With which artistic movement was the Belgian painter René Magritte associated?

René Magritte, in full René-François-Ghislain Magritte, (born November 21, 1898, Lessines, Belgium—died August 15, 1967, Brussels), was a Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. His works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and others.

After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916–18), Magritte became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches for advertisements. In 1922 he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting "The Song of Love" (1914), an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements in a dreamlike architectural space. The work had a great influence on Magritte’s artistic approach.

In 1927 he and his wife moved to a suburb of Paris. Magritte began to integrate text into some of his works, and during this time he painted one of his most famous pieces, "The Treachery of Images" (1929), in which a detailed representation of a pipe is combined with the cursive statement: "Ceci n’est pas une pipe" (“This is not a pipe”). The painting questioned the authority of both images and words.

Two museums in Brussels celebrate Magritte: the "René Magritte Museum" located in the house occupied by the artist and his wife between 1930 and 1954; and the "Magritte Museum", opened in 2009 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.