René Magritte - the father of Pop Art? Maybe, but his images are carefully composed works, writes Lara Marlowe.
In December, 1929, the writer, André Breton, summoned his fellow surrealists to a meeting in his Paris apartment. "Someone here is wearing a thing I cannot abide; I cannot continue until they remove it," he said, indicating the gold crucifix around the neck of Georgette Magritte, the wife of the Belgian painter René.
Mrs Magritte explained she was not a practising Catholic, but the crucifix had belonged to her grandmother and had sentimental value. Breton persisted.
René and Georgette had rented a flat in the Paris suburb of Le Perreux for the previous 18 months, so that he could participate in the surrealist movement. But Breton's bad manners made up René's mind.
"Come on Georgette," Magritte said, extending an arm to his wife: "We're going home to Brussels."
That break with Breton lasted for two years, and Breton, the self-declared "pope of surrealism", would eventually "excommunicate" Magritte altogether in 1947. It is questionable whether a painter who calculated his images so carefully belonged in a movement allegedly based on hazard.
In any case, Magritte's talent and fame ensured his place in 20th century art, as an inventor of images, precursor of pop art, hyper-realism and conceptual art.
The humour, cruelty and irony of Magritte's painting was belied by his bourgeois existence. He always wore a double-breasted suit and neck-tie, perhaps a tribute to his father, Léopold, a tailor. The bowler hat, a constant theme in Magritte's painting, may have something to do with the fact his mother, Régina, was a hat-maker.
When Magritte was 13, his parents displayed his first painting, of two horses escaping from a stable in flames. A sense of impending doom would recur often in Magritte's work. His burning musical instruments would later be copied by Salvador Dali.
The following year, Régina Magritte committed suicide by drowning herself in the Sambre river. Someone placed a cloth over the dead woman's face, leaving an indelible impression on her 14-year-old son.
In 1928, his most productive year as a painter, Magritte painted figures shrouded in cloth. In The Invention of Life, a woman stands next to a veiled, Afghan-like figure, perhaps her double. In The Symetrical Ruse, two veiled forms flank the lower body of a woman, a cloth covering the waist where it seems to have been amputated.
In two versions of The Lovers, Magritte painted a couple snuggling and kissing, their faces hidden by cloth. We always hide ourselves, even in love, he seemed to be saying. Magritte never talked about his own life, describing himself as "a black box".
Back in Brussels, René and his inseparable wife and model, Georgette, lived quietly in a semi-detached bungalow at 97, rue des Mimosas. Georgette kept the furniture and baby grand piano polished, the knick-knacks dusted. René was careful not to spill paint on the oriental carpet in his upstairs studio. Except for rare trips abroad for exhibitions and to meet art dealers, the Magrittes rarely travelled.
René Magritte marked the Nazi occupation of Belgium with an odd "Renoir period", during which he painted sunny impressionist pastiches with surrealist motifs, such as a tiny ballerina dancing in a fiddler's lap.
Immediately after the war, he again broke his own style, entering his garish Vache (literally: "cow" but also "rude" or "unpleasant" in slang) period. It was a commercial failure and Georgette urged him to return to his pre-war style of almost academic execution.
Magritte knew success in the last two decades of his life. There were 15 Magritte exhibitions in New York before the painter's death in 1967, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965.
The Magritte exhibition now at the Jeu de Paume in Paris is the first in France in 23 years. The curator, Daniel Abadie, excluded the painter's early works, which were inspired by the fauves and cubists, so the public are immediately confronted by his surrealist paintings from the mid-1920s. These were strongly influenced by Magritte's "discovery" of the Italian, Giorgio De Chirico, of whom he said, "His was a new vision where the viewer found again his own isolation, and heard the silence of the world."
Although there is an dream-like quality to many of Magritte's paintings, unlike Dali, he emphasised the importance of mystery over dreams. When choosing a subject for a painting, Magritte said, he sought "an image that defies all attempts to explain it". The effect is often unsettling, as in Memory, in which a classical statue of a woman's head sits on a parapet before the sea and sky, its closed right eye splashed with blood. A small, U.F.O.-like sphere with a line around its circumference - a recurring theme in Magritte since the 1920s - sits beside the woman's head, and a curtain is drawn behind the right third of the painting. Other paintings - the gutted birds in Murderous Sky and and Young Girl Eating a Bird - are incredibly savage.
Yet, Magritte could be humorous too, when he mocked our sense of permanence by perching a small wooden chair atop a fossilised stone chair in Legend of the Centuries, or when he super-imposed Botticelli's Flora on the back of a bowler-hatted man in The Bouquet All Ready.
Magritte's titles were works of art in their own right, the product of weekly brain-storming sessions with poet friends. In one canvas, a self-portrait of Magritte at his easel, the artist looks at an egg and paints a bird. The title: Clairvoyance.
Magritte's repetition of figures in La Golconde, in which bowler-hatted, over-coated men are repeated, was copied by pop-artists, especially Andy Warhol. More than a decade before Warhol, Magritte painted $100 bills.
From the late 1950s, the "neo-Dadaists" Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg also used Magritte-like methods.
Johns loaned Magritte's The Key to Dreams to the exhibition. In it, ordinary objects - a horse, a clock and a pitcher - are mis-labelled "the door", "the wind" and "the bird". The last image, a suitcase, is correctly labelled "the valise". Similarly, in False Start, Johns mis-labelled colours.
Magritte transformed the very substance of his subjects, turning a woman's flesh into grained wood, a tree's bark into bricks, birds into plants and fossils. And he toyed with natural affinities between humans and objects, painting a woman's breasts on a night-gown suspended from a hanger, or boots transmogrifying into toes. Claes Oldenburg would also play on reality, sculpting a droopy, soft toilet, and a cardboard bathtub which would become soft like his other sculptures if used for its ostensible purpose.
Since Magritte's death, at least 50 brand names have appropriated his pictorial repertoire for advertising. Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but it's not certain Magritte would have appreciated the compliment. In his early years as an artist, he hated having to design wall-paper and posters to earn a living.
Magritte is at the Jeu de Paume, 1 Place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris, until June 9th. Open every day except Monday from noon until 7 p.m., and until 9.30 p.m. on Tuesdays. Admission: l8. Reservations: www.fnac.com. For more information see www.jeudepaume.org