http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16208781

Magritte’s Missives: A Cache of letters reveals the artist’s humour and imagination

“WHEN René Magritte was 13 years old, his mother drowned herself in a local river. When the body was recovered her face was found to be covered with her nightdress. No one knew whether she had deliberately shielded her eyes from death or if the river current had simply veiled her face. Magritte had begun painting a year earlier.

He would become obsessed with the hidden. His paintings often include grey rivers, pale lifeless bodies, faces swathed in fabric, solitary men walking, sea water and rampant roses—as well as the floating apples, burning bassoons, fingerless arms, sponges and pipes that began to appear in his work after he met Giorgio de Chirico, an Italian artist, and converted to Surrealism.”