This week reading was very interesting, but the works of Magritte always makes me very happy – so I decided to dedicate my weekly field journal to Rene Magritte 🙂
Since the birth of the advertising in the late 19th century, there has been a great overlap between publicity and fine art. Many artists were graphic designers and vice versa.
I believe that the painter that had a tremendous impact on advertising was the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967). His images and ideas are known to millions of people who do not know him by name. The advertising industry has had a vast effect on modern art, but no modern artist has had more effect on advertising itself other than Magritte.
Magritte was linked to the Surrealism movement. Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early ’20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious (1). In 1927, Magritte moved from Brussels to Paris and became a leading figure in the visual Surrealist movement. Influenced by de Chirico’s paintings between 1910 and 1920, Magritte painted erotically explicit objects juxtaposed in dreamlike surroundings (1).
“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” – Magritte
The common man in Magritte’s paintings, with his raincoat and bowler, whether standing with an apple in front of his face or floating down in multitudes upon the unperturbed streets of Brussels, really is Magritte — the poker-faced enchanter. No artist ever behaved less like one (2).
The Common Man
Magritte actually worked as a commercial artist himself, and shaped his vision as an artist. He accepted a job as a designer at a wallpaper factory and later began working as a freelance graphic designer. He produced posters and advertisements in brochures and magazines, predominantly for the Belgian couture house Norine, but also for a number of other clients, including bookshops, a jeweller, and the car manufacturer Alfa Romeo (3)
He also designed around 25 covers for sheet music of popular songs. Several of his paintings from this period, such as (clearly demonstrates that Magritte had abandoned the Cubist technique in favor of creating pictures that was already fully Surrealist) and Cinéma bleu (both 1925), are suffused with the kind of languorous, elegant spirit and faintly Art Deco style that characterized the advertising of the time (4)
The Bather 1925
Cinema Blue 1925
Inspiration
Magritte’s work had been imitated countless times for everything from Volkswagen cars to the French state railway and was an inspiration to friends, artists and movements (5).
The False Mirror (1928), Magritte’s close-up painting of a lash-less eye, in which the iris appears to reflect puffy white clouds floating against a bright blue sky, inspired the logo of America’s CBS television network (6):
Its interesting to note that while the Apple Computer logo was inspired by the Beatles, the original Beatles Apple logo in turn was itself directly inspired by Magritte. Taking Magritte for inspiration, the Apple record labels were designed by Gene Mahon, an advertising agency designer (7):
The album “Late for the Sky” by Jackson Browne cover was inspired by the 1954 painting “L’Empire des Lumieres”:
“cover concept Jackson Browne if it’s all reet with Magritte”
The Pleasures of Electricity is an album by John Foxx was based on Magritte’s painting Le Principe du Plaisir:
And finally – the personal corner – I was always fascinated by the works of Renee Magritte as an artist and as a graphic designer – and a while back I created this composition in Photoshop:
Homage to Rene Magritte by Orna Kretchmer
References
- http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm
- http://www.mattesonart.com/article-on-magritte-the-poker-faced-enchanter.aspx
- http://www.mattesonart.com/1926-1930-surrealism-paris-years.aspx
- http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/magritte1.html
- http://www.theartstory.org/artist-magritte-rene.htm
- http://www.mattesonart.com/cbs-and-magritte.aspx
- http://www.achangeinthewind.com/2011/12/the-art-of-john-lennon.html
Orna Kretchmer 