When did you start to understand Rene Magritte?

Answer 1

At eight. I got the painting with the pipe. But now I still don't get all of them.

Answer 2

I only started to understand Magritte when I began reading about him and learnt something about his life story. For example, his mother drowned when he was 12 years old and he was present when her body was retrieved from the water. The image of his mother floating, her dress obscuring her face, are thought to have influenced a 1927-1928 series of paintings of people with cloth obscuring their faces. I also learnt through reading what he was getting at when he painted a pipe or an apple realistically and then used a caption such as This is Not a Pipe -. In doing this, he was stating that no matter how accurately one comes to depict an object, we never do catch the item itself: we cannot smoke tobacco with a picture of a pipe, or eat the fruit that is painted.
I came to understand that there is always some mystery in Magritte's paintings. He spoke about this: My paintings are visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."
Quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Magritte