René Magritte

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Description

René Magritte
LE PRÊTRE MARIÉ
signed Magritte (lower left); titled on the reverse
gouache on paper
27 by 35.5cm.
10 5/8 by 14 in.

Provenance

Albert Delerry, (acquired in 1960)
Sale: Galerie Motte, Geneva, 17th June 1966
Sale: Galerie Motte, Geneva, 9th June 1967
Renée Lachowsky, Brussels
Private Collection, Brussels (acquired from the above circa 1967)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited

Paris, Galerie Rive Droite, René Magritte, 1960, no. 17
Paris, Galerie d'Orsay, Les Peintres Surréalistes. Delvaux, Ensor, Labisse, Magritte..., 1999, no. 8, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature

Letter from Magritte to Iolas, 28th December 1959
David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield and Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, Gouaches, Temperas, Watercolours and Papiers Collés 1918-1967, London, 1994, vol. IV, p. 224, no. 1476, illustrated

Catalogue Note

The image of the masked apple first appeared in Magritte’s design for the cover of View magazine of December 1946 (D. Sylvester, op. cit., no. 1196). In the following years he executed several oil and gouache versions of the image containing two apples, some set against a day-time sky, usually titled La Valse hésitation, others with the night sky titled Le Prêtre marié. This subject also appears in Magritte’s mural for the Knokke-le-Zoute Casino Communal, Le Domaine enchanté, of 1953 (D. Sylvester, op. cit., no. 792). Magritte probably took the title from Barbey d’Aureville’s book Le Prêtre marié, to which he referred in a letter of 1944. The contradiction expressed in the title certainly would have appealed to the artist’s own predilection towards unusual or paradoxical couplings. Additionally, he plays visually upon the erotic associations of the apple as a symbol of carnal knowledge, and the tantalising appeal of a disguised object of desire, giving the apples a curiously human aspect.

The present work is one of ten gouaches Magritte executed for the exhibition organised by Alexandre Iolas at the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris in February-March 1960. Although all of them were dated 1959 in the catalogue and all appear under 1959 in Magritte’s list of 1964, a letter written to Iolas on 28th December makes it clear that he was not planning to start work on them until early in the New Year. They were all evidently painted during the first six weeks of 1960.

Fig. 1, René Magritte, La Valse hésitation, 1950, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Fig. 2, René Magritte, La Chambre d'écoute, 1958, oil on canvas, Kunsthaus, Zurich
Fig. 3, René Magritte, Le Domaine enchanté, 1953, mural, Casino Communal, Knokke-le-Zoute