte’s artistic development and the profound questions he raised in his work about the very nature of authenticity. This is a vital biography for our time that plumbs the mystery of an iconoclast whose influence can be seen in everyone from Jasper Johns to Beyoncé.