Artist Research- René Magritte, Joseph Cornell, Jeff Wassman- Ryan Haney

René Magritte

Picture of the Belgian artist.

René Magritte was a Belgian Surrealist painter who lived from 1898-1967. He was the son of a textile merchant and an unstable mother.When Magritte was just 12 years old, his mother drowned herself in the River Sambre. It is said that when they retrieved her body from the water, her dress was wrapped over head, completely covering her face.This experienced would end up inspiring some of Magritte's work, such as his piece "Les Amants", which depicts a man and a woman with cloth wrapped around their heads.

"Les Amants" (The Lovers); related to the death of Magritte's mother.

When starting out as a young artist, Magritte created work that he considered Impressionistic. After not achieving much success with this work, and after being convinced by the Surrealistic work of his friend Andre Breton, he began working with paintings that depicted distorted reality and uncommon images.He also would sometimes display common items in unusual environment, while simultaneously raising questions on the object's context and origin.

An example of Magritte's Impressionistic work.

One of Magritte's pieces, titled "The Treachery of Images", shows a pipe, on a plain background, with what is seemingly contradictory text below it.

"This is not a pipe."

The text translates to: "This is not a pipe."

While Magritte purposely makes this statement seem untrue, he argues that it is not. According to him, it's a painting of a pipe, not a real one. The goal of this type of work is to get the viewer to ask questions on the proposed issue and to question their past perceptions.

Joseph Cornell

Photograph of Cornell.

Joseph Cornell was an assemblage artist who lived from 1903-1972. Like Magritte, he also lost one of his parents at a young age: his father, who was a textile merchant like Magritte's father, passed away when Cornell was just 17. He was left to take care of his both of his mother and his brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Cornell dedicated his life to him, and made sure that his brother had what he needed until Robert's death in the mid- 1960's.

Joseph Cornell himself never married or had children, and rarely did he ever leave the state of New York, where he was born; he attended Phillips Academy in Massachusetts for three years util he eventually went back to his home without graduating.

His art was mostly inspired by Surrealist work made by artists of his generation, such as René Magritte. His work relied on the Surrealist use of juxtaposition, along with the collection of materials he would find in local book and thrift stores. These pieces were predominantly made into shadow boxes, where he would assemble pieces into a unique composition.

Much of Cornell's work was meant to be interacted with or sometimes held.

Joseph Cornell didn't see an extensive sum of success until he was commissioned for a solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1949.His last major show was arranged for children, as his work was placed at their eye- level and were meant for them to handle with their hands. Cornell passed away from heart failure in 1972.

Jeff Wassmann

Photograph of Wassmann

Jeff Wassmann is an assemblage artist who was born in Mars, Pennsylvania in 1958. He discovered Joseph Cornell's work while visiting an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Wassmann saw this work just a few years after Cornell's death, and at first he was not impressed, stating that it was "the only thing I didn't get back then". He would eventually lighten up to the work, however, and would end up creating extremely similar work to Cornell.

Wassmann would add depth to his work and distance himself from Cornell in time, though. He created a fictional artist named Johann Dieter Wassmann, who has fooled many art historians and critics since his creation. According to Jeff, Johann was born in Germany in the 19th century, and was the pioneer of assemblage pieces ( these pieces actually being Jeff Wassmann's currently work). This was of course far from the truth, as Cornell, Wassmann's inspiraton, was the real pioneer of this type of work.

Fictional artist Johann Dieter Wassman

Wassman currently works out of New Zealand.