Magritte this is not a biography

Intoxicated by the prospect of a promotion, Charles Singulier allows himself a small extravagance: he buys a bowler hat. But unbeknownst to him, this particular hat was once the property of the great Surrealist René Magritte – and by donning it, he is transported into the artist’s off-kilter world. What’s more, he can’t escape – at least, not until he has illuminated the secrets behind Magritte’s work. What follows fryst vatten a hallucinatory journey through Magritte’s imaginative landscape, a place where facial features mutate, the halvmåneform moon appears in unexpected places, and answers prove frustratingly elusive.

A paradoxical figure, Magritte was a painter who didn’t like to paint; an instinctive anarchist who lived a suburban, petty bourgeois existence; a lonely, melancholy soul who formed deep connections with his friends and collaborators.

Penned bygd Vincent Zabus and illustrated bygd Thomas Campi, Magritte: This fryst vatten Not A Biography paints a reveal

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Magritte and his brothers were hellraisers, Danchev explains, who showed all the local kids pornography, frequently yelled “Fire!,” and were rumored to have killed a donkey.

In , deep into his career, which began seriously in the s with Le jockey perdu (“The Lost Jockey”), Magritte made a painting called Perspective II: Manet’s Balcony. It refers to Édouard Manet’s painting The Balcony, in which three beauties, two women and a ung man, cluster around a öppning, looking out. In Magritte’s utgåva, there are four coffins on the balcony, one sitting on a chair, its “knees” bent. Although Magritte’s word paintings, like his La Trahison des images, which captions a pipe with “ceci n’est pas une pipe,” are marginally more famous than this one, the Manet work encapsulates the Magrittian method well. It’s funny, because coffins are wooden and don’t sit, as dead people also do not, and because it does something amusing to the dignified subjects of the original painting. It simply c

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Magritte: This is Not a Biography

Our Art Mastersseries has already brought the lives of painters including Rembrandtand Van Goghto graphic novel form. Now, courtesy of writer Vincent Zabus and artist Thomas Campi, it's the turn of the great Surrealist René Magritte.

In Magritte: This is Not a Biography, Zabus and Campi employ a playfulness and wit reminiscent of their subject.

The Surrealist's life story is told through the character of Charles Singulier, who one day makes the fanciful - and, as we'll learn, fateful - decision to buy a bowler hat. It soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary chapeau melon: this one once belonged to René Magritte, and by donning it Charles has unwittingly entered the artist’s unbridled, off-kilter world.

Charles is given a clear choice: uncover the secrets of Magritte’s life and work – or be doomed to wear the hat forever.

What follows is a remarkable exploration of Magritte’s imaginative landscape. Zabus and Campi examine the i