René François Ghislain Magritte was born in 1898 in Lessines, Belgium. He decided to become an artist after seeing Giorgio de Chirico’s The Song of Love (painted in 1914). Magritte was deeply touched by the work, describing it as “one of the moving moments of my life: my eyes saw thought for the first time.” After a failed exhibition in Brussels, the artist moved to Paris in 1927 and met the French writer and poet, André Breton. In Paris, Magritte became one of the leading members of the Surrealist movement. In December 1929, Magritte participated in the last publication of La Révolution surréaliste with his essay, “Les mots and les images,” in which words play with images in his work The Treachery of Images. Magritte’s work has a dreamlike quality and is painted with a precise illusionism. Until the 1920s, Surrealist painting, such as that by Masson, Miró, and others, tended toward biomorphic abstraction, achieved often through automatic techniques allegedly outside the artist’s conscious control. By contrast, Magritte employed everyday objects in unexpected contexts which give new meaning to familiar things, often creating an uncanny and disturbing image. He turned to certain motifs repeatedly in his work: pipes, bowler hats, clouds, and green apples, to name a few. In Paris, Magritte developed word paintings in which he investigated the relationship between text and image. In perhaps his most famous work, The Treachery of Images, from 1929, a pipe is illusionistically rendered and below it are the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). Indeed, the painting is not a pipe, rather it is a representation of one. Here, Magritte raises questions about the nature of reality and representation and challenges the difficulty of works of art to convey meaning. According to scholar Natalie Dupȇcher, “Image and language interrupt one another, challenging artistic conventions of representation and urging viewers to ask which, if either, is more ‘real’ than the other.” She continues: “Magritte reimagined painting as a critical tool that could challenge perception and engage the viewer’s mind. His was a method of severing objects from their names, revealing language to be an artifice—full of traps and uncertainties.”
Magritte’s paintings without text also play with artistic conventions. The artist adopted a style that, as he stated, “challenge[d] the real world” “through a naturalistic and highly detailed depiction of ordinary objects and subjects” (Dupȇcher). After participating in an exhibition devoted to the nude, Magritte became preoccupied with the female nude, and beginning in the 1930s, made a series of paintings of his wife Georgette. With the work La magie noire (Black Magic), in which Georgette appears, the artist created a new, Surrealist conception of the classical nude. There are also lithographs of the subject that were executed posthumously; the David Barnett Gallery offers an original certified print of a lithographic version of La magie noire (Pictured above). The work in the Barnett collection portrays an idealized version of a nude Georgette standing on what appears to be a balcony in front of a tranquil body of water and a cloud-filled sky.
Magritte presents Georgette as a classical idealized figure. Georgette appears not as a real woman, but as if carved from marble, statuesque and motionless, like the rough block of stone upon which she leans. The unexpected element is that the top half of her body seems to be blending into the blue sky. In this metamorphosis the figure is literally changing from flesh to sky. “…La magie noir abounds with juxtapositions and transformations, embodying one of the central tenets of Magritte’s enigmatic and highly distinctive form of Surrealism. ‘I have found a new potential in things—their ability to become gradually something else, an object merging into an object other than itself…This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances and no limit. By this means I produce pictures in which the eye must “think” in a completely different way from the usual one’ (Ottavia Marchitelli, Christie’s, 2024)
By Jennifer McCormick