Half Life Wallpaper

René Magritte: The artist who turned the world on its head

Ever since the birth of the advertising industry in the late 19th century, there has been a great deal of overlap between publicity and fine art. Ad agencies must come up with eye-catching campaigns, and one time-honoured tactic for beleaguered art directors and “creatives” is to plunder famous paintings, in the spirit of homage or comical pastiche.

But with the possible exception of Salvador Dalí, no painter has had a bigger impact on the advertising industry than the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967). His poetical pictures, with their signature motifs of flaming tubas and men in bowler hats, have been imitated in countless advertisements, for everything from Volkswagen cars to the French state railway.

Arguably, Magritte’s career as an illustrator and designer of publicity material even shaped his vision as an artist. Next week, this theory can be put to the test, when examples of his commercial work will be displayed alongside more than 100 paintings, including masterpieces such as The Menaced Assassin (1927), Time Transfixed (1938), and Golconda (1953), in a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool.

Despite winning international acclaim during his thirties, Magritte didn’t become rich until fairly late in his career. As a result, he was obliged to seek work as a commercial artist, so that he and his wife Georgette could live comfortably in their cramped flat in the suburbs of Brussels.

Shortly before their marriage in 1922, Magritte accepted a job as a designer at a wallpaper factory – in a bid, as he put it in a letter, “to make Georgette as happy as possible in the calm of a nice steady bourgeois life”. This only lasted for a year or so, but in 1924, he began working as a freelance graphic designer.

Over the next five years, he produced posters and advertisements in brochures and magazines, predominantly for the Belgian couture house Norine, but also for a number of other clients, including bookshops, a jeweller, and the car manufacturer Alfa Romeo.

He also designed around 25 covers for sheet music of popular songs. Several of his paintings from this period, such as Bather and Cinéma bleu (both 1925), are suffused with the kind of languorous, elegant spirit and faintly Art Deco style that characterised the advertising of the time.

In 1926, a Brussels furrier, Maison Samuel, commissioned Magritte to illustrate their autumn catalogue. They repeated the commission the following year – and the second booklet is practically a Surrealist work of art in its own right (two copies will be shown in Liverpool).

Half Life

The Half-Life of Happiness

Sister Suzie cinema, the collected poems and performances, 1976-1986

LIFE

The Half-Life, A Novel