Magritte, René (1898-1967)

A Belgian painter. He followed courses at the Brussels Académie des Beaux-Arts from 1914 and joined the Surrealist group in 1926. He became famous in the USA with his first personal exhibition in 1936. In 1938 it was the turn of London to host him. It was also during the 1930s that he became a fellow traveller of the Belgian Communist Party. For him painting does not consist of representing an object, but the action of the painter’s thought on this object.