René Magritte

Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquavella Gallery, New York
Galerie Cazeau-Le Béraudière, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Sarah Whitfield wrote the following commentary on a painting of the same title, Le séducteur III, and subject as the present work for the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London and The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1992:  "Writing to a friend about the first version of Le séducteur, an oil of 1950, Magritte told him that it represented the solution to the problem of water.  As with his other works, he said, the image had been found through a kind of 'frantic contemplation,' which he described as a process of drawing the same image repeatedly until a line or a conjunction of lines dictate the solution.  Those particular sketches have not come to light but a few sheets of the sort he describes have survived (they relate to works from either the 1950s or 1960s).  While Magritte's habit of throwing drawings away makes it unwise to infer too much from the ones that he kept, this kind of obsessive drawing - a form of doodling - indicated a method of tapping the unconscious that brings to mind some of the experiments with automatism practiced by the Paris Surrealists in the 1920's.  And, indeed, in the letter cited above, Magritte went on to associate this image with the realization of a dream." (op. cit., p. 104)