Consulate General of Belgium in New York,
Ambassador Marc Caloen, underneath
our beautiful Magritte Clouds Umbrella

      The month of march has been very exiting for the Rene Magritte project at Rare Posters. With the help of our friends at Belcham (The Begian Chambre of Commerce in NYC) and the Consulate General of Belgium in NY, we are spreading the word about the year of Rene Magritte. Check out this picture of the esteemed Consul General, Ambassador Marc Calcoen, just as happy as can be to find himself under our beautiful Rene Magritte (La Trahison des Images) Umbrella !

      Also, thanks to photographer Antonio Aguilar, our product is receiving its due attention in the lime light! Follow his experience with the Rene Magritte project through his BLOG.

      Join us in celebrating the life and work of Rene Magritte. From now until the end of the year, we are taking 25% off select Magritte items, including our new exclusive line of Magritte Ties, Magnets, Watches, Cup and Saucers, and more! Click HERE to start saving.

Les Valeurs Personnelles
Sku: AW9178     Size: 27.5 x 19.75 in.
Retail: $40    

Sale: $30

Unlike the visions and images of surrealists like Dali, Ernst and Yves Tanguy who created fantasy imagery, Rene Magritte evoked the ambiguities of reality and real objects. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, the normal becomes abnormal. He inverts the inside and the out, rendering landscapes within the bedroom walls. He brings mundane objects of use to life and makes them life-sized. In short Magritte creates a world of paradoxes that defies common sense, while painting, with a well concealed brush stroke, in an almost photorealistic style. In the room Les Valeurs Personnelles (Personal Values) 1952, walls are covered with Magritte’s cloudy sky motif: indicating perhaps the expansiveness of the human imagination. In the room we also note a hair comb, a wine glass, a matchstick, a bar of soap and shaving brush. The objects are life-sized - or perhaps (as in Alice and Wonderland) the viewer and the room have become tiny. The objects are place around the room as if they were performers on a stage (recalling the play A Street Car Named Desire): the comb laying on the bed, the shaving brush perching on the dresser like a cat, the wine glass standing curvaceously and tall besides the match stick - perhaps eluding to the french phrase “Tu m’allume” translated as “You turn me on”, and the bar of soap round and bland standing to the side: a minor character. One truly wonders what these characters are doing there, and what their forms mean. But everything is ambiguous: even the title is ambiguous - its meaning both negative and positive. Is the artist indicating that what is valued in society is ruled by mundanity and materialism, or is he stating simply a phrase intended to describe personal belongings of an Army Cadet as het enters the army (as Magritte did between 1920-1922) which he must guard to maintain his hygiene, his humanity and his sense of honor?

      Join us in celebrating the life and work of Rene Magritte. From now until the end of the year, we are taking 25% off select Magritte items, including our new exclusive line of Magritte Ties, Magnets, Watches, Cup and Saucers, and more! Click HERE to start saving.

La Magie Noire Poster
Sku: F962     Size: 27.5 x 19.75 in.
Retail: $25    

Sale: $18.75

This 1946 piece 'La Magie Noire' by Rene Magritte depicts Magritte's childhood friend, wife and muse Georgette Berger as a nude in an unidentified landscape. Appearing as would a marble statue, leaning slightly in praxitelean curve against a stone pillar, the nude is executed in a classically traditional manner according to the laws of beauty and proportion. However, this classicism is juxtaposed with an unusual coloration as the figure’s body gradually takes the color of the sky. Her top half appears to be celestial while her bottom half remains earthly. Magritte’s idea about stones as symbols for “attachment” to the earth can imply that woman is (or has the appearance of being) loyal and attached to earth physically, even though her mind can rise to the highest of heights. This is truly an image of virtue and balance, wherein Georgette seems to represents all the necessary elements of life. With this, Magritte also intended to show that the mental and physical are not unconnected, despite being so different in both appearance and capacity.

      Join us in celebrating the life and work of Rene Magritte. From now until the end of the year, we are taking 25% off select Magritte items, including our new exclusive line of Magritte Ties, Magnets, Watches, Cup and Saucers, and more! Click HERE to start saving.

Sheherazade Poster
Sku: AW9157     Size: 27.5 x 19.75 in.
Retail: $25    

Sale: $18.75

The image of Shéhérazade (1947, oil on panel) depicts the eyes and lips of a woman’s face, veiled by a curlicue of pearls, implying wealth, exoticism and opulence. This exotic vision appears as a mirage in a dune landscape, foreground of a rippling grey blue water of the North Sea and a blue sky dotted with clouds - reminiscent of Magritte’s work ‘La Malediction’. Although Magritte painted dozens of gouaches and drawings of this theme, an important aspect of this particular piece is the reference to one of the most important inspirations to Rene Magritte’s oeuvre; Giorgio de Chirico's 1914 painting ‘Le chant d'amour’. This work was not just important to Magritte, but can be seen as the work that sparked the surrealist movement - preceding it by ten years. The metaphysical painter de Chirico was an important inspiration to Magritte’s work, who vowed to only ever again paint poetry upon seeing this work. In Shéhérazade we certainly denote an aspect of the metaphysical in this mirage appearance - but also a more outspoken ode, namely; the round ball-like (almost alien) object at Shéhérazade’s feet that frequently appears in the oeuvre of de Chirico. Despite the surreal contexts, the ball - along with other shapes - denotes logic, reason, balance and mathematics. Magritte first began to paint Shéhérazade when he read the tales of A Thousand and One Nights. These are a series of fables that were once told by the wise and well-read Shéhérazade who used them to distract the angry and murderous Persian King Sharyar from beheading her at dawn, something he did each day to revenge the extramarital affair of his first wife. Riveted by her tales, however, the King prolonged her life each dawn in order to hear the end of each story. After 1001 stories, in love, a kinder man and having bore her three sons, he married Shéhérazade making her Queen of Persia.

      Join us in celebrating the life and work of Rene Magritte. From now until the end of the year, we are taking 25% off select Magritte items, including our new exclusive line of Magritte Ties, Magnets, Watches, Cup and Saucers, and more! Click HERE to start saving.

La Condition Humaine Postcard
Sku: RM16909     Size: 2 x 3.25 in.
Retail: $1.50     Sale: $1.13

Two oil paintings by Rene Magritte are titled “La Condition Humaine” (or the ‘Human Condition’). One was created in 1933 that now hangs in the National Gallery of Art and the other in 1935 which hangs in the Simon Spierer Collection in Geneva, Switzerland. Both the works use common artistic devices associated with Magritte’s style to produce objects that hide what lies behind them - this theme can be seen in one Magritte’s more famous works entitled “The Son of Man”. In both these works, the image includes an artist’s canvas perched on an ezel, (presumably) depicting the landscape behind it with exact precision, and matching up to the scenery to seem like it is part of the scenery. For example, where the road is seen in the background, the road on the canvas continues on the same height, matching up to the road as it reemerges on the other side of the canvas. In effect these works are experienced in a way that reminds one of carnival mirrors in which one finds themselves reproduced ad infinitum.

La Condition Humaine Greeting Card
Sku: RM09475
Size: 39.25 x 27.5 in.
Retail: $3.5     Sale: $2.5

In first instance, Magritte is (as usual) playing with the expectations and imaginations of the viewers. Somehow eerily silent and serene, both canvases also seem to be covering up a more tense scene in the background hidden by the canvas. But he is also referring to the way in which we see ourselves and each other: presenting ourselves and our appearance to the world in one way while feeling and being another way - as well as projecting an image onto others, while ignoring who they might truly be. Besides the aspect of self-perception and perception of others as being mostly matters of the mind rather than reality, Magritte also raises the issue of real and skewed memory of the past affecting and changing the what we know to be the present. Finally, and relational to the notion of real or perceived reality, these works also touch upon the fact that the viewers’ perception of the ‘symbolic’ meaning of paintings can skew the work’s real meaning as the interpretation of symbols are merely ‘substitutes’ useful only to the mind that is unable to handle reality. Magritte’s work was very much influenced by the works of the Philosopher Immanuel Kant who argued that humans can rationalize things and situations but cannot understand things in and of themselves.

      Join us in celebrating the life and work of Rene Magritte. From now until the end of the year, we are taking 25% off select Magritte items, including our new exclusive line of Magritte Ties, Magnets, Watches, Cup and Saucers, and more! Click HERE to start saving.

L'Empire des Lumieres (mini) poster
Sku: AW9126     Size: 11.75 x 8.25 in.
Retail: $12.00     Sale: $9.00

Between 1949 and 1964, Rene Magritte produced a series of 17 oil paintings and 10 gouache versions of L’Empire des Lumieres. The image has become one of Magritte’s most sought after themes. The image is of a white villa with shuttered windows on a street at dark, dimly lit by a the soft glow of a lantern. The bottom part of the picture seems to thus be a scene at night, the trees surrounding the silent villa are totally black. Yet the eye is tricked and the mind must adapt to what the viewer is actually seeing: the sky above the villa on the top half of the piece, shows a blue sky patched with white clouds. Magritte explains that this image represents what is visible to the eye while at the same time awakening the imagination to the viewer, which must tap into two normally inconceivably reconcilable conditions - day and night. The piece amazes, surprises and delights - a trifecta which renders Magritte’s conception of poetry. The repetition of this work was a practice that would bring out increasingly surprising and disruptive elements in each piece.

Ever the clear minded intellectual, this work brings up a scientific question as well which is that darkness and brightness always coexist, becoming apparent depending on the amount of light there is. For example: the villa is white, whether it is dark of light outside. Similarly darkness and light can exist within one and the same person.

A copy of this painting can be seen in The Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

      Join us in celebrating the life and work of Rene Magritte. From now until the end of the year, we are taking 25% off select Magritte items, including our new exclusive line of Magritte Ties, Magnets, Watches, Cup and Saucers, and more! Click HERE to start saving.

La Trahison des images Magnet
Sku: RM16909     Size: 2 x 3.25 in.
Retail: $4.99     Sale: $3.74

Rene Magritte was 30 years old when he painted what would become his most renowned work of art. La Trahaison des Images (The Treachery of Images), better known as “Ceci n’est pas une Pipe” (This is not a pipe), is a simple, sleek and graphic image, representational but realistic at the same time, of a Pipe – underwritten by the words: This is not a Pipe. It is an image that has been used and retaken by advertisers, artists, and product promoters of all kinds due to its attractiveness, simplicity, wit and appeal. The piece is a conversation starter to say the least: while it resembles an advertisement – which are usually intended to attract a consumer because of what it promises to give or be – this image does exactly the opposite by presenting the product but also disappointing the viewer/consumer by reminding them that this is not what they seek, if what they want is a real pipe.

In a biography written on Magritte’s life by his lawyer Harry Torczyner, Magritte defends this piece which was received with outrage: “Could you stuff my pipe? No it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a Pipe’ I’d be lying” (Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p.118).

With his background experience in advertising and graphic design, Magritte was well fit to ask the paradoxical questions posed by surrealist philosophers and painters. Firstly, Magritte depicts the paradox of consumerism: no matter what marketers depict – we can never catch the object itself – only the idea of it, and so every consumer consumes based on whatever he/she has imagined the product to mean or bring. Secondly, Magritte’s work discussed the paradox of paintings as self-referential symbols and representational realism. As many post-WWI and WWII artists and thinkers, Magritte was interested in the perception of the mind and engaged in debates about the nature of the conscious experience. Was/Is the world simply the way we see/saw it, or was it created by neuronal processes in the brain that shape our perception? Representational realists argue that our ideas of the world are indeed just that: ideas and perceived notions as well as interpretations of sensory inputs – rather than based on first hand knowledge of the world. In as much: we can never know the world as it really is, we can only see with the eyes that been influenced by experiences, marred by preconceptions and expectations of what we think we will see.

This piece, in the way it examines the fickleness of images and the witty manner in which he does so, makes it easy to understand how and why Rene Magritte influenced so many pop artists of the 1960’s like John Baldassari, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns who also deconstructed simple everyday objects.

      Join us in celebrating the life and work of Rene Magritte. From now until the end of the year, we are taking 25% off select Magritte items, including our new exclusive line of Magritte Ties, Magnets, Watches, Cup and Saucers, and more! Click HERE to start saving.