The Lovers II by René Magritte – Canvas Giclée Print

$99.00$159.00

The high-resolution canvas revisits the masterpiece “The Lovers II” created in 1928 by René Magritte. As one of the Belgian artist’s outstanding paintings, it is part of the masterpiece series at Pigment Pool. Exploring the tension between the obvious and the shrouded to challenge the viewer’s perception was one characteristic of Magritte’s surrealist approach.

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Belgian painter René Magritte’s dreamlike aesthetic and evocative dreamscapes have ensured him enduring legacy. As a proponent of the surrealism art movement, Magritte used visual imagery associated with the subconscious to create art without the intention of logical comprehensibility. In “The Lovers II” Magritte plays with the mental conflict of wanting to see and understand what is hidden.

Where is the picture “The Lovers II” today?

The Magritte original of the picture “The Lovers II” (“Les Amants II”) is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

What’s in it?

A man and a woman lean in a loving embrace in an abstract interior setting with a dark back wall, a red sidewall, and white stucco at the ceiling. The two lovers press their faces together as if wanting to kiss. Yet this attempt is idle since their heads are tightly shrouded in white cloths. The attempted intimacy becomes a spectacle of alienation or even suffocation, while the white cloth is reminiscent of a winding sheet and therefore of death.

What’s the context?

In 1928 Magritte painted a series of four paintings showing lovers. The first two pictures each show two individuals trying in vain to be close since their heads are shrouded in white cloth; the other two ones also showing lovers, but the man’s body is omitted, just showing his head next to the complete depiction of the woman. This series of pictures has been analysed in multiple ways. One interpretative approach draws the conclusion that lovers are unable to decipher true intentions, feelings, and fantasies regardless of how intimate and in which setting they are.
One year before painting his lovers’ series, Magritte suffered a crushing defeat when critics heaped abuse on his first solo exhibition in Brussels. Subdued by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became acquainted with André Breton and the movement of Surrealism. Strongly influenced by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, he produced numerous paintings including “The Lovers II” that showed highly successful in a joint exhibition at the Goermans Gallery in Paris in 1929.

Chatter and Prattle

René Magritte – Facts:

  • Throughout his career, Magritte used evocative symbols like bowler hats, cloudy dreamscapes, and half-obscured visages. The leitmotif of covering faces has been attributed to Magritte’s childhood tragic: His mother committed suicide drowning herself in the River Sambre when he was 13 years old. When his mother was found, her dress covered her face – an image that has been suggested to be the source of the artist’s motive of obscured faces.
  • Psychoanalysts have attributed the same incident of his mother’s tragic death with Magritte’s persistent fluctuation between illusion and reality in his art, associating the occurrence with the constant shifting from his wish (mother alive) and the factual (mother dead).
  • Magritte however revoked the relation between his childhood experiences and the depiction of shrouded images, saying: “My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does that mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable.”

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Recommended Readings:

This article may contain compensated links. Please read Disclaimer for more info. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Stephanie D’Alessandro et al. (2013): Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938

Guido Comis et al. (2019): René Magritte: Life Line

Didier Ottinger (2017): Magritte: The Treachery of Images

Kathleen Rooney et al. (2016): René Magritte: Selected Writings

Siegfried Gohr (2009): Magritte: Attempting the Impossible

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