Rene Magritte (1898-1967) did not keep copies of his letters, nor did he generally save those he received. But Harry Torczyner, Magritte's confidant, friend, and attorney, cherished the letters he received from the great Belgian Surrealist artist between 1957 and 1967, and kept them all - along with duplicates of his own responses. Here, selections from this lively correspondence are reproduced and set in context by Torczyner's notes. In his letters, Magritte dealt candidly with the daily concerns of his art. He revealed the workings of his own creative process in words and, frequently, in drawings. Although they belonged to different worlds, Magritte the painter and Torczyner the lawyer shared similar mental inclinations and a vivid curiosity. They were both hostile to obligatory sentiments; boredom was deemed to be the supreme menace, and they remained mutually critical in their correspondence and in their encounters - while remaining friends. The Magritte-Torczyner connection had its special tone, which this book faithfully reflects. Illustrated with reproductions of paintings mentioned in the letters, as well as with personal photographs of both men, this intriguing book offers fresh insights into the last ten years of Magritte's life and work.

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.

For René Magritte, painting was a form of thinking. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception—what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation—as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. This book makes the claim that Magritte’s painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.