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 deliberately ugly Vache period, and the mature philosophy of floating boulders and The Human Condition that pop culture later absorbed everywhere.

• How commercial advertising became Magritte’s superpower for provoking philosophical crises with crisp everyday imagery
• The failed scheme to distract his wife Georgette that backfired into her own affair with Paul Colinet
• Chicken and champagne communism: his fight for the working class to have mental luxury, not just propaganda
• Why a forged banknote may be the ultimate Magritte artwork, and the irony of his face on Belgium’s 500 franc note in 1998
• The 2009 theft of Olympia, returned for a fraction of its value because the image was too famous to sell