The Surreal Universe of René Magritte

René Magritte (1898–1967), a Belgian surrealist painter, used visual poetry and humor to reveal the mysterious nature of cognition and perception. His ambition was to disturb the art world by shattering the way we usually see things. “All that we see hides something else,” he said. His imaginative works purposefully challenge logic through strange object pairings, dream-like scenes, and obscure titles like “The False Mirror” and “Time Transfixed.” The complex relationship between language and meaning, word and image, as well as the rules of pictorial representation, is most prominently explored in "The Treachery of Images,” his best-known painting. This course gives students a comprehensive background for understanding Magritte's surreal universe through in-class lectures and field trips to museums. Students will investigate Magritte’s word paintings, his thought process, and his philosophical investigations in comparison to those of other surrealists like Salvador Dali, Juan Miró, Leonora Carrington, and Max Ernst. Suzi Gablik's monograph on Magritte will complement our study.

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