Love song

Petrified lovers with fish bodies, frozen in an impulse to sing a love song - this is exactly how the heroes of the painting "Wonders of Nature" painted by René Magritte in 1953 look. This canvas evokes associations with the work of another famous surrealist - Salvador Dali - and at the same time it is characterized by the quirkiness and humor of Magritte's works, which cannot be confused with the eccentricity and provocative nature of the works of the Catalan master. It is worth noting that Wonders of Nature refers us to the artist's earlier paintings, which already used the images of half-humans-half-fish ("Collective Invention." и "Enchanted Area."), silhouettes of ships filled with water (series "The Seducer."), as well as the element of fossilization, to which the painter repeatedly refers throughout the 1950s.

The painting Wonders of Nature is sometimes found on the Internet under a different title, Song of Love, and is signed in 1948. This mistake is caused by the fact that in 1948 Magritte was illustrating the prose poem Songs of Maldoror, whose author was the forerunner of Surrealism, the poet Lautréamont. One of the illustrations depicted a mermaid with the torso of a fish and the legs of a woman, sitting on a rock by the sea. However, it was not until 1953, in the painting Wonders of Nature, that the artist depicted two such creatures merging in a single rush. Later, during exhibitions, there was confusion about the title and the dating of this work, which was revealed only recently, during a study of the catalog of Magritte's works.

Now the canvas "Wonders of Nature" is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art of Chicago.

Text prepared by Elina Bagmet