If you watched much of the World Cup this summer, you may have caught the Belgian team playing a match.That was the team that beat the U.S. 4-1 in the knockout round.In addition to their playing, what was very noticeable about the team was the jersey that the players wore when they were classified as visitors.It was based on a design by Belgian artist Rene Magritte, and it was a sensation.Magritte is pretty close to being the pre-eminent artist from Belgium and it’s nice to see a country celebrate that so vividly and in the mainstream of culture.
Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, a little town in the Wallonia region southwest of Brussels, in 1898.Today there’s a local cultural center there named for him, a concert hall, and a statue or two.He began taking drawing lessons in 1910 when he was about 12 years old and his talent was evident.During WWI, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels.His earliest paintings tended to imitate the style of the impressionists, but that really wasn’t where his heart and his eye were leading him.
In the early 1920s he worked for a while as a designer at a wallpaper factory and then got into advertising work, but all the while he continued to paint.He had his first solo exhibit in Brussels in 1927, and it wasn’t as well received as he’d hoped. Depressed, he moved to Paris where he fell in with a group of artists called the “Surrealists.”Their art was heavily influenced by dreams and the unconscious along with a huge distrust of human reason and institutions because of World War One.
French philosopher and journalist Albert Camus describes surrealism as “absolute rebellion, total insubordination, sabotage on principle, the humor and cult of the absurd,” all of which seeks to examine everything society claims to be important.That is what Magritte—if not necessarily the Belgian football team—came to embrace.
He was soon being included in exhibits alongside artists like Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, and Pablo Picasso.Eventually he wound up back in Brussels with its distinctive cultural energy and continued to work. He died there in 1967. You would recognize many of his works in an instant.
In addition to being honored via the Belgian football team’s World Cup jersey almost 60 years after his death, Magritte was also featured on the Belgian 500 franc note back before the Euro was instituted as a common currency in 1992.
I can think of some other countries that I’d like to see honor their artists a little better.