ABSTRACT
Rene Magritte’s art is generally seen as a challenge: to bourgeois values and ideology, originality, representation, common sense, and to the narrative of modernism with its emphasis on formal innovation. Magritte consistently downplayed his role as author, thereby giving agency to painting as a thinking subject, asserting his presence through the always prominent signature. The artist holds paintbrushes and a palette in his left hand and uses his right hand, at the center of the composition, to conjure the figure out of and into thin air. Metaphorically, the image describes an artist starting with a dematerialized idea and ultimately creating something from nothing using real materials. Magritte modernizes the tradition, dispensing with the model and the canvas propped on an easel. The figure of the artist, the maker, comes to life as well under the steady gaze of the companion figure he makes. Magritte painted the work in his Paris apartment, which served as his studio.
