Lancaster - You are not human: how words Kill

I ts an unexpectedly warm evening in February 2013 and hundreds of global art collectors, foreign investors and members of Londons creative glitterati are making their way down St Jamess Street, London towards the pillared doors of Christies auction house. For 250 years, this has been a place where millions of pounds have been spent with a literal blink of the eye or wave of the hand and tonight promises to be just such a night. Private collections and secret vaults around the world have been prised open for the Art of the Surreal auction. All the seats have been taken. The doorways are full. Dozens of people line the room, nervously checking their phones and biting their lips.

Jussi Pylkknen, the Finnish global president of Christies and auctioneer for the evening, gracefully welcomes everyone and briskly begins bidding on lot number 101 a tiny oil painting called Les Coquilles by Max Ernst. The guide price was 100,000 to 150,000 but it ends up going for a breath-taking 433,250. Then, we head straight to lot number 102 the Study for the Head of the Virgin, by Salvador Dal a fairly cursory and unattractive work which had been estimated to sell for 50,000 to 70,000 but ends up fetching 337,250. Lot number 103, Volupt by Francis Picabia, estimated at 80,000 to 120,000, ends up going for 229,250. It is going to be one of those nights. Pylkknen smiles.

Now, its time for lot 104. This is one of the star lots. Much of the pre-auction publicity has centred on this oil painting. All eyes in the room turn right, towards this grand, irregularly framed, world-renowned oil painting by Ren Magritte. Theres no bowler hat in this painting, but there is an apple. Or, at least, I think its an apple

Magritte is probably one of the worlds best-known surrealists. He was hugely influential on the London counterculture movement in the 60s. John and Yoko talked about him on their first date. In the 70s, his influence was evident on a number of album covers from Pink Floyd to Jeff Beck. In the 80s, he inspired a Fleetwood Mac video and Paul Simon even wrote a song about him Ren and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War.

Magritte was a rebel and subversive. In some ways, he was the precursor to Andy Warhol and 1950s Pop Art, constantly probing the ethics of capitalism, challenging the gap between reality and illusion. He was also a communist but, bizarrely, he came to inspire the biggest brand that has ever been known in the history of capitalism but well come to that later. For now, lets take a look at his intriguing back story.

Magritte was born in Lessines in the province of Hainaut, Belgium in 1898 to Lopold Magritte, a tailor, and Rgina (ne Bertinchamps), a hatmaker. The oldest of three boys, his family had money but his upbringing was turbulent. His mother suffered severely with depression and attempted suicide a number of times. On one occasion, she tried to drown herself in the water tank upstairs in the attic. She was rescued but, after that, was forced to spend the rest of her life locked in her bedroom for her own protection. Life must have been filled with anxiety and anguish for young Ren, hearing his mothers cries from the next room. Finally, one night in 1912, she smashed down her bedroom door, fled from the house and made for the bridge that ran behind their family home. There, she flung herself in the raging River Sambre below. Ren Magritte was just fourteen years old.

When her bruised and battered corpse was discovered several days later, a mile downstream, she was returned to the family home and laid out in the familys front room. Her face had been covered with a blanket. A nurse probably did this to avoid traumatising young Ren, but it seems to have had precisely the opposite effect because for the rest of his life much of his artwork involved deliberately concealing or corrupting peoples faces, as on the cover of this book. To see a human body with their face removed, blocked or distorted even slightly is profoundly shocking; it confounds our most primitive and basic expectations. Maybe Magrittes intention in depicting such shocking images was to recreate the feeling he had experienced when he first saw his dead mother.

Psychologists say a fascination with reality and illusion is common amongst those who are bereaved young: it is a consequence of them trying to reconcile their two conflicting worlds the world they wish exists (in which their mother is still alive) and the world they know exists (in which their mother is dead). John Lennon shared this fascination with Magritte. His mother was also killed when he was young and he also found comfort in surrealism. As he said, Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasnt insanity. Surrealism to me is reality. Dancing upon the intersection between reality and illusion yielded many of Lennons truly greatest works Strawberry Fields Forever, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and I am the Walrus. It also proved immensely productive for Magritte.

The first piece of Magrittes oeuvre to catch the public eye was The Treachery of Images, produced in 1929 when he was just thirty years old. At first glance, this was just a simple classical picture of a pipe. But then beneath the pipe, in beautiful calligraphy, in a style which was immediately redolent of pre-school books used to teach children the alphabet A is for Apple, B is for Banana, C is for Caterpillar it said,