Unlike his surrealist contemporaries, Rene Magritte tended to keep Freud at a distance from his work though few artists offer as much scope for armchair analysis. Speaking in 1961, he observed that “psychology doesn’t interest me. It claims to reveal the flow of our thoughts and emotions. Its efforts are contrary to what I know; it seeks to explain a mystery. There is only one mystery: the world.”
One conclusion in reading Alex Danchev’s recreation of Magritte’s formative years, in this diligent and insightful biography (almost complete at the time of Danchev’s death in 2016), is that he was in
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