Seducer

A series of works by René Magritte, united under the general title of The Temptress, was executed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Each of them depicts the silhouette of a ship going on all sails, the outlines of which are filled with sea waves. Since 1950, when the first canvas on the subject was created, the artist returned to it repeatedly, using different materials and techniques, changing the contours of the ship, the nature of the sea waves, the time of day and cloud cover the sky. Nevertheless, the original idea of the image remained unchanged.

In one of his letters to a friend, Magritte said that the painting The Temptress appeared to him as "a solution to the problem of water. René also claimed that this image came to him as a result of "frantic contemplation" - the process of repeating the same image over and over again until a random line or combination of lines suggested a solution to the work. Interestingly, unlike other artists, Magritte preferred to get rid of his drafts, so art historians cannot reconstruct the course of the creation of The Temptress. At the same time, several sketches for other canvases of the painter have survived, showing exactly how he worked on his works. We can see that Magritte used the technique of obsessive drawing or, in other words, griffinage, to generate new ideas. In this way the artist influenced the unconscious, which is reminiscent of the experiments with automatism popular in early Surrealism. In addition, the image of the ship used in The Temptress, according to René Magritte, was borrowed from dreams. These circumstances indicate that although by 1950 the painter had been removed from the list of Surrealists, his later paintings are still influenced by this movement.

In the 1960s, Magritte spoke of one of the works in the series as follows: "I believe that it is wrong to confuse 'reality,' that is, the world as a whole, with the possible representation of certain realities, because otherwise a drawing would be considered 'less real' than, for example, a gun or a loaf of bread... As for my painting, it shows nothing imaginary... It shows absolute reality, that is, reality with its mystery, not separated from its mystery (seeing a ship on water means seeing reality, separated from its mystery. To see water in the form of a ship is to awaken to the mystery, to see water and the ship). Seeing an image of water that has taken the form of a ship is not a bad manifestation of peace, is it?"

The first painting, The Seducer, made in 1950, is in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Text prepared by Elina Bagmet