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We notify you each time your favorite artists feature in an exhibition, auction or the press. Access detailed sales records for over , artists, and more than two decades of past auction results. The celebrated author of lives of Paul Cezanne and Georges Braque died suddenly from a heart attack shortly after completing his ninth chapter, leaving the tenth in the care of Sarah Whitfield, who also edited. Unfortunately, the book reads like the first draft it is, clearly needing a rewrite before publication.
It is a Porlock project, interrupted and incomplete. Its other fault is Magritte himself, who is a surprisingly dull subject until just before the second world war. A really good biography needs something more than a problematic pipe and peculiar pictures of bowler-hatted businessmen and other classic surreal splendors. These lives read like thrillers. The first half of this Magritte reads like 10 mg of valium. A quarter of the way in, we have learned from long pages about his wickedness as an unpleasant boy who persecuted his mother.
Fun and games? In his first year of art school, his fellow student Leon Pringels, who recalled the incident, was hospitalized for malnourishment. While his friends wore the floppy hats and long hair of bohemia, Magritte wore a suit and tie and refused to adopt their patois. He married Georgette, his beloved childhood sweetheart, and lived simpatico with her in provincial Belgian bliss. Whatever came from Brussels but beer, bureaucracy, and the bourgeoisie?
They kept a dog always a Pomeranian. Magritte enjoyed kicking visitors in the backside and pretending nothing had happened. He locked Georgette in their coal bunker as a joke. There are few real revelations to season the meat of his life, and Danchev had little spice to grind. Under contract to his first gallery, he produced hundreds of paintings, whipping them out at incredible speed.
