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Rene  Magritte

       MAGRITTE'S WORKS II

It might be more possible to interpret Magritte as commenting on Freudian psycho-analysis -- a topic not very far removed from many of his surrealistic works, anyway.Sigmund Freud, especially in his dream analysis, continually asserted that what clearly and obviously seemed to be an X in a dream was not really an X, that it was an X only patently, on the surface, but not latently or deeply, that the X in the dream represented or was a metaphor for some other thing, Y. The dream-image train is really a snake, for example. So when Magritte says "This is not a pipe," what he means is that it may be possible to think that it is only an image that stands for something else, that the phenomenal reality of the pipe obscures or hides the true reality lying underneath. The difficult question, if we go this far, is whether Magritte intended to provide support for or to illustrate sympathetically Freudian dream analysis -- the treachery of dreams -- or, instead, was mocking it: "You mean this image, which is obviously a pipe-image, is not really a pipe-image? Tell me another!"

His art shows a more representational style of surrealism compared to the automatic style seen in works by artists like Joan Miro. In addition to fantastic elements, his work is often witty and amusing. He also created a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings.

René Magritte described his paintings 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 either, it is unknowable