Les Valeurs Personnelles. The artwork chosen for this paper is Les Valeurs personnelles painted by Ren Magritte in 1952. It was done in oil on canvas, measuring 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in.

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Les Valeurs Personnelles

The artwork chosen for this paper is Les Valeurs personnelles painted by René Magritte in 1952. It was done in oil on canvas, measuring 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in.  

This painting highlights the tension between reality and fantasy by transforming everyday objects into representations, which is characteristic of Magritte’s style of surrealism. Surrealism, beginning in the early 1920s, was a movement founded by artists and writers against reason and traditional forms of expression governing European culture. Les Valeurs personnelles, known for its play with reality, is one of the key surrealist works that break with the usual standards to reach a deeper reality.  

Rene Magritte, the Belgium surrealist painter, was born to a textile merchant family in 1898. His artistic development was initiated by two events--an encounter with an artist painting in a cemetery and his mother’s suicide, the latter of which seemed to be the source of his works painted in 1927–1928 of people with cloth concealing their faces. Uninterested in traditional European art, Magritte found his inspirations from the works by Jean Metzinger and Fernand and experimented with Cubism in his early works. Later, his work experience as a designer of advertisements and as a fine artist under the contract with the Galerie le Centaure in Brussels, together with his interest in the work of Giorgio de Chirico, made him work more distinctly on surrealist paintings, and form connections with fellow Surrealists such as Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí from 1927 to 1930. Since then, Magritte had never broken with his unique surrealist style, though during the Second World War, he also depicted his subject matter in a brightly impressionistic manner to express his revulsion against the war. It is generally thought that his experience with commercial art and his emphasis on non-traditionalist concepts had lent special artistic merit to his works.  

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Les Valeurs personnelles depicts a number of oversized everyday objects such as a comb, a matchstick, a goblet, a shaving brush, and a bar of soap enclosed in small room. At first glance, the overly distorted proportions of these familiar household items in the box-like room create an immediate strange impression as they appear to the eye. The wall with a pattern of clouds that mimic real ones are reflected from the wardrobe mirror, which also shows a reflection of an open window that links the interior space with the outside. Besides, the balanced composition of the objects ...

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