see A Small List of Great Artists : RENÉ MAGRITTE (Belgian, 1898-1967)
(Read previous: Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes (Treachery of Images))
(Read more: A SERIES of Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes)
When I was in college and began thinking about and studying art, my relationship with artwork was that these were all just a bunch of images we would look at in art books, or that the professors would project on the wall as slides, to talk about. Some of the work spoke to me, and a lot of it didn’t. (We all like we what we like, don’t we? And that’s ok!) And during that college time, as I got older and got out and saw more of the world, something that might seem really simple and self-evident to you occured to me, and kind of surprised and delighted me to realize it. Sure, I understood in an abstract sense that these aren’t just pictures in books – These are all actual, real, one-of-a-kind objects that physically exist in our world. All these paintings. But the surprise and revelation for me was that, as objects that exist in different locations, they are viewable. They’re in publicly accessible museums – all over the place, anywhere you go. Either you can just go somewhere and then view whatever they have, or if you want to view something particular, then you just need to find out where, and then you can go there, and then you can view it. They’re out there!
My first visit out to New York, popping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stupidly asked one of the gallery attendants, “Wait a minute, is that the actual piece, and not a duplicate?” He was understandably baffled at the question. Here I was looking – all in one place – at a bunch of the most famous paintings I knew of, by all the most famous artists I could think, and that I new of since they were in all my books. Somewhere back in time, that actual artist held a brush in their actual hand, and chose and mixed that particular hue of color and chose that very spot of their canvas, and touched their brush against that very canvas, and now here is that finished work, right before me.
Don’t take my word for it: Pop into your local museum! Or if you’re on vacation, pop into THEIR museum! Go see these amazing works of art! Spend time with them! It’s a record of time, these paintings, recording these moments of the artist’s life – what was before the artist’s eyes, and the fact that the artist recorded it on their canvas. And YOU can be right there with these pieces, face to face, seeing what the artist sees for as long as you like; study them, enjoy them, think or talk about them! And every city around the world you go to will have a new and exciting and uniquely different selection. It’s like the ultimate scavenger hunt! This has come to become a source of great joy to me, popping out to art museums and getting a chance to see and snap a photo with all these amazing works of art. Please look forward to more of this from me, on all the other of these artist pages.
(Read previous: Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes (Treachery of Images))
(Read more: A SERIES of Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes)
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
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Small List of Great Artists
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