Original subtitles

I love the bowler hat,

and I've been collecting bowler hats for 12 years now.

And that's because of one man,

the surrealist painter Rene Magritte.

He's responsible for making the bowler hat

one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

And he's been my inspiration since I was a teenager.

If you don't know his name, then you will know his work.

Surreal, anarchic,

challenging, ahead of its time,

and it goes for millions.

Selling here at 5,800,000.

Magritte showed us the world is not as it seems.

He challenged the way we look at ordinary objects.

This pipe, he said, is not a pipe.

Faces are hidden,

characters anonymous,

and that really appeals to my sense of the absurd.

But what kind of mind produced works like this?

A crazed maniac? A wild bohemian?

Think again. This Belgian surrealist lived quietly

in a suburb of Brussels,

dressed like a banker, and married his childhood sweetheart.

His legacy is colossal.

He influenced comedians.

That's very Monty Python.

He revolutionised advertising.

He's even made his mark on album covers.

And he's inspired my work too.

The way he saw life has changed the way that I see life.

He was a giant of a man,

and I'm making it my mission to find out what lies beneath his hat.

I grew up near Oxford,

and I first discovered Rene Magritte's work in a bookshop here

when I was just 15.

I will never forget it.

His belief that things are not what they seem

captivated me straightaway.

I cut out the famous picture of a dove made out of sky,

and stuck it on my bedroom wall.

It was such an image of hope.

When I went to boarding school,

I took the picture with me,

and everyone was different in what they had on their walls.

Some people had, you know, FHM covers,

you know, whatever, like, woman by fast car.

You know! Or pictures of football players.

And I just...

I don't know, I just wanted images that were intriguing to me.

And, I guess, inspiring.

I didn't know it at the time,

but I'd discovered surrealism.

The movement began in Paris in the Roaring '20s.

World War I was over.

A new way of looking at the world was gaining ground.

And with the help of Freudian ideas about the subconscious,

a group of artists decided to quite literally step beyond reality.

The most famous of the surrealists is the flamboyant Salvador Dali.

His weird landscapes and dripping watches

pitch us into a world of dreams and nightmares.

But I've always preferred Magritte, the quiet surrealist.

Take Empire of Lights. Nothing unusual at first glance.

But look again.

Something impossible is going on.

It's simultaneously day and night.

Magritte is a magician and a joker.

He disliked interpretations of his work,

insisting that its mystery was the whole point.

But, always contrary, he happily discussed the work himself

in television interviews, in essays,

and in the many letters he wrote to friends.

"I detest resignation, patience,

"professional heroism and all the obligatory noble sentiments.

"I also detest the decorative arts,

"folklore, advertising, and drunks.

"What I like is subversive humour,

"freckles, women's knees and their long hair,

"the laughter of children when they're being themselves.

"I long for love that is alive,

"for what is impossible and ambiguous.

"I dread knowing precisely where my limits are."

Magritte was full of contradictions.

A subversive in suburbia.

This is rue Essegham, in a middle class area of Brussels.

It couldn't be more ordinary.

Yet Magritte lived here with his wife, Georgette,

for more than 20 years.

When I think of an artist's place of work,

I don't necessarily think

of an unassuming suburban street like this one.

And it's rubbish day today.

I wonder if Rene and Georgette took out their own rubbish.

His old house is now a museum.

Hi. Hello. Come in.

He created so many brilliant paintings here,

and I've wanted to visit for years.

So right here we have, let's say, the room of all purposes.

It's a dining room and it's also his working space.

So this is his little corner where he's painting.

And he will realise about 800 works of art

in these 24 years that he's living here,

so I think that's quite a lot.

(GASPS) These are his brushes.

I'm just going to pick it up, that's all I'm going to do.

Just hold it. Oh, it's quite heavy.

Is there a chance I can sit down?

Well, yes I'll let you sit down for a minute. OK.

Thank you.

Wow. (LAUGHS)

OK. So thinking about what he would have been doing.

The first thing that strikes me is there really isn't that much space.

I don't think he was complaining so much,

because on a certain moment, he said,

"I just need a room or even an attic.

"Just a little space to do my work."

And, you know, he's not so very messy,

so he's not needing a lot of space, I think.

But anyway, it's true that it's not ideal.

It;s not so very comfortable for an artist.

Let's enter the bedroom.

A dog! A dead dog.

You have to know, the Magrittes were very, very fond of their dogs.

So they had Lulu, a Pomeranian,

their whole lifetime.

And Rene Magritte had one stuffed.

Incredible. Lots of people have a dog, but to stuff it?

What is very interesting in this living room is that window.

It's a sash window, and it's curved.

You recognise it exactly in la Condition Humaine, for example.

It's a painting from 1933, and he obviously painted it

when he was living right here.

You have the staircase as well

which we can recognise in a painting.

But, you know, his paintings are not biographical.

It's banal objects. Because they are surrounding him, he depicts them.

It's great to see something in real life that is in a Magritte painting.

"I want to breathe new life

"into the way we look at the ordinary things around us."

"But how should one look?

"Like a child,

"the first time it encounters a reality outside of itself.

"I live in the same state of innocence

"as a child who believes he can reach out from his cot

"and grasp a bird in the sky."

This is Lessines, where Magritte was born in 1898,

the oldest of three boys.

His father, Leopold, was a tailor and a merchant.

And his mother, Regina, a milliner and a housewife.

It's a dull, provincial place.

Not much here to spark a passion for painting.

We don't actually know that much about what happened behind closed doors here,

but we can imagine it wasn't a happy household.

His mother suffered from severe depression,

so Magritte used to come to the nearby mediaeval town of Soignies

to stay with his grandmother.

It was here, in the old cemetery,

that he first encountered a serious artist.

And it thrilled him.

Magritte wrote hundreds of letters, as well as giving lectures,

and that's how we know that this place was significant to him.

"As a child, I used to play with a little girl

"in the old provincial cemetery.

"We would go down into the family vaults,

"when we could lift their heavy iron doors,

"and would come up into the light again

"to find an artist from Brussels at work on a very picturesque path

"where broken stone columns were scattered among dead leaves.

"The art of painting seemed to me vaguely magical

"and the painter to be gifted with superior powers."

Feels great to be in the place where Magritte came across an artist

who inspired him, and it seemed magical to be an artist,

so maybe this was the very place that a kernel of an idea started

to set him on his journey towards becoming the great painter he became.

So are there events in Magritte's life that found their way into his paintings?

I'm hoping to find more clues here in Chatelet,

in the industrial heartland of Belgium.

The family moved here in 1904, when Magritte was five.

Quite a smart house.

Leopold was making serious money trading in edible oils,

and built this rather posh home.

Apparently, Regina hated it -

a factor in the tragedy that followed some years later.

Young Magritte was, by all accounts, a bit of a handful,

his antics out of the ordinary.

He hung cats on the doorbells of his neighbours.

As a child, Magritte loved silent movies.

His idol was the arch villain and master of disguise Fantomas,

the anti-hero in these films.

The Fantomas films are masterpieces of visual invention and plot.

Critics called them "fantastic realism",

a description that could be applied to Magritte's work.

Fantomas is an outlaw who scorns the conventions of everyday life.

Perhaps Magritte saw himself as a similarly anarchic character.

Magritte loved the melodrama of these films.

Sequences like this one, from The Murderous Corpse.

Two assassins stand outside a door,

waiting to pounce on their victim.

Magritte was inspired by this scene to paint The Menaced Assassin.

This is one of my favourite images of Magritte's,

and I've always loved it.

Starting from the perspective in the painting,

to have the three men at the back poking their heads over the balcony,

looking in on this scene,

and then the two bowler-hatted men in the foreground,

looking to do some mischief.

The escapism of the Fantomas films must have given the young Magritte

a refuge from the oppressive atmosphere at home.

His mother's mental health was getting worse.

At night, she had to be locked in a bedroom.

But one dreadful day in February 1912,

as the rest of the family slept,

she found the key.

A body was dragged from the water ten days later.

His mother had committed suicide.

She'd thrown herself off the bridge into the River Sambre below.

Magritte was just 13 when his mother died,

and I can't imagine what effect that would have had on him.

I think if I was his age, and my mother had left me

in such a sad way, as well,

I don't know if I would have ever recovered.

But Magritte always dismissed the suggestion

that the loss had affected him in any lasting way.

"It was a shock, but I don't believe in psychology

"any more than I believe in willpower.

"Psychology doesn't interest me.

"It tries to explain a mystery.

"The only mystery is the world."

I don't agree with what Magritte has said in this.

I mean, we do see it coming out in Magritte's work.

Some paintings in particular certainly show a direct correlation,

in my opinion, to his mother's death.

But I also get a sense that there's a sadness that perhaps he's held in...

his entire life.

I'm delving into the life of Rene Magritte,

the surrealist painter who helped shape the way I look at the world.

In 1913, a year after his mother's death,

14-year-old Rene met a young girl who would change his life.

"In the street fairs, they used to have merry-go-rounds

"with wooden horses.

"It was here I met a young girl who eventually became my wife."

Her name was Georgette Berger.

But the outbreak of World War I forced the young couple apart,

and they lost touch.

Magritte had been going to art classes since he was 12.

A poor student in every subject but art,

in 1916, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels.

But he soon became restless and disillusioned.

"If, in my childhood,

"the art of painting had seemed to me vaguely magical,

"I soon learned, unfortunately, that painting indeed

"had very little to do with everyday life.

"This was how I came to acquire a total mistrust

"of all art, and artists.

"I felt I had nothing in common with such a group of people."

The rebel in Magritte was slowly finding its voice.

Contrary and nonconformist as ever,

he distanced himself from other artists

by painting in a suit,

a habit he continued to the day he died.

It was also the time that he rediscovered

the love of his life, Georgette.

I'm on my way to meet someone who knew her well,

the custodian of the Magritte estate, Charly Herscovici.

Is it true he met Georgette by coincidence in Brussels?

How romantic.

A chance meeting on a spring day in the botanic gardens in 1920,

and young Rene was smitten all over again,

as he wrote to a friend.

"And as soon as I've secured our material future, which is one aim,

"I shall find another to live by.

"And that will be to make Georgette as happy as possible.

"And in the calm of a nice, steady, bourgeois life,

"I shall devote myself during my leisure hours

"to the work which I want to leave after me."

Magritte married his beloved Georgette in 1922.

They settled into a life of suburban bliss.

But as an artist, Magritte had yet to find himself.

There was a lively art scene in Brussels at the time,

and he sought the company of like-minded friends.

We are here at one of Magritte's favourite coffee houses,

where he hung out with his fellow Brussels surrealist group.

And if you turn around, you can actually see some of them here.

ELT Mesens, and also Paul Colinet, and Irene Hamoir,

and they all met here

and discussed how the artistic development would go.

Magritte was experimenting at the time with different styles,

and I think he actually experimented

with whatever style he could get his hands on.

Until he comes across this painting.

This is Songs of Love by Giorgio de Chirico.

And de Chirico was a metaphysical artist.

De Chirico thought of it as trying to see something

from a different perspective,

like with a clairvoyant, there is another level of perception.

That was a moment of revelation to Magritte.

And it moved him to tears.

Magritte realised that really, what is important in painting

is the idea rather than the form.

So what kind of idea does it convey?

And how can he represent ideas

to challenge our habits of thought.

And we can see this in his first surrealist work, The Lost Jockey.

One major source where Magritte gets these ideas from

is the Larousse Encyclopaedia.

The famous pipe painting! Ah.

It really was never a pipe.

It was always based on a model of a pipe.

It's so interesting to see clearly his interpretation

of everyday things,

and moving them into the Magritte world.

"In my pictures, I have placed objects

"in situations where we never encounter them,

"because I wanted the most familiar objects to utter a kind of scream.

"These had to be arranged in a fresh order,

"and acquire a meaning that was deeply upsetting.

"Wooden table legs, turned on a lathe, lost their ordinariness

"if, all of a sudden, they rose high above a forest.

"Those small iron bells slung round the necks of our fine horses,

"I envisaged them popping up like dangerous plants."

Magritte's surrealism certainly upset the Brussels art scene.

In 1927, he had his first one-man exhibition.

61 works of art.

The critics hated them.

One reviewer wrote, "What is one to say of these pretentious canvases,

"devoid of any link with the living world?"

Magritte felt that his work was completely misunderstood,

and he said later of the work,

"The proof of freedom they reveal naturally outraged the critics,

"from whom I had expected nothing interesting anyway."

He should have taken a leaf out of my book.

I try to ignore the critics.

But Magritte was having none of it.

If the provincial art world of Brussels couldn't appreciate him,

he would go somewhere that would,

a city that embraced the new - Paris.

Wave after wave of artists had made their way here.

Impressionists, cubists, Dadaists, and now the surrealists.

He and Georgette moved here in 1927.

The French surrealists, led by Andre Breton,

admitted him to this most exclusive of artistic movements.

But, always the nonconformist,

even this was a club that he didn't really want to belong to.

I've come to the Magritte Museum in Brussels to find out more.

It was very stimulating, in terms of his creative output.

He painted over 100 pictures in one year.

But he did not fit in, because he didn't believe in this whole notion

of the unconscious, and that you can tap into the unconscious.

He said, "Oh, I hate when my paintings are interpreted

"in terms of the unconscious or in Freudian terms."

He was into philosophy,

and the philosophy of language,

and the philosophy of representation.

Particularly with themes like this,

where he shows that actually, the word and the image

aren't necessarily related.

Let's have a look at Ceci continue de ne pas etre une pipe.

This continues not to be a pipe. (LAUGHS)

And it's really interesting. Look at it.

Can you... can you smoke this pipe?

No, you can't. So this is not a pipe.

He shows how unreliable language really is,

and how slippery language is.

I get it. Mm? I get it, I get it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yet again, Magritte is telling us, "Don't trust what you see."

The Paris years were among the most creative of Magritte's life,

but his work failed to sell.

He and Georgette lived on food parcels from her family.

Magritte fell out badly with Breton.

Demoralised and defeated,

Rene and Georgette returned to Brussels in 1930.

They'd been away for just three years.

He was so keen to put his Parisian experience behind him

that he burnt many of his letters and photographs.

Magritte was nothing if not pragmatic.

Short of money, he set up an advertising agency, Studio Dongo,

with his brother Paul.

Working out of Magritte's house,

they created amazing designs that still look fresh today.

But Magritte saw advertising as an idiotic job,

which is typically contrary,

because his designs clearly influenced his art,

sometimes in the most disturbing ways.

This is an evolution of a Magritte image.

It's an advert for cigarettes.

It's a very direct portrayal of her.

And then we can see the sort of image, this face,

has been transmuted into this rather disturbing image,

where you've got women's sexuality blazed across her face,

rather than her features.

And Magritte here is making us focus very clearly

on a woman's sexuality, and how that comes to represent her.

Now, it is disturbing, it is disturbing imagery.

And then, of course, we see it as a final painting.

In the mid-1930s, this was exhibited in a surrealist exhibition,

it was exhibited behind curtains. Really?

So there was a sense even then that this was a disturbing image, a peep show,

the surrealists often played with that idea.

So do you think that Magritte was coming at the female form

from a chauvinist point of view,

or do you think Magritte was making a point that within society,

at that time, women were purely treated as sexual objects?

That's the great beauty of surrealism, is the ambiguity of it.

The meanings, I think, you know...

It depends on the viewer.

But here we have other depictions of women in Magritte's work. Wow.

Well, that to me seems...

Yeah, that's... ..far more empowering.

And don't you think he looks intimidated? Yes, he does.

Yeah. A bit lost. He looks a bit lost, a bit childlike.

(LAUGHS) A bit fearful. Well, all men are babies.

Yes. This is what I say.

Well, that's what the surrealists were very often exploring.

It's interesting. I always saw him as being far more, erm, pro women

than this chauvinistic, misogynist man.

But, I mean, now I'm not...

I don't know, I'm still learning about him.

I'm coming to love Magritte's contradictions.

The knowing innocent, the bourgeois in a bowler.

In 1936, he was invited to submit paintings

for the very first London exhibition of surrealist art.

Making a rare excursion from Brussels,

Magritte came to London for a short visit.

While he was here, one of his friends suggested that he buy a bowler

from the famous hat shop Lock & Co.

Typically, Magritte thought it was too posh.

But I've come for my very own fitting.

This is the contraption that we use for fitting the bowler hats.

Wow. What's that called?

It's, er... it's called a conformator.

How funny, cos Magritte is anything but conformist,

you know, he's very subversive.

It does look like an instrument of torture.

It's a French invention from the 1850s.

Put it on the head, all of the pins move around.

It makes an impression onto the paper of your head shape.

Oh, I see, I see. Can I try it on?

Of course. Let me take a... take a head shape for you.

Keep your chin up.

Feels a bit strange.

Wow. That feels really odd.

So what it's doing is it's kind of like a very...

Like a sort of hand going pffff, like that.

Compressing your head. Yeah, it's sort of a very traditional

Indian head massage.

So that is, more or less, the shape of your head.

Which isn't as worrying as you might think.

That looks really wonky! (LAUGHS)

That's the front and that's the back.

So it's called a long oval.

Yeah, 57 centimetres on the nose.

57.

That feels like a good number.

Very solid. I feel... Solid. Yeah. (LAUGHS)

The bowler-hatted figure first appeared in 1926.

He pops up in dozens more paintings and drawings.

The figures are detached.

They invite us to project our own stories onto them.

It's their anonymity that so appeals to me.

Magritte himself wore the bowler to mask his nonconformity,

to become the invisible man.

Here's your bowler hat.

Can I just say this is extremely exciting for me?

Excellent. On the outside, I'm calm.

(LAUGHS) On the inside, I'm like a four-year-old child.

Can... I don't... Of course.

So that... Yeah.

Is a traditionally fitted bowler hat.

How's that look? It looks very nice.

Yes!

I look quite smart.

I feel like a gentleman.

I feel like I could have, you know, mixed in Magritte's circles.

Yeah.

The London art scene was good to Magritte,

and he liked the city.

He came here again in 1937.

Magritte was invited to this house in Wimpole Street by Edward James,

an eccentric and extremely wealthy man.

and a great patron of the surrealists.

These are now private consulting rooms,

but back in the day, this was a magnificent townhouse

with its own ballroom.

James commissioned three paintings from Magritte at a sum of £250,

which in today's money is £15,000,

a terrific sum for a struggling artist.

James bought some of Magritte's best-known works.

The Red Model.

Not to be Reproduced,

which is actually a portrait of Edward James.

And Time Transfixed.

They're brilliant.

Love them.

But London was to be a massive test of Magritte's perfect marriage.

It was here he met and fell in love with a surrealist poet, Sheila Legge.

Here she is in Trafalgar Square, her head a mass of roses.

Left alone in Brussels, Georgette was spending more and more time

with their friend Paul Colinet.

Perhaps inevitably, she too fell in love.

The marriage was falling apart.

Magritte was further depressed by the onset of World War II.

That really was a very difficult period in his life.

And so, in 1943, these paintings start to appear.

Hm.

That's his Renoir period.

He went back to the impressionist artists

and used their colours and reworked them into these paintings,

which are completely untypical of Magritte.

In 1940, Belgium was invaded by the Germans,

and this is allegiance to the French artists.

But it's a disruption in Magritte's style.

You get all these typical Magrittes,

and suddenly there is this disruption here. I feel disrupted.

A break in the circuit. Yeah.

And were these selling?

No. No. It was a disaster.

He knew that this was a disaster. He must have known.

It's very interesting that he's standing up

and doing something completely different.

And actually, Magritte had a lot of pressure from the art markets

to produce Magritte-like paintings.

Erm, and after his impressionist period, the Renoir period,

instead of reverting to his Magritte-like paintings,

he came up with this.

Wow.

(LAUGHS) Oh, my gosh.

This is his Vache Period, and vache means cow.

And it drew very heavily on the Fauves,

which was Henri Matisse and other people.

The colours are very dominant.

But also, Magritte is using caricatures

more than serious imagery.

I don't like that. No? No!

You know why I don't like it? I don't understand it.

I feel like I don't understand it.

Suddenly, you are in deep waters with Magritte.

Suddenly, it's not reliable any more.

Is this the same thing as when Dylan plugged in an electric guitar?

Or when... You know, there's certainly been times when I've wanted

to move away from certain things that I've become known as.

You... you want to break away from that brand, in a way.

I'm having to completely reframe my thoughts on who this man was.

Er... I'm slightly flummoxed.

The Vache Period ended in the late 1940s,

when Magritte reverted to his more familiar style.

And luckily for us, he discovered another medium in the 1950s -

the cine camera.

He filmed his great friends Louis and Irene,

and he filmed his wife Georgette.

They're together again, after their brief affairs.

It's brilliant seeing these videos.

Georgette just looks like a right laugh.

And... In fact, they're all having great fun.

Irene is performing...

er...

close relations with a banana.

I don't think you have to be a brain surgeon

to work out the connotations of those!

And it's really cool to see adults of that age behaving like that.

These are artistic people who are having a right laugh

doing home videos, essentially,

which is what we now do, you know, on our phones.

Er, there's no difference.

These are really wonderful glimpses of the private Magritte.

The invisible man made visible.

I've come to Knokke-le-Zoute, a seaside resort on the Belgian coast.

Magritte painted something here in 1953

that I've been told is spectacular.

I've never seen it, so I don't know what to expect.

(GASPS)

No!

Are they all by him? No!

I just don't know what to say!

They're absolutely massive.

There's everything that I know about Magritte, in one place.

All his paintings, all his subjects, all his ideas.

It's like it's come out of his mind

and he's just thrown them all into one place.

As I'm looking at it, I'm swept by a real feeling of... humour,

and a real sense of life.

Every emotion, nature, the elements, sexuality, sadness...

Oh, look at that.

Look at the stone chair with the tiny, tiny chair on top.

That's very Monty Python. I mean, gosh.

That is Monty Python.

It's... it's unbelievable. It's completely overwhelming.

You know, I feel kind of sick with excitement.

By the end of the 1950s, Magritte was famous and wealthy.

The value of his work increased eightfold between 1959 and 1965.

He and Georgette moved to this new house

in the smart suburb of Schaerbeek.

But, through rich and poor, he remained a stickler for routine

as his friend Mesens recalled.

"He lived a systematic life.

"He painted always absolutely fully dressed,

"as if going to town, with a stiff collar and so on.

"Every afternoon after lunch, he rested a bit.

"Didn't paint, went downtown with a tram,

"not a bus, nor a taxi,

"and went to the same place to play chess.

"A place where you found, usually, 80 or 90 men,

"extremely concentrated in chess-playing,

"and drinking, the whole afternoon, one coffee."

Legend has it that he would try and sell some of his pictures

to his opponents.

One opponent in particular, who was constantly taking cash off him,

was asked why he didn't take the pictures.

His reply... "If he paints like he plays chess,

"I'd rather have the cash."

He might be regretting that now.

Today, a Magritte will cost you a fortune.

And I'm about to find out just how much one of his paintings is worth.

And so we come on to the wonderful Magritte.

The Hunters at the Edge of the Night.

I'm really excited.

I'm in London for a sale of surrealist art,

and it includes a work the auctioneers describe

as "the most important early Magritte to be sold in a generation."

Privately, Magritte was anything but indifferent.

In fact, fame tormented him.

One friend wrote, "The more honours and money he receives,

"the more uneasy he feels."

Isn't that just like Magritte?

Complaining when he isn't recognised, tormented when he is.

And so we come on to the wonderful Magritte.

The Hunters at the Edge of the Night.

Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, of 1928.

And where do we open this?

At four million five. Five million is here.

Gentleman's bid, I have it. Five million.

5,500,000 is the bid,

and I'm selling here at the moment, at 5,500,000.

With the two telephones here, this is Olivier.

5,800,000.

5,800,000 for the 1928 picture.

Are we all done, sir?

Thank you for your bids. Here it is, then, at 5,800,000.

I'm sorry. Sold here at five-eight.

Sold.

Not that much money, really.

Well into his 60s, Magritte produced

some of his best-known and most loved works of art.

The Son of Man.

The Domain of Arnheim.

And Golconda.

But, while his mind was as inventive as ever,

his body was failing.

This film of Magritte was taken on holiday in 1967,

just six months before he died.

I find it so moving.

Ever the comic, he's still messing around,

mugging to camera, standing on his head.

Not really. He's put the chair on his head and flipped the image.

What a joker, turning the world upside down right to the end.

In August 1967, Rene Magritte died of pancreatic cancer

here at home.

By his side, his beloved wife Georgette,

his brother Paul, and on his bed, his dog Lulu.

Magritte;s legacy is colossal.

In the '60s and '70s, he was a powerful influence on rock musicians

and the designers of their album covers.

There was something in his images that caught the spirit of the times.

Magritte was hip.

This is a picture that we did for Pink Floyd,

which is very much about Magritte.

You know, you've got a man in a suit with a bowler hat. Yeah.

And he has no face.

In Magritte's painting, the face is missing completely.

And this is all about absence.

And this was for Pink Floyd for Wish You Were Here.

# So, so you think you can tell

# Heaven from hell #

The album that they made was about the insincerity of the music business.

That when a businessman was talking to you as an artist,

that actually, he wasn't really there.

But I can safely say that this was a direct piece of plagiarisation from Magritte.

But, you know, it works.

# Do you think you can tell?

# Did they get you to trade... #

He often had imagery which was oblique.

And he influenced, again, when we did the picture of the cow.

That picture over there.

Which is simply a cow on the front of an album cover.

It's nothing more, nothing less.

It doesn't relate to the lyrics, it doesn't relate to the title of the album,

it doesn't relate to Pink Floyd.

It's just a cow. So to me, that sounds, erm... subversive.

Yeah. That's why Magritte's so important today.

And that's why Magritte will go on being important,

because his images translated an emotional sense of urgency.

You want to know what they're about.

I wonder what Magritte would have made

of the influence he continues to have on modern art.

I'm on my way to meet Gavin Turk,

one of Britain's leading contemporary artists.

He's created sculptures that are based entirely on Magritte's work.

He also has great taste in scarves.

There's a couple of pieces which I made.

And one of them is this.

So here we have, like, a sculpture of my head,

and then it has all these attendant

kind of Magritte attributes put to it.

It's great. I love this as well.

Egg eyes, which are kind of a logo of mine,

and then a gun barrel nose.

And there's another one here which, again, was a similar sort of thing.

It's a self portrait, with this big beard

and pipes stuck all over the face.

And this is a bronze sculpture.

I think that what Magritte does is to make you realise

that you can't just assume that everyday objects,

you know what they are.

That, actually, within the everyday,

there's a surreal element.

Long after his death, #Magritte's work still exerts

an incredible pull over so many of us.

The advertising industry.

Designers. Artists.

And my fellow musicians.

But I've come to realise that Magritte is a mirror,

reflecting who I am, or, at least, what I would like to be.

Smart on the outside...

rebellious on the inside.

This is where Rene Magritte is buried next to his beloved wife Georgette.

And this is where my voyage of discovery ends.

It's a very modest and unassuming grave, like the man himself.

And although Rene Magritte is buried here,

I can draw no other conclusion than ceci n'est pas Magritte.

This is not Magritte.

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