The man behind the floating apples and bowler hats paid for groceries after World War II by forging Picassos and counterfeiting banknotes. This deep dive strips away the myths around René Magritte, starting with the 1912 suicide of his mother in the River Sambre when he was thirteen, the largely discredited legend that he saw her body with her nightdress over her face, and the shrouded heads that haunt paintings like The Lovers.

We trace his awakening in 1922 in front of de Chirico's The Song of Love, his years designing wallpaper and advertising posters that taught him how familiar images manipulate behavior, the critical destruction of his first solo show, the Paris years that produced The Treachery of Images, his chaotic 1930s of affairs and Communist Party quarrels, the bright Renoir period painted under Nazi occupation, the deliberatel ...