René Magritte

René Magritte spent the mid-1920s in Brussels doing the least glamorous work a painter can do: designing advertisements and posters for a fashion house and a fur company, in the crisp Art Deco style of the day. That commercial training never left him. When he painted his famous pipe in 1929 and lettered underneath it, in neat schoolbook cursive, 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe', meaning 'This is not a pipe', it reads exactly like an advertisement that has turned on itself, because the object on the canvas really is only a picture of a pipe, which is all the caption points out.

He kept this up for 40 years, painting ordinary things wrongly: a steam train charging out of a fireplace, a man in a bowler hat with an apple hiding his face, a daylight sky above a night street. He did it while living deliberately like a bank clerk, in a modest Brussels house, in a suit and the same bowler hats that fill his pictures.

There is a shadow behind the calm surface. In 1912, when he was 13, his mother drowned herself in the river Sambre near their town, and when her body was recovered days later her nightdress was said to be over her face. Biographers have long tied that image to the cloth-shrouded faces he painted in the late 1920s, though Magritte himself waved the connection away. He went on repeating his quiet, unsettling objects until his death in 1967, by which point younger Pop artists in America were treating him as an ancestor.