Good Faith

Rene Magritte was an acclaimed 20th century Belgium surrealist artist. His work is notable for the witty and thought provoking images he created.

As a surrealist painter, some saw his work as a sign of the challenge against reality seen in the unsettling strange scenes in his works.

The subjects in his paintings were often pipes, men in bowler hats and musical instruments. He made use of these in a number of his works. One of these is Good Faith or La Bonne Foi to use its French title.

Two years before his death in 1967, Rene Magritte produced the painting ‘Good Faith’. The picture is an oil on canvas work that he created in 1965. It measures about 41x33cm in size. It is not on public display and is part of a private collection.

The picture shows us the head and shoulders of a man in a suit wearing a bowler hat. In front of the man’s face is a pipe. Behind the man, you can just see the top of a wall and possibly the sea.

Given that Magritte was someone who always wore a suit and bowler hat, one view is that the man in the painting is a self-portrait. However, another school of thought is that the man is an image of his hero Fantomas.

The image would become his alter-ego which he created in his younger days and go on to use as his subject in several of his later paintings. There are similar pictures to the Good Faith such as The Son of Man. The differences are that they show an apple rather than a pipe covering the face.

Although Magritte made use of other styles of painting in his career, he is someone we associate with the Surrealism art movement. While others tried new techniques, he took a different approach.

For him, he made use of an illustrative method. While his pictures have an illustrative quality in the clarity and simplicity they offer; some considered them to generate thoughts that were unsettling.

Despite this, for Magritte repetition played an important part in his paintings. The way he was able to show subjects within individual pictures was something that allowed him to create multiple copies of some of his greatest works.

It may, however, have been his work producing commercial art that allowed him to question the belief that works of art had to be original.

Magritte’s style of painting was almost conventional, reflecting his ideals. This may have been a decision that was almost conscious and deliberate. His dress and habits that saw him in a suit and bowler hat may have provided him with his best disguise of just being himself.

In his writings, he wrote that there were no subjects or themes in his paintings. His artwork associated with Surrealism sought to confuse people. It fused reality with the imagination. Because of this, the viewer was forced think about the image.

Magritte’s skills in being able to present objects in such a way that challenge and question the viewer has proved to be a strong influence on other artists.

His style of paintings helped shape works by the likes of John Baldessari, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Jan Verdoodt to name but a few. Magritte’s works have often been adapted or copied in things like logo’s, posters and album covers.

Born in Belgium in 1898, Rene Magritte was the oldest of the three children of Leopold and Regina Magritte. His father worked as a tailor and textile merchant.

He began painting in 1915 and continued up until his death in 1967. He started out working for a local wallpaper factory where he designed posters and advertisements for them. It was in 1922 that Magritte married Georgette Berger whom he had known as a teenager.

She became his muse and model for a number of his works. Magritte sold his first work sometime during 1923. It was a painting of the singer Evelyn Brélin. As a result of selling the painting, it led to a contract in 1926 with the Galerie la Centaure. It was the launch of his career as a full-time artist.

Rene Magritte died in 1967 in his bed. He died from pancreatic cancer, something that he had lived with for several years. He is buried in Schaerbeek Cemetery in Brussels.