About Rene Magritte Ligne Blanche Paris – Porcelain – Espresso Set of 2 – Great War (1964)

This exclusive Rene Magritte Ligne Blanche Paris Limoges Porcelain Espresso Set of 2 features the notorious Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte’s work “The Great War” (1964). A variation of his work The Son of Man, Magritte’s work the Great War also consists of a man in a bowler hat and where unlike in his work The Son of Man, where the artist teases the spectator with showing one of the eyes of the man, in Magritte’s The Great War the apple completely covers the face of the subject. In addition, unlike in Magritte’s Son of Man where the body of the subject is partially visible, in The Great War Magritte zooms into the subject’s upper torso and face. Although Magritte’s The Great War draws the spectator closer to the subject already familiar from his previous work Son of Man, ironically Magritte now makes the subject even more unattainable and inaccessible to the viewer. Magritte comments on the aspect of the hidden face of the subject: “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.” This porcelain espresso set made by the Limoges-based french company Ligne Blanche, and it features the label “Porcelaine de Limoges” attesting to it unique and high-quality standards. More details Rene Magritte Ligne Blanche Paris – Porcelain – Espresso Set of 2 – Great War (1963):

• Dimensions: (Espresso cup) 3.5″ x 3.5″ x 5″ inches (est)
• Weight: 3 lbs (est)
• Material: Porcelain.
• Porcelaine de Limoges – Fabriquée en France
• © Photothéque R. Magritte – ADAPG, Paris 2011.

About Rene Magritte

The Belgian painter René Magritte encountered the work of Giorgio de Chirico in 1922. The Italian artist’s disquieting combinations of motifs rendered in a realistic manner deeply impressed the younger Belgian artist, who produced his first Surrealist painting The Lost Jockey in 1926. The next year Magritte moved to Paris, where he joined the intellectual circle of André Breton and remained in France until 1930. In 1929, Magritte published an important essay in the Surrealist journal La Revolution Surréaliste in which he discussed the disjunction between objects, pictures of objects, and names of objects and pictures. The essay explained the intellectual basis for The Treachery of Images. Throughout his oeuvre, Magritte challenges the discrepancy between image and caption and result in challenging the assumptions underlying reading visual works of art. As it is true for other Surrealists’ work, Magritte’s paintings wreak havoc on the viewer’s reliance on the conscious and the rational.