Rene Magritte

A collection of artworks and objects by or belonging to the late Belgian painter Rene Magritte will be sold abroad to pay death duties on the estate of his widow, it was announced Friday. A spokeswoman for Sotheby's in London said the estate is valued at about $2.4 million. It will be sold at the beginning of July.

This is not a great painting. I would call it an illustration, and like Norman Rockwell images, it looks better in reproduction. But it's a great lesson of a painting. I've always felt that a word and image are of equal value, and that's certainly what this painting is about. I think about my own piece in the LACMA collection, "Wrong," also a balance of visual and verbal information. It's the image where I'm standing in front of the palm tree and there's just one word below: WRONG.

The National Museum of American Art has received a gift of 311 paintings, sculptures, drawings and collages. The donation, for which no dollar figure was given, came from the Container Corp. of America, with headquarter in Chicago. Among the artists represented are Willem de Kooning, Gyorgy Kepes, Rene Magritte, Larry Rivers, Leonard Baskin and Ben Shaun.

Surrealism meets the new-music ensemble eighth blackbird in "Images: The Influence of Magritte," a concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing Theatre on Wednesday, presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images."

I was so happy to see a positive--even glowing--review by Cathy Curtis that I was reluctant to write this letter pointing out an error in her article ("Unusual Dimensions," OC LIVE! July 25) about the current juried exhibit at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. But as the president of the OCCCA Board of Trustees and an art history teacher, I was compelled to offer this correction. Ms. Curtis pointed out that two of the artists in the exhibition "do takeoffs on Marcel Duchamp's famous 'Ceci n'est Pas un Pipe' (This Is Not a Pipe)

Surrealism meets the new-music ensemble eighth blackbird in "Images: The Influence of Magritte," a concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing Theatre on Wednesday, presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images."

Visitors who remember the "Keystone Kops" are sure to be baffled when they see the Rene Magritte painting for the first time: The image of a woman's nightgown hanging alone in a wardrobe is titled "In Memory of Mack Sennett," the father of slapstick comedy in motion pictures. But Magritte, one of the world's most popular Surrealists, deliberately sought such paradox in his works. "The titles of paintings are not explanations and the paintings are not illustrations of their titles," he once said.

Men in suits and bowler hats, green apples, puffy white clouds in blue skies, a floating boulder, black umbrellas: The imagery of Belgian Surrealist painter Rene Magritte dominates Barry Kornhauser's play "This Is Not a Pipe Dream." Kornhauser's exploration of theater, art and reality is a play-within-a-play, fed by Magritte's observations and signature images, including his seminal pipe painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," and his self-portrait obscured by an apple.

Thinking about "Rene Magritte: The Poetry of Silence," which opened Tuesday at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, I have to admit: I don't much care about the Belgian Surrealist's paintings. For me their greatest strength is the same as their principal weakness. Magritte is pop culture with its pinkie raised. The carefully orchestrated mental pratfalls he painted between the 1920s and his death at 68 in 1967 are unthinkable without the era's newly exploding world of mass culture.

Uniting words and images, the masters of Dadaism and Surrealism "changed the way one read or interpreted a work of art ever after." The speaker was Judi Freeman, associate curator of 20th-Century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curator of "The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image," on exhibit through Aug. 27. Dada and surrealist artists may not have been the first to wed words and images, Freeman said in an interview, but what...

JOHN BALDESSARI 'We don't notice him' "WHEN I was in school, Duchamp was the major force," Baldessari says, musing over Magritte's place in art history. The French Dadaist still gets much more respect than the Belgian Surrealist. But "Wrong," Baldessari's deadpan painting of a photograph explaining how not to compose a picture, based on an example in an art instruction book, has a lot in common with Magritte's irreverence toward the rules and conventions of art education.

MAGRITTE is back. Not that the natty guy in the black bowler ever really left. He fell out of fashion long before his death, in 1967, but graphic designers and illustrators never stopped mining the Belgian Surrealist's work for visual shock and dreamy wit. Despite perpetually changing styles, new generations of painters, sculptors and filmmakers continue to assimilate his ideas in disjunctive images and enigmatic combinations of pictures and words.

Visitors who remember the "Keystone Kops" are sure to be baffled when they see the Rene Magritte painting for the first time: The image of a woman's nightgown hanging alone in a wardrobe is titled "In Memory of Mack Sennett," the father of slapstick comedy in motion pictures. But Magritte, one of the world's most popular Surrealists, deliberately sought such paradox in his works. "The titles of paintings are not explanations and the paintings are not illustrations of their titles," he once said.

Men in suits and bowler hats, green apples, puffy white clouds in blue skies, a floating boulder, black umbrellas: The imagery of Belgian Surrealist painter Rene Magritte dominates Barry Kornhauser's play "This Is Not a Pipe Dream." Kornhauser's exploration of theater, art and reality is a play-within-a-play, fed by Magritte's observations and signature images, including his seminal pipe painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," and his self-portrait obscured by an apple.

His jarring visions spawned the posters that decorated a million dormitory rooms. Familiar yet bizarre, Rene Magritte's creations--impossible landscapes, men in bowler hats, giant apples, floating boulders--have been plundered by advertisers, spoofed by critics and mass-marketed into one of the best-known cultural products of the 20th century. Despite its ubiquity, the art of the Belgian Surrealist, who would have turned 100 this year, continues to attract large crowds.

Inventive, funny and definitely not the usual children's theater fare, "This Is Not a Pipe Dream," based on the words and work of Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte, is an outstanding treat at Cal State Northridge for ages 8 and up. Playwright Barry Kornhauser's fantasy romp incorporates the images and words of the artist. It revolves around childhood experiences that fed Magritte's unsettling artistic vision in which words become meaningless and nothing is as it appears.

MAGRITTE is back. Not that the natty guy in the black bowler ever really left. He fell out of fashion long before his death, in 1967, but graphic designers and illustrators never stopped mining the Belgian Surrealist's work for visual shock and dreamy wit. Despite perpetually changing styles, new generations of painters, sculptors and filmmakers continue to assimilate his ideas in disjunctive images and enigmatic combinations of pictures and words.

His jarring visions spawned the posters that decorated a million dormitory rooms. Familiar yet bizarre, Rene Magritte's creations--impossible landscapes, men in bowler hats, giant apples, floating boulders--have been plundered by advertisers, spoofed by critics and mass-marketed into one of the best-known cultural products of the 20th century. Despite its ubiquity, the art of the Belgian Surrealist, who would have turned 100 this year, continues to attract large crowds.

Thinking about "Rene Magritte: The Poetry of Silence," which opened Tuesday at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, I have to admit: I don't much care about the Belgian Surrealist's paintings. For me their greatest strength is the same as their principal weakness. Magritte is pop culture with its pinkie raised. The carefully orchestrated mental pratfalls he painted between the 1920s and his death at 68 in 1967 are unthinkable without the era's newly exploding world of mass culture.

Rene Magritte was the Andrew Wyeth of Surrealism. OK, so there is one big difference between them: The late Belgian artist made a significant difference in the art life of the 20th Century, while the American has made virtually none. Still, as an artist firmly committed to academic style, worldly description and a developing sense about the newly arriving world of popular culture, Magritte is about as close to Wyeth as an artist of the Modern avant-garde can get.