The
umbrella was made famous in art through the work of Rene
Magritte,(1898-1967) who made it a motif in some of his
paintings. (Les vancances de Hégel pictured). He was
a leading painter and theorist of surrealism and worked as a
commercial artist for some years, at one time designing
wallpaper--a dreary activity that had the virtue of teaching
him about illusions of depth and the effects of repeated
patterns.
The aspiring painter was influenced by orphic cubism and by futurism, but the surrealistic vistas and alien perspectives of Giorgio de Chirico had the most lasting impact on his art. By 1925 he was concentrating almost entirely on surrealist works.
Almost all of Magritte's paintings feature some sort of visual paradox: a restless blue sky with a hole in it, a human body with a fish's head, a hat suspended in midair. His seas and skies seem bright and sunny, but there is a disturbing artificiality about the too-regular clouds and the too-glassy water. The point of this interplay between precisely drawn objects and abnormal settings and features is that the common-sense perception of reality is only one way of looking at the world. In The Human Condition I (1934; private collection, Paris), Magritte forcefully demonstrates the paradoxes of perception by placing a painting showing a landscape view within the window overlooking an identical view.
