Far from underestimating Magritte, Danchev’s picture of him is pointillist and enormous in scope. It is full of shock, for the casual Magritte fan who knows little about his life ... There is not much discussion of women in political terms in Magritte: A Life, although they appear in Magritte’s life plenty. This is perhaps the book’s one significant flaw, especially since its best surprises often occur at the intersection of Magritte’s politics and his relationship with other artists ... Biographies usually attribute weight to moments or eras in a person’s life, building a narrative which will 'explain' the artworks, but this one attempts no such thing ... Magritte: A Life paints scenes, all taken from life, but not forced into the realist mode which can constrain works of this type.
As a whole, the book is accessible, factually reliable and, at 439 pages, free of the inflated heft of so many recent biographies ... Magritte declined to talk about his mother’s death, even privately, and dismissed psychology as a pseudoscience. Danchev does not say much about the subject ... Even so, it seems fair to say that his mother’s death and the years of depression that preceded it surely bear a connection to the all-around sense of apprehension pervading his work. Danchev is on firmer ground in describing Magritte’s career.
[A] diligent and insightful biography ... Danchev proved an indefatigable researcher, and Sarah Whitfield does full justice to his labours in completing this final chapter of Magritte’s life. Here as elsewhere, however, the artist seems to resist coming to full corporeal life on the page. Still, you can’t help feeling that the persistent sense of René being there and not being there might have been exactly as he would have wished it.
[A] thoroughly and gruesomely entertaining biography ... Alex Danchev died before he could write his final chapter. His manuscript was ably finished by Elizabeth Whitfield. All this befits their subject. This is a fascinating biography of an artist by Alex Danchev, this is not by Alex Danchev; this is fascinating as biography, but not because of the art.
... an insightful and broad-reaching new biography by the late Alex Danchev that nonetheless may leave some important clues underexplored ... The polymath Danchev is well-equipped to investigate Magritte’s singular mind. The author brings to his mission an impressive array of aesthetic, political and philosophical tools ... Danchev is intimately familiar with the French surrealist circle that Magritte and his Brussels cadre tensely orbited. But he is equally adept at contextualizing Magritte’s life and work ... But in seeking clues to the mystery of Magritte, how should one weigh his dysfunctional childhood? Danchev vividly describes it but eschews the role of amateur Freudian. He trusts himself to intuit Magritte’s mind but shies from guessing what lay within the painter’s heart. That reluctance is understandable, but it leaves crucial puzzle pieces missing ... Some scholars have approached Magritte’s doors to nowhere, his draped heads and exposed bodies, his blurring of the animate and inanimate, live and dead, from a psychoanalytic standpoint. That mode was one with which Danchev may have been uncomfortable, but it feels important to the mystery of Magritte, which is far from solved.
... lavish, authoritative ... Danchev seasons his book with reams of research and critique and not a little gossip, evoking a titan of the 20th-century European avant-garde ... Erotic titillation and the menace of mortality underpin Magritte ... The book also entertains: Squint hard, and you just might spy an Andalusian dog ... a superb account of one enigmatic, enduring artist, a gratifying addition to our cultural literature, and an ode to modernity's contradictions.
Alex Danchev’s posthumously published book — the final chapter was written by Sarah Whitfield from his notes — unpicks the philosophical basis thoughtfully and with real enlightenment. I would have enjoyed more investigation of the daily life of this most outwardly respectable of artists ... It’s worth saying, too, that the biography is handsomely illustrated. Not every artist’s estate is generous enough to allow hundreds of reproductions, including nearly 50 in colour ... The drama of thought is well explored, though Magritte leaves one, as always, with the nagging worry that art that reaches so emphatically for extra-painterly values, such as narrative or philosophical statement, always appeals strongly to contemporaries, but ages badly ... For the moment, the conscious mind and philosophical engagement of the artist is worth exploring conscientiously, as Danchev has done.
Sinuous ... Danchev...makes a compelling case for Magritte as a much more political painter than he is often given credit for ... This book leaves no doubt that the image Magritte maintained of himself as a regular citizen living a quiet life in a nondescript Brussels neighborhood was indeed performance art of the highest order.
Danchev was a researcher of ferocious meticulousness ... Danchev’s approach to...questions is...open-ended. He presents the facts as he doggedly finds them, leaving his audience to make the connections between Magritte’s biography and art; to each reader, his own little bowler-hatted man ... This is a fine book, and Whitfield’s tenth chapter, covering the last twenty years of its subject’s life, does Danchev’s efforts full justice. As a historian, Danchev was polymathic ... If there is a single annoyance in Magritte: A Life, it is Danchev’s tendency to wear his breadth of knowledge on his sleeve: quoting Félix Fénéon, Humpty Dumpty and Samuel Beckett on successive pages looks like showing off. But this is a quibble. For those who love Magritte and those who do not, Danchev’s biography will come as a revelation.
[A] monumental biography of the inimitable surrealist artist ... A fascinating study ... An exhaustive look at the painter’s unusual life ... The result is sure to be the definitive account of the extraordinary artist’s life.
