René Magritte was a Belgian painter, born in Lessines in 1898 and dead in Brussels in 1967, and one of the best-known Surrealists.
He is remembered for three images: a pipe above the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," a man in a bowler hat whose face is hidden by a floating apple, and a quiet street at night under a daytime sky. All three are painted in a plain, careful style, and all three refuse to add up.
He liked to say that his paintings hid nothing. People have been looking for the secret ever since.
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The secret was never supposed to be there. Magritte described his paintings as "visible images which conceal nothing," and said the mystery they evoke "means nothing either, it is unknowable." To the question "what does that mean?", he said, there is no answer.
Biographers answered for him, and nearly every answer starts in February 1912. Magritte was thirteen when his mother, Régina, drowned herself in the river Sambre. The story that circulates says he watched as her body was pulled out, her dress covering her face, and that the shrouded heads he began painting in 1927 come straight from that sight.
The evidence is thin. Later research discredited the idea that he was there, and the dress over her face is passed down with a "supposedly" attached. The man who painted these pictures is harder to reduce to one scene. In 1948 he filled a Paris gallery with pictures made to offend, and in the same years he lived off fake Picassos.
What You'll Discover
What the legend gets wrong about his mother.
Why Paris never quite kept him.
Why a pipe is not a pipe.
The show built to insult Paris.
Who is hiding behind the apple.
How one street holds night and day.