cover image Magritte: The Silence of the World

Magritte: The Silence of the World

David Sylvester. Menil Foundation, $75 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-3626-3

Rene Magritte's mother drowned herself when he was 12; the future painter saw her water-ravaged corpse with its face covered. This trauma, Sylvester asserts, helps explain the Belgian surrealist's consuming preoccupation with hidden faces and things. A curator of the major Magritte retrospective on display in New York, Houston and Chicago in 1992 and 1993, Sylvester pierces the tranquil bourgeois facade of the painter's marriage to Georgette Berger, whom Magritte virtually forced into a long affair with one of his closest friends. Every Magritte fan will want to own this monograph, both for its extraordinary wealth of illustrations (470, including 340 color plates) and its sensitive biographical-critical account of Magritte's career, from his earliest cubist- and futurist-influenced work through his discovery of Giorgio de Chirico to his development of a meticulously precise style that coolly confronted the world in all its terrible mystery and improbability. (Nov.)