René Magritte

Willy van Hove, Belgium

Acquired from the above through Galerie Isy Brachot on December 18, 1967 and thence by descent

Brussels, Galerie Isy Brachot, Magritte: Cent cinquante oeuvres; Première vue mondiale de ses sculptures, 1968, no. 147

Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art & Kyoto, Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, Rétrospective René Magritte, 1971, no. 88, illustrated in the catalogue

Lausanne, Fondation de l'Hermitage, René Magritte, 1987, no. 73, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, René Magritte, 1987-1988, no. 66, illustrated in color in the catalogue

"Numéro René Magritte," L'Art Belge, Brussels, January 1968, illustrated p. 69

David Sylvester, Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, vol. IV, London, 1994, no. 1293, illustrated p. 120

Excellent condition. Gouache on card laid down on board. Three pinhole sized abrasions are visible on the extreme left edge. One 3/16 inch hairline of discoloration is visible at the lower left corner.
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The compelling imagery of Marine echoes Magritte's sculpture from 1945, La Peinture. Magritte owned a plaster cast of this subject which he would transform into the 1945 sculpture (fig. 1). While he painted the sculpture in flesh tones, Magritte depcits a tranquil seascape to alter the significance of the female form in this gouache from 1948.

Though the female nude figures prominently in Magritte's oeuvre, this motif becomes a dominant focus for him in the 1940s. As in the current work, his imagery of this period finds a harmony in the confluence of the female form and a sun-filled landscape. The classical nude form, intimated in Marine by the figure's resemblance to a Greco-Roman relic, is at once the subject and the backdrop in these works. Jacques Meuris points out, "Magritte said, in fact, that an undercurrent of eroticism was one of the reasons a painting might have for existing. It asserted itself most intensely and explicitly in these stately classical nudes with their cool coloring. For the very reason that it aims at maximum resemblance, their academicism is upset by the provocation of mystery emanating from that identification, once the painting and the arrangement of the painting interfere with its course" (J. Meuris, René Magritte, London, 1988, p. 76).

According to David Sylvester's catalogue raisonné on the artist, this work was signed Magritte, dated 1948 and titled on the verso by the artist in either 1966 or 1967 though this inscription is now obscured by museum exhibition labels.