The retrospective exhibition of works by Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte is to continue until June 28th 1998 at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.
Magritte played a major rôle in the history of Surrealism with his production of «talking» pictures in which titles were used to baffle viewers. His painting representing a pipe with the title : «This is not a pipe» is probably the best example of Magritte's disconcerting habit of unsettling the public.
In fact Magritte was a poet who beyong images probably wanted to provoke questioning. His language was vehiculated through painting and his works usually tend to tell stories. The exponent of mystery and of some certain symbolism, Magritte however was not a great master of the brush but just an average artist infused with incredible genius, a bourgeois who only became a revolutionary painter when at work, in fact the heir of Pieter Brueghel and James Ensor and of those Belgians who had a sense of what the village fair and its absurd sides are in their country. Magritte played with what ordinary people treat as non-sense as this could have been seen in the 350 works displayed in the Museum.
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