'Threatening Weather' was painted during the summer of 1929 while Magritte was staying with Dalí near Cadaqués, in Spain. This painting is a perfect example of Magritte's use of familiar objects in an unexpected manner. The three objects float like clouds over the sea, in a way that suggests the scene is both natural and unnatural. They bear all the hallmarks of a dream image, both unsettling and erotic.
René Magritte (Belgian, 1898 - 1967)
Magritte was born in Belgium and, apart from a few years spent in Paris in the late 1920s, lived there all his life. Unlike many Surrealists, Magritte did not subscribe to the view that the unconscious could be expressed through chance or 'automatic' techniques. Instead, he planned and executed his paintings with all the deliberation and skill of an academic painter. The results are surprisingly credible images of seemingly illogical scenes. Magritte would undermine logic by tampering with scale and by placing unrelated objects in unexpected settings. A constant theme running through his art is the relationship that exists between the painted image and the visible world, between fiction and reality. Magritte's art blurs the boundaries between the two.
