Continuing with our fortnightly artist study I recently hosted a session to look at the work of Rene Magritte.
Why Rene Magritte?
We had studied a lot of pop artists in the first few artists we had looked at, and I wanted to challenge the children with someone very different. I wanted them to look at Magritte’s art and to see the influence his work had on the Pop Artists we have studied so far.
Materials Needed
For this session I provided each child with a range of printouts should they wish to make their own pack of information.
- Famous Artist Research Brochure (from TpT)
- Famous Artist Colouring Pages (from TpT)
- Famous Artist Paper Dolls (From TpT)
- Photo of themselves (we used the same photo as for previous artist studies)
- Photo of themselves with their back to the camera.
- Selection of colour or patterned papers and scissors and glue
How I ran the Session
My studies have a similar flow and approach. With this one I told the children about Magritte, about where and when he was born, noting that he was older than the other artists we had studied.
I talked about his life and the influences and social change that would have been taking place. He lived during both world wars, spent time in Paris in the 1920s as well as returning to Belgium when it was occupied during the Second World War.
I asked the children to think about how these things may have influenced his views on the world and his artwork. I also touched on how different his work during the Second World War was.
I talked about how he put his artistic talent to use post-war to create fake Picasso’s as well as forging banknotes!
Next, we looked at some of his work. I did stress to the children that his work is that of a surrealist and that there isn’t a right or wrong response to this work.
We looked at his work ‘The Treachery of Images‘ and I asked the children to consider whether they believed the image is a Pipe or not and I then read to the children a quote from Magritte about this work. We then looked at some other pieces of his work and talked about them together.
Art Activity
I then gave the children the choice of two tasks.
The first was to use the image of them with their back to the camera to recreate the piece called Decalcomania. The children all had a go at this and the results were excellent.
The second task was to use the image of themselves and use The Son of Man as inspiration. We talked a lot about the picture and I asked the children to obscure their faces with something personal to them. We had cakes, books, bananas and all manner of things.
Follow up with my own children
With my own children, we have followed this up by adding to our artist project book and adding Magritte to the world map we are building. We talked again about Magritte’s work and how we liked it compared to the work of the Pop Artists.
We also completed the Belgium Factfile to help to record some of the things we learned about Magritte’s home country.
Other artist studies can be found below.
interesting work again