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Black magic

René Magritte • Painting, 1945, 73×54 cm
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About the artwork
This artwork was added since it is referred to in the materials below
Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Allegorical scene
Style of art: Surrealism
Technique: Oil
Materials: Canvas
Date of creation: 1945
Size: 73×54 cm
Content 18+
Artwork in selections: 33 selections

Description of the artwork «Black magic»

René Magritte met Georgette Berger when they were both teenagers. After the outbreak of the First World War, the young lovers had to part, because the girl's family moved to Brussels. A few years later, Rene also went to the capital. There one fine day he again met Georgette by accident - and they never parted again.

Rene and Georgette's life was calm and happy. They did not have children and seemed to spend all their time in each other's company. In their family history, there was only one episode that could be called scandalous: Magritte was carried away by the surrealist Sheila Legg, and his wife, in revenge, started an affair with the artist Paul Colinet. And only one thing in the life of the Magritte family remained unchanged - Georgette has always been the main muse for her husband. In almost every woman in Magritte's paintings, one can discern Georgette's features - eyes and lip shape, shape and hair color. As for the canvas "Black magic" (more precisely, a series of paintings with the same name), then it, perhaps, can be called the picturesque equivalent of an ode praising the beauty of a beloved woman.

In Black Magic, Magritte portrays Georgette in an almost classical, traditional manner. The naked female body, smooth and devoid of flaws, looks more like a marble statue. But here the artist's favorite "cunning of images" comes into play, and the "sculptural" effect is enhanced by the fact that the upper part of the woman's figure acquires the color of the sky behind her. It is unclear whether it dissolves in this blue, or vice versa - it is born from it, turning from a ghostly, intangible silhouette into a person of flesh and blood. If we consider the entire series of such paintings by Magritte, we can see that Georgette's eyes are closed or empty in all, like the notorious stone statue.

By the way, in most of these canvases, the woman's hand rests on a massive stone. Rene Magritte, in a letter to his friend Paul Nouget, wrote about it this way: “I'm looking for a name for a picture of a nude woman in a room with a stone. One of the ideas is that the stone is somehow connected with the Earth, it cannot rise by itself, we can rely on its generic fidelity to earthly attraction. The same goes for women, if you will. From another point of view, the rigid existence of a stone is clearly defined, and the mental and physical systems of a person cannot be called unconnected. "

Author: Evgenia Sidelnikova
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