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Red model

René Magritte • Painting, 1935, 56×46 cm
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About the artwork
This artwork was added since it is referred to in the materials below
Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Allegorical scene
Style of art: Surrealism
Technique: Oil
Materials: Canvas
Date of creation: 1935
Size: 56×46 cm
Artwork in selections: 13 selections
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Description of the artwork «Red model»

Rene Magritte became interested in painting as a teenager. When he was eighteen, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. However, according to the artist's own words, he studied very irregularly and finally left the academy two years later. One of the most significant events in Magritte's career happened a few years later, after he began exhibiting his work, and after he again met the lost love of his life. In 1922, Rene married Georgette Berger, who became his main muse until the end of his days. But something else happened that same year: a close friend, Marcel Lecomte, showed Magritte a reproduction of the painting.Giorgio de chirico "Song of Love". Magritte recalled that this work simply stunned him and moved him to tears.

In 1926, Rene Magritte draws his first "Lost jockey”And in just a few years he developed an absolutely unique style, thanks to which his paintings could later be unmistakably recognized among the works of other surrealists. Unlike his colleagues, Magritte fools the audience in a special way, he does not distort the shapes of objects, does not make them melt and spread, curl and turn inside out. Instead, the artist turns the viewer's imagination inside out. Often, with just one conflicting detail. As in the picture "Red model" 1935, in which human feet "sprout" from boots. In total, Magritte wrote at least three works of the same name, they are all very similar and differ slightly (1, 2). This is another feature of the artist's work: images born by his imagination wander from one picture to another, allowing them to be combined into conditional series. However, the "Red Model" is always the same - the feet-boots are on the ground against the background of a wooden wall. However, in 1947 Magritte will write another canvas, which can be called part of the series, - “Boudoir philosophy". Here the toes have become a continuation of women's shoes, and against the background hangs a nightgown, on which, following the same strange logic, women's breasts “grow”.

Returning to Giorgio de Chirico, one can recall that an empty glove was a recurring motif in his works (it is also present on the canvas that so impressed the young Magritte). Some experts believe that the "Red Model" is a kind of reference to the famous seriesVincent van Gogh with worn out shoes. In Magritte, like in Van Gogh, the image of the boot becomes part of a kind of rebellion. The Dutchman painted a trivial, "down to earth" thing that had never occurred to anyone to capture in a still life. Magritte goes further: he not only portrays a trivial thing, but also makes it scary. This bewildering hybrid of "outside" and "inside", a boot and a leg, an inanimate object is endowed with human features and actually turns into a creepy living thing.

Author: Evgenia Sidelnikova
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