RICHARD WORTH relishes the fleeting moment and sense of flow of the late, great saxophonist
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As a communist artist, what was he trying to do?
A biography in which Magritte’s thinking is ignored and subjected instead to commodification and the shameless appropriation of his imagery, argues ANGUS REID
POLITICS IGNORED: Poster for the Vigilance Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals, 1937: ‘The True Face of Rex’ a poster of Leon Degrelle, the founder of the Belgian far right Rexist Party (Rex) - after WWII Degrelle, convicted of treason in absentia and sentenced to death, took refuge in Francoist Spain; The Red Model, 1934, possibly inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes, 1886
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ON THE back cover of Alex Danchev’s new biography Magritte — A Life it asks: “Artist, Surrealist, Provocateur — who was Rene Magritte?”
Answer (although you don’t find it the book): Magritte was a communist, like Andre Breton, who founded the Surrealist movement, and the poet Paul Eluard, the film-maker Luis Bunuel and the theoretician Paul Nouge.
Nouge was Magritte’s closest collaborator and he was a founding member of the Belgian Communist Party in 1919.
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