René Magritte was an enigmatic and strange man who painted surrealist paintings. Little is known about his childhood, except that his mother, Regine Magritte, took her own life by drowning in the Sambre River. The young Magritte is thought to have discovered her body floating with her night gown covering her face. It is hypothesized that this trauma influenced many of Magritte's works. When René Magritte picked up his paintbrushes, he created beautiful visual puzzles that both delight and baffle the viewer. His clean lines and highly detailed finishes made his brushstrokes almost invisible; his paintings look like they came out of a printing press. Magritte referred to his paintings as “his labors.” He worked through the paintings and the questions and answers that generated them in his imagination. His art asks questions, seeks answers and challenges the conventional definition of ideas. He came to the Surrealist art style in the 1920s and produced some of the most beautiful and moving works of art in the world. He was a shy, introverted man who detested the social familiarity that society imposed on its celebrities. He liked to maintain social boundaries and was quite reclusive, ironically, he habitually used people as objects and removed the boundaries of association between objects to create his visual puzzles. He did not like to be recognized and this became one of the recurring themes in his works. Always an enigmatic secret agent, Magritte is as much an enigma as his paintings. Surrealism began as a literary movement in the 1920s but was adopted by painters attracted to Surrealism's freedom of expression. It began in France with a writer, Andre Breton, and is closely linked to Dadaism and abstractc...... middle of paper ......ism of dreams and the expressive images generated by the subconscious were much more stimulating compared to the representative and logical images of the conscious mind. Surrealist artists created art from what others thought was confusing and incomprehensible. They were in effect taking a concept created for healing and using it to create art instead. The movement spread, and surrealist groups soon arose in metropolitan areas around the world. It was around the same time that René Magritte was shown a painting by Giorgio de Chirico and soon became a member of the Surrealist group. This image is not intended to inspire the viewer to think about the pipe, but rather to examine how we see reality. To quote Magritte “An object never performs the same function as its image or its name”. http://quote.robertgenn.com/auth_search.php?authid=704