René François Ghislain Magritte (French: [ʁəne fʁɑ̃swa ɡilɛ̃ maɡʁit]; 21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation.

He was the oldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor and textile merchant,[3] and Régina (née Bertinchamps), who was a milliner before she got married.

[3] Also during 1922, the poet Marcel Lecomte showed Magritte a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's The Song of Love (painted in 1914).

In 1922–1923, Magritte worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time.

He briefly adopted a colorful, painterly style in 1943–44, an interlude known as his "Renoir period", as a reaction to his feelings of alienation and abandonment that came with living in German-occupied Belgium.

[18] In 1946, renouncing the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, he joined several other Belgian artists in signing the manifesto Surrealism in Full Sunlight.

During this time, Magritte supported himself through the production of fake Picassos, Braques, and de Chiricos—a fraudulent repertoire he was later to expand into the printing of forged banknotes during the lean postwar period.

This venture was undertaken alongside his brother Paul and fellow Surrealist and "surrogate son" Marcel Mariën, to whom had fallen the task of selling the forgeries.

[22] Politically, Magritte stood to the left, and retained close ties to the Communist Party, even in the post-war years.

[25] Popular interest in Magritte's work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist, and conceptual art.

[27] In 1936, Magritte's marriage became troubled when he met a young performance artist, Sheila Legge, and began an affair with her.

Magritte's work frequently displays a collection of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things.

[38] Elsewhere, Magritte challenges the difficulty of artwork to convey meaning with a recurring motif of an easel, as in his The Human Condition series (1933, 1935) or The Promenades of Euclid (1955), wherein the spires of a castle are "painted" upon the ordinary streets which the canvas overlooks.

"[41] René Magritte described his paintings as "visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'.

Psychoanalysts who have examined bereaved children have hypothesized that Magritte's back-and-forth play with reality and illusion reflects his "constant shifting back and forth from what he wishes—'mother is alive'—to what he knows—'mother is dead'".

[43] More recently, Patricia Allmer has demonstrated the influence of fairground attractions on Magritte's art—from carousels and circuses to panoramas and stage magic.

He considered the pop artists' representation of "the world as it is" as "their error", and contrasted their attention to the transitory with his concern for "the feeling for the real, insofar as it is permanent.

[2] Thanks to his "sound knowledge of how to present objects in a manner both suggestive and questioning", his works have been frequently adapted or plagiarized in advertisements, posters, book covers and the like.

[50] The logo of Apple Corps, The Beatles' company, is inspired by Magritte's Le Jeu de Mourre, a 1966 painting.

Magritte's imagery has inspired filmmakers ranging from the surrealist Marcel Mariën to mainstream directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Bernardo Bertolucci, Nicolas Roeg, John Boorman and Terry Gilliam.

In the 1999 movie The Thomas Crown Affair starring Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo and Denis Leary, the Magritte painting The Son of Man was prominently featured as part of the plot line.

In the early 2000s, two LPs were released that had album cover art referencing The Lovers: Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation by Funeral for a Friend and Frances the Mute by The Mars Volta.

In John Green's novel (2012) and movie (2014), The Fault in Our Stars, the main character Hazel Grace Lancaster wears a tee shirt with Magritte's, The Treachery of Images, (This is not a pipe.)

[55] Belgian actor Pierre Gervais is set to play René Magritte in the 2025 television series This Is Not A Murder Mystery.

[57] Housed in the five-level neo-classical Hotel Altenloh, on the Place Royale, it displays some 200 original Magritte paintings, drawings and sculptures[58] including The Return, Scheherazade and The Empire of Light.

Olympia (1948), a nude portrait of Magritte's wife reportedly worth about US$1.1 million, was stolen from this museum on the morning of 24 September 2009 by two armed men.