No, a work of art didn’t help ignite the personal computing revolution. But a painting by Belgian artist René Magritte, whose mid-career work is the subject of a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, did help inspire the name Apple Computer. And it did so in a roundabout way that goes through Beatle Paul McCartney.
In Groovy Bob, an oral biography of swinging-sixties London art dealer Robert Fraser, the apple-cheeked Beatle relates, “One day he brought this painting to my house. … It just had written across it 'Au revoir,' on this beautiful green apple.”
It happened that McCartney was in the process of setting up a new business with his fellow Beatles that anticipated electronics, film, publishing and retail divisions. Not to mention a record label. They needed a name and a visual trademark.
“This big green apple, which I still have now, became the inspiration for the logo,” McCartney said of the Magritte canvas.
The inspiration behind the Beatles' Apple Corps and, thus, Steve Jobs' Apple Computer, was this... [+]
Thus the Beatles’ legendary company, Apple Corps, was born. Like the band’s name, it’s a pun. And there’s a visual pun in the use of the Granny Smith apple on the record label’s physical label—the flip, or “b,” side of the vinyl discs showed the innards of the apple, as if it were cut in two.
Surrealist extraordinaire René Magritte was a master of visual puns and jarring juxtapositions, which might explain McCartney’s fascination with his work, which he had long been familiar with.
According to multiple sources, when looking for a name for his nascent computer enterprise, Steve Jobs decided to “nick” (as the Brits like to put it) the name of his musical heroes’ outfit, and thus Apple Computer was begat. The company’s original logo retained something of a sixties feel, featuring bright stripes reminiscent of the work of artists such as Gene Davis and Peter Max.
Although “appropriation” is considered legitimate under certain circumstances in the world of fine art—Andy Warhol would have been stuck drawing illustrations of women’s shoes without it--that’s not quite the case in the business world. The Beatles’ Apple sued Jobs’ Apple in 1978 over the use of the name. The computer company agreed not to get into the music business and the record company not to get into the computer business. That agreement went out the window when iTunes and the iPod took off in the 2000s. Apple Computer eventually made an iSettlement with the boys from Liverpool or their estates. I doubt anyone consulted the estate of René Magritte.
The Beatles weren’t the only rock 'n' rollers to creatively deploy a Magritte apple—for the cover of his album Beckola guitar wiz Jeff Beck used Magritte’s “La Chambre d'Ecoute,” which depicted a Granny Smith filling an entire room.
As for that original painting McCartney had acquired, it was a late work by Magritte, painted in 1966, a year before he died. No one is quite sure what its title, “Le Jeu De Morre,” translated as “The Game of Mora,” really means. Since it was one of his last works, maybe the "Au revoir" emblazoned across the apple signified the farewell of or a farewell to what was arguably his favorite motif.
For those interested in a dazzling display of surrealism at its purest, visit or get the catalog of MoMa’s exhibition “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938.”
