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In some ways his most extreme work comes from this aberrant moment of peinture vache (stupid painting), as he called it -- it's as though, in parodying other Belgian artists (Ensor, and a particularly gross comic illustrator named Deladoes), he touched a demotic rock bottom from which he could only recoil in the end. But Georgette hated the new style, and by 1950 Rene was back to the old one, often repainting versions of images he had first made in the '30s. This recycling fitted his own idea of himself as a craftsman rather than an artist. You could make more than one chair to the same pattern.
Magritte was not a "literary" artist, and his work was more about situation than narrative. Nevertheless, his titles were important to him, and they are never neutral. They were, so to speak, pasted on the image like another collage element, inflecting its meaning without explaining it. They reflected his browsing in high and popular culture. The Glass Key comes from Dashiell Hammett, and references to the Fantomas thrillers (on which Magritte, along with the rest of the Surrealists and everyone else in France and Belgium, doted) are everywhere. On the other hand, The Man from the Sea is Balzac's title, and The Elective Affinities Goethe's.
Then there was Edgar Allan Poe. Magritte used him repeatedly. The Domain of Arnheim, Magritte's image of a vast, cold Alpine wall seen through the broken window of a bourgeois living room, with shards of glass on the floor that still carry bits of the sublime view on them, is the title of Poe's 1846 tale about a superrich American landscape connoisseur who creates a Xanadu for himself. "Let us imagine," says Poe's hero, "a landscape whose combined vastness and definitiveness -- whose united beauty, magnificence and strangeness shall convey the idea of care, or culture . . . on the part of beings superior, yet akin to humanity . . ." Yes, one can well imagine Magritte liking that. His work too sets up a parallel world, extremely strange and yet familiar, ruled by an absolutist imagination.