Musee Magritte Museum, Belgium Archives - The Artist

Personal Values

Afzal Ibrahim — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 14:20:55 +0000

Personal Values is an oil painting produced in 1952 by Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte.

The Musee Magritte Museum hosted the painting until 2015 and now it was lent by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The painting Personal Values style was similar to the old master’s style i.e. more realistic and ultrafine. Rene Magritte used a deadpan to illustrate the articulated content of this picture which results in a power paradox. It means that there were certain beautiful images in clarity and simplicity but they could provoke unsettling thoughts. These pictures seem to declare that they were hiding nothing but at the same time were so strange. Rene Magritte wanted that the viewers would start to question the definition of the painting. The comb in this painting represents a tool with a socially accepted exterior behavior. Its position depicts a standing figure and a relationship with the pillow.

Personal Values is an oil painting produced in 1952 by Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte.

The comb was generally used to groom one’s hair either male or female. The soap present nearby represents the importance of the grooming of the body. Through this painting, Rene Magritte’s particular personal hygiene and picture were shown. The dimensions of the painting Personal Values were 80 cm x 100 cm

Magritte painted the walls with the color of the sky which depicts that the room was free from its limit to human physicality of imagination. It suggests that the image of any individual viewer was up-to their own and they could interpret the composition of the painting Personal Values.

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The Temptation of St. Anthony

Afzal Ibrahim — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 14:20:55 +0000

The Temptation of St. Anthony is an oil painting produced in 1946 by Spanish painter Salvador Dali.

The Temptation of St. Anthony was Dalí’s work better known as the “Dalí Renaissance”.

The Temptation of St. Anthony depicted a landscape similar to desert. The landscape consists of a line seems to be a horizon with dark clouds at the top in the sky. At the bottom left hand side of the painting, a figure was kneeling holding a cross in right hand and from his left hand on the rock, he supports himself. The figure seems to be of Saint Anthony. A human skull lies at a distance shown between his two legs. A group of elephants with horses at the beginning approached Saint Anthony. They were carrying object which represents different figures, one with a nude woman holding her breast, other with a complex building confining a nude woman, another with an obelisk, a vertical tower. These elephants and horse were painted having very long and spindly legs.

David Loew Albert Lewin had organized a contest for his film production company for which Dali’s painted The Temptation of St. Anthony. The painting was supposed to be used in the film The Private Affairs of Bel Ami and many artists participated for the contest. Unfortunately, Salvador Dali painting was not chosen in the film and this was the only contest where Dali had participated in his entire life.

Salvador Dali was known as the surrealistic artist and many paintings contain surrealistic elements from his work. This painting was regarded as the first and foremost which lightened Dali’s interest between the earth and the heaven. The dimensions of the painting The Temptation of St. Anthony were 119.5 cm x 89.7 cm.

The work can be viewed at Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium

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