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拍品专文
Eye wide open, a woman stares at a leaf in what appears to be a diagram illustrating the act of seeing. And yet, with the vastly enlarged eye dominating the woman’s profile, this is clearly the work of the Belgian Surrealist painter, René Magritte. Painted in 1958, La femme du maçon is a vivid and engaging exploration of the entire nature of sight, as seen and subverted by Magritte. It is a telling tribute to the success of this picture that, shortly after its execution, La femme du maçon featured in a number of exhibitions in which Magritte was himself actively involved.
The concept of La femme du maçon appears to have had its seed in a picture Magritte included at the head of a letter he sent to the American gallerist, collector and artist William Copley earlier in 1958 (see D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1993, vol. III, p. 302). That drawing featured the bust of a woman in profile facing the other direction and looking slightly downwards, with a similarly colossal eye. Soon afterwards, in a letter to his new acquaintance and frequent correspondent, the young poet André Bosmans, Magritte explained the extent to which this image fascinated him: ‘For some time now I have been thinking of this face. In a recent painting it is looking at the leaf of a tree. But in addition Scutenaire has thought of the title “The mason’s wife” for this picture’ (quoted in ibid., p. 302).
Despite Magritte’s professed interest in the subject, La femme du maçon appears to be his only painting of the motif, although he created a handful of drawings exploring similar themes. He even toyed with using this image as the inspiration for a cover for a book by Bosmans. While that project never transpired, Magritte executed a variation showing a woman looking at the moon which served as the cover for his retrospective at the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels which took place in 1959, and in which La femme du maçon featured.
In his paintings, Magritte often plucked objects and images from the world around us, transforming them in order to present them in a new light, allowing us to perceive some sliver of the infinite potential of existence – and of the imagination. In a radio interview promoting his 1959 exhibition, Magritte explained: ‘[…] it seems to me, that if certain things seem familiar or unembarrassing to us, it’s thanks to the ideas we have of them. Now, I have been at pains to paint the kind of pictures that do not look familiar and do not correspond to ideas, whether naïve or scholarly’ (‘Interview with Jean Stévo,’ in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., René Magritte: Selected Writings, Richmond, 2016, p. 188).
In La femme du maçon, the building blocks of the composition – leaf, eye, profile – are all familiar, and have been painted in an almost deadpan style that is deliberately calculated to remove any sense of distraction. And yet the alteration that Magritte has wreaked, through the presentation of a floating leaf and the exaggerated eyeball, launches his viewers down their own routes of enquiry. When André Breton wrote an essay to accompany another exhibition in which La femme du maçon featured, this time in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1964, he astutely quoted a passage from Dore Ashton which touched upon the process that Magritte’s works continue to inspire: ‘The artist who believes that he can maintain the “original status” of an object deludes himself. The character of the human imagination is expansive and allegorical. You cannot “think” an object for more than an instant without the mind’s shifting... Not an overcoat, not a bottle dryer, not a Coca-Cola bottle can resist the onslaught of the imagination. Metaphor is as natural to the imagination as saliva is to the tongue’ (quoted in A. Breton, ‘René Magritte’s Breadth of Vision,’ 1964; in A. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, pp. 401-402).
This, of course, was more than true of Magritte, especially considering his investigations of meaning and representation. Ashton’s words perfectly encapsulate the chemistry that drives Magritte’s paintings. When one considers even his early masterpiece La trahison des images (Sylvester, no. ; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art), with its illustration of a pipe accompanied by the words, ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe,’ it is evident that Magritte had long played with the slippage between image and experience. Tellingly, when Magritte had talked to Jean Stévo about his retrospective at the Musée d’Ixelles five years earlier, he explained: ‘Painting, as I see it, does not have to express ideas, even brilliant ones. If the painter has genius, he has a genius for images, not ideas’ (quoted in op. cit., 2016, p. 188). Asked shortly afterwards by Stévo ‘why the mind likes images whose meaning is unknown,’ Magritte responded: ‘It seems obvious that riddles and puzzles have a charm for the mind. The game is to find what is hidden. But the game does not affect the images whose meaning remains unknown. I believe the mind likes the unknown’ (quoted in ibid., p. 189).
In La femme du maçon, the unknown is all the more jarring as it is presented through the emphatic use of a composition that recalls textbook illustrations. This is a playfully reconfigured impression of how we see. With the focus on the enlarged eye, the viewer’s wandering associative meanderings of the imagination might recall, say, the illustrations of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, one of the most important and pioneering anatomical books. Originally published in Basel in 1543, this was the magnum opus of the Padua-based author, who had originally been born in Belgium as Andries van Wezel. Analysis such as Vesalius’ of the actual instruments of sight had a significant pedigree, not least in Leonardo da Vinci’s earlier notebooks.
Magritte himself had a long history of probing the nature of sight in his works. He painted several pictures entitled Le faux miroir, showing an enlarged eye with sky within its iris, a theme he first explored in 1929 in a painting now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Sylvester, no. 319). Similarly, in the mid-1930s, he painted a small group of shaped pictures, or objets peints, showing cropped eyes. Later, in 1963, he would paint La traversée difficile, in which the entire head of a man in a suit was substituted for an eyeball (Sylvester, no. 982; Private collection). In each of these works, Magritte focused on the nature of sight as well as disrupting the nature of portraiture. So too, in La femme du maçon the profile of the woman depicted is shown in a manner that might evoke portraits, yet also utterly undermines that entire genre of painting. In so doing, it also throws it into question, adding to the mystery that spools from its sparse, understated yet deceptively dynamic components.
La femme du maçon was painted in one of Magritte’s most prolific years of the post-war period. Inspiration and popular demand were both encouraging his output. It was a reflection of Magritte’s standing that a show of his work had been chosen as the subject for one of the first exhibitions of the Musée d’Ixelles. This was one of the early shows under the directorship of Jean Coquelet, who hoped to reinvigorate the space, and its visitor numbers, with a more contemporary exhibition programme (see Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, pp. 94-95). Magritte involved himself extensively in both the curation of the exhibition and the composition of the modest catalogue.
After being shown by his dealer Alexandre Iolas in Paris in 1960, La femme du maçon was later also selected for an important retrospective held at the Arkansas Art Center, now known as the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. This 1964 show took place only the year after the museum had opened, following a massive fundraising push by future state governor Winthrop Rockefeller. The exhibition was organised in part by the great collector Dominique de Menil, who owned a number of Magritte’s most celebrated works. The importance of this exhibition was reflected by the fact that Breton wrote the preface. In it, Breton expounded upon Magritte’s ability, so ably demonstrated in La femme du maçon, to transform images and thoughts: ‘Magritte, while caressing with his hand those elements deriving from relative reality, is also able to liberate “with a single wave of his magic wand” (in the literal sense of the phrase, before it grows vulgarized as we grow up) the latent energies smouldering within them’ (op. cit., 2002, p. 402).
The concept of La femme du maçon appears to have had its seed in a picture Magritte included at the head of a letter he sent to the American gallerist, collector and artist William Copley earlier in 1958 (see D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1993, vol. III, p. 302). That drawing featured the bust of a woman in profile facing the other direction and looking slightly downwards, with a similarly colossal eye. Soon afterwards, in a letter to his new acquaintance and frequent correspondent, the young poet André Bosmans, Magritte explained the extent to which this image fascinated him: ‘For some time now I have been thinking of this face. In a recent painting it is looking at the leaf of a tree. But in addition Scutenaire has thought of the title “The mason’s wife” for this picture’ (quoted in ibid., p. 302).
Despite Magritte’s professed interest in the subject, La femme du maçon appears to be his only painting of the motif, although he created a handful of drawings exploring similar themes. He even toyed with using this image as the inspiration for a cover for a book by Bosmans. While that project never transpired, Magritte executed a variation showing a woman looking at the moon which served as the cover for his retrospective at the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels which took place in 1959, and in which La femme du maçon featured.
In his paintings, Magritte often plucked objects and images from the world around us, transforming them in order to present them in a new light, allowing us to perceive some sliver of the infinite potential of existence – and of the imagination. In a radio interview promoting his 1959 exhibition, Magritte explained: ‘[…] it seems to me, that if certain things seem familiar or unembarrassing to us, it’s thanks to the ideas we have of them. Now, I have been at pains to paint the kind of pictures that do not look familiar and do not correspond to ideas, whether naïve or scholarly’ (‘Interview with Jean Stévo,’ in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., René Magritte: Selected Writings, Richmond, 2016, p. 188).
In La femme du maçon, the building blocks of the composition – leaf, eye, profile – are all familiar, and have been painted in an almost deadpan style that is deliberately calculated to remove any sense of distraction. And yet the alteration that Magritte has wreaked, through the presentation of a floating leaf and the exaggerated eyeball, launches his viewers down their own routes of enquiry. When André Breton wrote an essay to accompany another exhibition in which La femme du maçon featured, this time in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1964, he astutely quoted a passage from Dore Ashton which touched upon the process that Magritte’s works continue to inspire: ‘The artist who believes that he can maintain the “original status” of an object deludes himself. The character of the human imagination is expansive and allegorical. You cannot “think” an object for more than an instant without the mind’s shifting... Not an overcoat, not a bottle dryer, not a Coca-Cola bottle can resist the onslaught of the imagination. Metaphor is as natural to the imagination as saliva is to the tongue’ (quoted in A. Breton, ‘René Magritte’s Breadth of Vision,’ 1964; in A. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, pp. 401-402).
This, of course, was more than true of Magritte, especially considering his investigations of meaning and representation. Ashton’s words perfectly encapsulate the chemistry that drives Magritte’s paintings. When one considers even his early masterpiece La trahison des images (Sylvester, no. ; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art), with its illustration of a pipe accompanied by the words, ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe,’ it is evident that Magritte had long played with the slippage between image and experience. Tellingly, when Magritte had talked to Jean Stévo about his retrospective at the Musée d’Ixelles five years earlier, he explained: ‘Painting, as I see it, does not have to express ideas, even brilliant ones. If the painter has genius, he has a genius for images, not ideas’ (quoted in op. cit., 2016, p. 188). Asked shortly afterwards by Stévo ‘why the mind likes images whose meaning is unknown,’ Magritte responded: ‘It seems obvious that riddles and puzzles have a charm for the mind. The game is to find what is hidden. But the game does not affect the images whose meaning remains unknown. I believe the mind likes the unknown’ (quoted in ibid., p. 189).
In La femme du maçon, the unknown is all the more jarring as it is presented through the emphatic use of a composition that recalls textbook illustrations. This is a playfully reconfigured impression of how we see. With the focus on the enlarged eye, the viewer’s wandering associative meanderings of the imagination might recall, say, the illustrations of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, one of the most important and pioneering anatomical books. Originally published in Basel in 1543, this was the magnum opus of the Padua-based author, who had originally been born in Belgium as Andries van Wezel. Analysis such as Vesalius’ of the actual instruments of sight had a significant pedigree, not least in Leonardo da Vinci’s earlier notebooks.
Magritte himself had a long history of probing the nature of sight in his works. He painted several pictures entitled Le faux miroir, showing an enlarged eye with sky within its iris, a theme he first explored in 1929 in a painting now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Sylvester, no. 319). Similarly, in the mid-1930s, he painted a small group of shaped pictures, or objets peints, showing cropped eyes. Later, in 1963, he would paint La traversée difficile, in which the entire head of a man in a suit was substituted for an eyeball (Sylvester, no. 982; Private collection). In each of these works, Magritte focused on the nature of sight as well as disrupting the nature of portraiture. So too, in La femme du maçon the profile of the woman depicted is shown in a manner that might evoke portraits, yet also utterly undermines that entire genre of painting. In so doing, it also throws it into question, adding to the mystery that spools from its sparse, understated yet deceptively dynamic components.
La femme du maçon was painted in one of Magritte’s most prolific years of the post-war period. Inspiration and popular demand were both encouraging his output. It was a reflection of Magritte’s standing that a show of his work had been chosen as the subject for one of the first exhibitions of the Musée d’Ixelles. This was one of the early shows under the directorship of Jean Coquelet, who hoped to reinvigorate the space, and its visitor numbers, with a more contemporary exhibition programme (see Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, pp. 94-95). Magritte involved himself extensively in both the curation of the exhibition and the composition of the modest catalogue.
After being shown by his dealer Alexandre Iolas in Paris in 1960, La femme du maçon was later also selected for an important retrospective held at the Arkansas Art Center, now known as the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. This 1964 show took place only the year after the museum had opened, following a massive fundraising push by future state governor Winthrop Rockefeller. The exhibition was organised in part by the great collector Dominique de Menil, who owned a number of Magritte’s most celebrated works. The importance of this exhibition was reflected by the fact that Breton wrote the preface. In it, Breton expounded upon Magritte’s ability, so ably demonstrated in La femme du maçon, to transform images and thoughts: ‘Magritte, while caressing with his hand those elements deriving from relative reality, is also able to liberate “with a single wave of his magic wand” (in the literal sense of the phrase, before it grows vulgarized as we grow up) the latent energies smouldering within them’ (op. cit., 2002, p. 402).