Rene Magritte Surrealist

Belgian painter Rene Magritte specialized in paintings of strange, imaginary scenes, often involving men in bowler hats. This one has hundreds of them hovering in the air above an ordinary— looking street. Golconda 1953

Despite the strangeness of the scene, Magritte painted it in a very lifelike way. It is only the combination of things that makes it look absurd. Magritte loved painting ordinary things in ordinary situations. He said he wanted to play with the viewer’s expectations in order to “challenge the real world.

Magritte’s pictures formed an important part of an art movement known as Surrelism. Surrealist works were not meant to be un-real but more than real or “sur-real” (sur is French for “above”).

The Surrealists wanted to create strange images in order to startle viewers into new ways of thinking about the world. They saw beauty in the most bizarre, unexpected combinations of things such as a lobster and a telephone.