René Magritte

René Magritte was a Belgian Surrealist painter who turned ordinary objects into puzzles for the mind. Born in 1898, he painted in a plain, precise style, but filled his pictures with strange, dreamlike situations, men in bowler hats raining from the sky, a pipe labeled this is not a pipe, an apple hiding a face. He wanted to unsettle the way we assume we understand what we see.

Rather than wild, chaotic imagery, his Surrealism relies on quiet, deadpan impossibilities that make you look twice. His famous pipe painting, with its teasing caption, became a landmark meditation on images and reality. Magritte's clever, thought-provoking pictures have seeped deep into advertising and popular culture, and his witty visual riddles still delight and puzzle viewers.