This insightful biography of the surrealist painter contends that to his peers he was a hero and outsider who resisted symbolic readings of his art
Unlike his surrealist contemporaries, René Magritte tended to keep Freud at a distance from his work – though few artists offer as much scope for armchair analysis. Speaking in 1961, he observed that “psychology doesn’t interest me. It claims to reveal the flow of our thoughts and emotions. Its efforts are contrary to what I know; it seeks to explain a mystery. There is only one mystery: the world.”
One conclusion in reading Alex Danchev’s recreation of Magritte’s formative years, in this diligent and insightful biography (almost complete at the time of Danchev’s death in 2016), is that he was in denial about being in denial. In their village, 30 miles west of Brussels, at the turn of the century, the Magritte family was notorious for its chaos. The artist’s father, a tailor, was also a gambler and drunk who sometimes sold pornography to make ends meet. His mother was severely depressive (“neuraesthenic” was the contemporary term) and apparently had to be locked in the family home overnight for her own safety. The three sons – Magritte was the oldest – were known locally as “Cherokees”; there were widespread rumours of them mistreating animals, even starving a donkey to death in their backyard.
