November 21 - Happy Birthday, Rene Magritte

Posted on November 21, 2021

Key Points

This is an update of my post published on November 21, 2010:

Rene Magritte was a Belgian artist who was born on November 21, 1898. Rene Magritte was a surrealist. Like other surrealist art, his paintings were surprising, unexpected, humorous in some cases, and (of course) surreal.

The idea of surrealism is to look at ordinary things in different ways.

Magritte made portraits of men in bowler hats—portraits with a weird twist that always hide the faces. For example, in one painting an apple hangs directly in front of the man’s face.

Magritte also painted scenes in which the foregrounds were mixed in with the backgrounds, and he even painted some paintings of paintings.

Check out the short Magritte article at Art Smarts 4 Kids and click all the links to see these and other Magritte awesomeness.

Art Smarts 4 Kids also has an idea for making a Magritte-style picture here.

One of Magritte’s paintings was called Personal Values. It looked like a room with various items—each drawn to a different scale—inside.

Use the picture as inspiration to make your own Personal Values poster—either draw, painting, or collage pictures of things that are important to you.