Magritte: Life Line

In 1938, René Magritte delivered a lecture entitled “La Ligne de vie” (“The Life Line”) in Antwerp―one of the rare occasions in which the artist talked about his work in public. During the hour-long lecture, he illustrated, with the aid of slides, the evolution of his work, and revealed the techniques that had allowed him to create images characterized by what he called a “disturbing poetic effect.”
The most celebrated Belgian artist of the 20th century, René Magritte (1898–1967) is best known for his hyper-illusionistic Surrealist paintings that explore the relationship between image, language and reality. “It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world,” Magritte said of his strategy of staging strange juxtapositions of objects. “Art for me is not an end in itself, but a means of evoking that mystery.”