Many of the photographs displayed here relate directly NOTE: to the paintings and objects Magritte created during exterior blue the period covered by this exhibition. Others highlight his interest in performing for the camera in ways that correspond to ideas expressed in his works. In one he poses next to a painting of Fantômas (entitled Le Barbare [The Barbarian, 1927] and subsequently destroyed), a fictional master criminal admired by the Surrealists for his challenge of social taboos. Magritte wears what became his trademark bowler hat, the headpiece of the common man, thereby identifying himself with both the everyday bourgeoisie and the fantastic underbelly of reality.

Although the photographers are in most cases uniden­ tified, Magritte almost certainly directed the staging of the images or collaborated in their making. The idea of placing a painting of a piece of cheese NOTE:blue under a glass dome came from the Belgian Surrealist case 78% poet Paul Colinet. The title is a joking play on the “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe) inscrip­ tion on La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images, 1929) and a humorous reversal of that negative statement into a positive declaration: this is a piece of cheese, although of course it is not. Magritte made three versions of this painting-object, although he likely left the selection of the glass dome and pedestal for this version’s first public appear­ ance, in the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition at the London Gallery in November 1937, to the exhibition’s organizers.

Magritte produced three of these small, peculiar, meticulously painted objects; shown here are the second and third versions. Each depicts a single eye and partial view of a woman’s face as if seen through NOTE:blue a circular peephole opening. The artist’s patron, the case 78% Belgian playwright Claude Spaak, commissioned the first version (with a brown eye) after admiring a piece of antique jewelry containing a similar eye portrait, perhaps of the type worn as a locket or brooch in the eighteenth century. Magritte produced the second version, with green eyes, as a gift for his own wife, Georgette. He mounted the versions displayed here in custom-made and custom-painted square wooden boxes, confirming their status as the painted objects of the title. Magritte endeavored to give all his works what NOTE: three he considered to be poetic titles. He used these labels:white, frequently mysterious appellations to further blue, and complicate the meanings of his already enigmatic exterior blue images. Many of the titles were the result of bl creative collaboration among those in the artist’s circle. Illogical and irrelevant to the subjects rendered, they abetted the Surrealist goal of subverting viewers’ expectations and redirecting their focus to truly seeing, as Magritte described In his 1938 lecture “La Ligne de vie” (“Lifeline”): “The titles of paintings were chosen in such a way as to inspire in the spectator an appropriate mistrust of any mediocre tendency to facile self- assurance.” Given the significance that Magritte accorded to his titles, this exhibition’s labels privilege his original, multivalent French, with English translations provided in parentheses. In this unsettling image—the first in a series of four NOTE:Two variations of Les Amants that Magritte painted in labels: 1928—the artist invokes the cinematic cliché of a white and close-up kiss but subverts our voyeuristic pleasure blue by shrouding the faces in cloth. The device of a draped cloth or veil to conceal a figure’s identity corresponds to a larger Surrealist interest in masks, disguises, and what lies beyond or beneath visible surfaces. The melodramatic scene may also relate to the graphic illustrations that accompanied pulp fiction and thriller stories, which Magritte’s friend Paul Nougé, in a letter from 1927, encouraged the artist to emulate. A man holding a smoldering (although oddly NOTE: blue smokeless)­ cigarette focuses intently on an empty tabletop. The notable blankness of the right side of the composition emphasizes the absence of any object for the man’s gaze. X-ray examination of this pain­ting has revealed that it originally contained a second figure on the right: another man in a suit, leaning across the table. That Magritte ultimately decided to paint out the right-hand figure sugg­ests that he recognized the potential for mystery in absence rather than presence in this particular scenario.

By inscribing the word montagne (mountain) across a NOTE: blue woman’s face, Magritte transformed this otherwise conventionally posed portrait, based on a photograph of one of his wife’s friends, into a surprising and curious image. The text appears to hover in front of the woman, parallel to the surface of picture plane, in contrast with the illusory three-dimensional space she occupies. With no clear link between the meaning of the word and the depicted woman, the painting inspires the mind of the viewer to “create new relation­ ships between words and objects,” as Magritte said, “and to bring out certain features of language and of objects that are commonly overlooked in the everyday process of living.” Various cropped and distorted body parts, stretched NOTE: blue as if made of rubber, seem to melt and morph in a sinuous, arabesque arrangement; a tuba and a shotgun appear as mysterious props in an ambiguous theatrical space whose architecture opens onto the clouds. Like the ideas evoked in the title, such a vision is only realizable in the realm of painting. Magritte described this painting in 1956 to his friend, the art dealer and collector E. L. T. (Édouard Léon Théodore) Mesens, as “one of the finest pictures that exist and that you possess.”

Words replace recognizable objects in this vaguely NOTE: blue cartographical composition. The French phrases for “person losing his (or her) memory” and “woman’s body” occupy two amorphously contoured cell- shaped compartments. At the top of the painting, in capital letters, the word paysage (landscape) arcs across the surface as if to delineate its territory, while a short line links the word cheval (horse) to an irregular black blob at the lower right. The enigmatic arrangement of biomorphic forms in an open field supplemented by writing is countered by the matter- of-fact, descriptive character of Magritte’s words. With its uniform black border and serial imagery, NOTE: blue the gridded format of this composition recalls a photographic contact sheet or the successive frames of a film reel. Magritte rendered the same image— a bourgeois domestic interior—in each of the four frames, except for the upper-left quadrant, where a seated man reading a newspaper appears. Magritte based the image on an engraved illustration from a Dr. Bilz’s household medical encyclopedia of natural remedies, published in 1895. His decision to alter and repeat this image three times over, however, subverts any instructional value the source illustration may once have had.

The cast shadow of a mysteriously freestanding NOTE: blue frame with a plaque reading paysage (landscape) suggests that the frame is empty and serves no conventional function. A realistically rendered shotgun leaning abandoned against a saturated red wall contributes to the scene’s unsettling atmosphere. Magritte apparently considered titling the painting Edgar Poe, in homage to his favorite poet, but ultimately settled on the paradoxical title it bears today. Writers, however, have continued to link the image to the passage from Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) that observes, “It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see.” The heavily worked surface of this small painting is NOTE: blue unusual for Magritte. Amorphous blobs of brown paint are built up so thickly that they resemble crumpled paper. Below the vaguely pipe-shaped form on the right, la pipe is rendered in equally textured impasto. This painting is a predecessor of Magritte’s iconic La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images, 1929), on view nearby, which pairs a realistic, clearly legible image of a pipe with the contradictory caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). The form in this painting, however, is almost as abstract as the unidentified blob to its left.

Four fluidly connected biomorphic forms, each NOTE: blue containing a word or phrase, float like comic strip thought bubbles across the surface of Magritte’s enigmatically titled Le Miroir vivant. Reading clock­ wise from lower left, the words read “wardrobe,” “person roaring with laughter,” “horizon,” and “bird calls.” Despite the absence of recognizable visual imagery, the carefully rendered letters combine in a random-seeming but evocative mixture of objects, sounds, and ideas. With the deceptively straightforward pronouncement NOTE: blue “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), this iconic painting declares that an image is not the same as what it purports to represent. Magritte presents a skillfully realistic likeness of a pipe, rendered with the direct clarity of a shop sign or school primer. The title further focuses attention on the slippery relation­ ship between words and images at the heart of Magritte’s work of this period. According to the artist, “This image, which immediately suggests a pipe, shows clearly, because of the words accompanying it, that only through a persistent misuse of language could one say: ‘It is a pipe.’” “Who could smoke the pipe from one of my paintings?” Magritte later wrote. “Nobody. Hence it is not a pipe.“

The two sections of this divided image juxtapose NOTE: blue the painting’s representational tricks with the flat artificiality of icons. Below the schematic silhouettes of four common objects on the right section, a rip through the canvas appears to reveal a black space like that of the section adjoining. The skillful naturalism of the trompe l’oeil rip and wood edging makes a stark contrast with the abstract, indeci­ pherable form of the tangled wire on the left and the flat, cut-out silhouettes. This is one of six word paintings by Magritte entitled NOTE: blue Le Sens propre. The title points to issues of language and meaning, yet the words in the rounded, irregular frame—femme triste (sad woman)—are incongruous with anything visually present. The minimal elements in this pared-down composition are sharply painted, corresponding to a growing polish in Magritte’s paint handling during his last full year in Paris.

Le Temps menaçant recalls the pastime of identifying NOTE: blue shapes in cloud formations—one of the free- association activities that the Surrealists believed to reveal unconscious dreams and desires. Apart from their color, however, the massive and precisely defined tuba, chair, and female torso clustered in the sky of this painting bear little resemblance to natural clouds. Magritte completed the painting while on summer holiday in Cadaqués, on the coast of Spain, where he and his wife traveled as guests of the artist Salvador Dalí along with others in the Surrealist circle. The serenely radiant landscape surely draws on these Mediterranean environs. Magritte produced his word paintings in Paris, NOTE: blue where he was living at the time and communicating with the Surrealist circle. L’Arbre de la science was one of two such paintings that he gave to the French poet Louis Aragon; both of them combined abstract forms, representational objects, and text. The words in this painting—sabre (sword) and cheval (horse)— occupy a sharply contoured biomorphic cloud, which seems to emanate like smoke from a cylindrical form resem­bling a shotgun barrel at lower right. The polish and precision of the image, especially evident in the high­lights on the rounded metallic barrel, indicate Magritte’s shift toward more lustrous, richly glazed surfaces. This apparently free-floating object juxtaposes NOTE: blue incongruous images in six sections: fire, a nude female torso, a forest, a building facade, a cloud-filled blue sky, and what Magritte referred to as grelots (sleigh bells). Magritte painted numerous variants of this compartmentalized composition, each containing different arrangements of the images now recognized as being among the artist’s signature motifs. André Breton, the leader of the Paris Surrealist group, owned this painting briefly in 1937.

L’Évidence éternelle is one of three unusual multipart NOTE: blue toiles découpées (cut-up paintings) that Magritte created for a solo show at Galerie Goemans in Paris in the spring of 1930. He specifically referred to this work as an object, thus underscoring the unique position it occupies between painting and sculpture. It appeared in many early Surrealist exhibitions and predates the vogue for Surrealist objects that was launched by Salvador Dalí’s essay “Objets surrealists” in 1931.

In a simultaneous challenge and homage to the tradi­tional artistic subject of the female nude, Magritte divided the body into five framed and isolated sections. “Of the woman I show only parts of the body, but situated where they should be,” he wrote. The fragmentation suggests the tendency of the human eye to focus selectively rather than comprehensively. As Paul Nougé later wrote, “The act of seeing is discontinuous. We see only things we are interested in seeing.” Painted for his first solo exhibition, in 1927, NOTE:blue L’Assassin menacé is one of Magritte’s largest and most theatrical compositions. Like many of the Surrealists, Magritte was an avid fan of the pre– World War I popular crime fiction series Fantômas; he borrowed the placement of the two detectives figures flanking the doorframe from the Le Mort Qui Tue (The Murderous Corpse), a film from the series first released in 1913. It was Magritte’s ambition to create a similarly immersive and fantastical world on the canvas, here made manifest in the unsolvable narrative of this enduringly mysterious painting.

Four fragmented and framed views of an ostensibly NOTE: blue conventional landscape make up this work; Magritte called them toiles découpées, or cut-up paintings. The original glass pane on which Magritte intended to mount them has not survived and no early photographs have surfaced, so the present display, with the paintings mounted on acrylic, relies partially on conjecture. Of his three toiles découpées (all on display in this exhibition) Magritte wrote to Paul Nougé, “In the case of the woman, the sky or the landscape, it seems to me that they gain from being subjected to . . . such a process,” referring to the act of cutting or fragmenting. The viewer is asked to play an active role in reconstituting the full image by imagining the missing parts between the canvases. In this work Magritte presents the equivalent visual NOTE:blue and verbal signs for the concept ciel (French for “sky”) in two identically shaped panels: on the left in a trompe l’oeil depiction of an atmospheric patch of blue sky, captured and brought down to earth, and on the right with the word ciel in black script, aus­terely flat and precise. Set in a non­ descript interior with a wood-paneled wall and floor, the angular framed panels of this word-image pair recall the backs of stretched canvases leaning against a wall, yet the deep shadows they cast suggest free­standing objects, propped up by some invisible mechanism. In combination, these puzzling com­ponents probe the complex relation­- ship between words and images, as well as the tropes and conven­tions of painterly representation.

Le Faux Miroir presents an enormous lashless eye NOTE:blue with a luminous cloud-swept blue sky filling the iris and an opaque, dead-black disc for a pupil. The allusive title, provided by the Belgian Surrealist writer Paul Nougé, seems to insinuate limits to the authority of optical vision: a mirror provides a mechanical reflection, but the eye is selective and subjective. Magritte’s single eye functions on multiple enigmatic levels: the viewer both looks through it, as through a window, and is looked at by it, thus seeing and being seen simultaneously. The Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who owned the work from 1933 to 1936, recognized this compelling duality when he mem­orably described Le Faux Miroir as a painting that “sees as much as it itself is seen.” Magritte created this painting, among his largest, for NOTE: blue his solo show at the Galerie Goemans in Paris in the spring of 1930. Several of his signature motifs— grelots (sleigh bells), cut-out paper, and bilboquets (forms resembling chess pieces or table legs, used by Magritte as human stand-ins)—are imbued with an unprecedented monumentality. The title, probably suggested by the Surrealist poet Paul Nougé, fulfills Magritte’s characteristic desire for ambiguity in its dual connotations: a general announcement and the specific Christian miracle of the Annunciation.

Magritte was not content to paint in the style he NOTE: blue described as “traditionally picturesque.” “I never portrayed the sky,” he declared, “as bourgeois artists do, in such a way as to get a chance to place one of my favorite blues beside one of my favorite grays.” In this painting, divided into two sections by a trompe l’oeil frame, the artist confirms his ability to paint in a traditional manner in the cloudscape on the left, but he subverts this high realism by juxtaposing it with a scene that reads as highly artificial, of schematic blue cloud shapes and modeled grelots (sleigh bells) set against a surprisingly pink background. Magritte’s first solo exhibition, held at the Galerie NOTE: white Le Centaure in Brussels in 1927, included twelve papiers collés, or collages. Such works contain what would become the artist’s signature motifs: bowler hats, theater curtains, mysterious landscapes, and bilboquets (a term that refers to a toy but in Magritte’s work evokes many other objects). Among them Le Jockey perdu has a singular status: In September 1926 the poet Camille Goemans, Magritte’s friend (and later his dealer), compared the figure of the mounted jockey “hurtling recklessly into the void” to the artist himself. With Les Affinités électives Magritte claimed to have NOTE: white hit upon a “new and astonishing poetic secret” that arose from the juxtaposition of related objects. This breakthrough, he claimed, came to him in a nocturnal hallucination: “One night . . . I woke up in a room where there happened to be a bird sleeping in a cage. A splendid misapprehension made me see the cage with the bird gone and replaced by an egg. . . . The shock I experienced was caused precisely by the affinity between the two objects: the cage and the egg.” From this point on, Magritte sought solutions to various artistic problems primarily by searching for such affinities.

La Condition humaine brings together two NOTE: white of Magritte’s favorite themes for the first time: the window painting and the painting within a painting. According to Magritte, the image on the canvas represents “exactly the section of landscape hidden by the picture. Therefore, the tree represented in the painting hid from view the real tree situated behind it, outside the room.” But the assumption that the easel painting is a representation while the surrounding space is real is quickly understood to be a false prem­ise: the entire composition, of course, is a painted invention by Magritte. Light, Magritte wrote in 1938, “is manifest only on NOTE: white condition that it is accepted by objects. . . . The object illuminated itself gives life to light.” The nude white torso in La Lumière des coïncidences—most likely based on a plaster model of the Venus de Milo—seems to receive the light from the candle to its right, as evidenced by the orientation of its shadows. But while the torso seems to be modeled in three dimensions, the frame and easel surrounding it suggest that it is painted: a painted depiction of a sculpture in a painting. At the same time that Magritte undermines our assumptions about the art of representation, he alludes to the history of representational art. The dark, candlelit interior recalls Baroque paintings, and the stark still life arrangement evokes a vanitas or memento mori, designed to remind us of the transience of life and its material pleasures.

In 1934 Magritte participated in a group exhibition in NOTE: white Brussels on the theme of the nude, and he may have been inspired to expand upon this subject in works he subsequently produced, including La Magie noire and Le Viol (The Rape, 1934) (installed nearby). In La Magie noire a woman’s body is subjected to a strange metamorphosis: her body is naturalistically modeled throughout, but her torso is painted in a blue con­sistent with the sky behind her, which shifts gradually to skin tone starting at her waist. “It is an act of black magic to turn woman’s flesh into sky,” Magritte wrote, a notion that clearly fascinated him; he painted at least six versions of a woman with a two-toned body, giving each the same title. Le Viol, as Magritte wrote to André Breton in 1934, NOTE: white emerged out of his continuing desire to demonstrate affinities between related objects, proposing a startling direct visual correlation between a woman’s face and her body. The grotesque result recalls Breton’s concept of humour noir, or black comedy. Breton considered the image a key Surrealist work and reproduced it on the cover of the book Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme? (What Is Surrealism?) in 1934. When first displayed publicly in Brussels the same year, the painting was hung in a separate room behind a velvet curtain, alongside other provocative works by Salvador Dalí, Balthus, and Victor Brauner. In 1943 Magritte deliberately omitted it from a mono­ graph to avoid the scrutiny of World War II censors.

Magritte employed English text rather than his usual NOTE: white French for this small-scale variant of La Clef des songes (1927), produced for his first solo exhibition in the United States, at Julian Levy Gallery in New York in 1936. This version utilizes the same didactic school-primer format of paired words and images as earlier examples, but the specific pictures and words are new. “Valise,” a word used in both English and French, is the only word that appears to designate the object with which it is paired. This reinforces the puzzlement of the other disjunctions while simulta­ neously estranging the expected. Le Modèle rouge proposes a visual rhyme between a NOTE: white body part and the thing that normally covers and contains it. “Thanks to Le Modèle rouge,” Magritte wrote in the lecture “La Ligne de vie” (“Lifeline”), “people can feel that the union of a human foot with a leather shoe is, in fact, a monstrous custom.” The shock provoked by this merging of dead and living skin is in part produced by the anatomical realism of the veined feet and toes.

This is the first of three versions of this image that Magritte painted. The third, displayed in the next section of the exhibition, was a large decorative commission for Edward James, and André Breton reproduced one of them on the cover of the first illustrated edition of his book Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Surrealism and Painting) in 1945.

Combining cruelty and pleasure, Magritte’s NOTE: blue hallucinatory image reflects the Surrealist preo­ccupation with the relationship between Eros and Thanatos, love and death, as laid out by the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Magritte’s friend and collaborator Paul Nougé composed a prose poem that vividly evokes this unusually macabre and melodramatic scene of a girl devouring a bird surrounded by her victim’s brightly colored counterparts. This version of Le Modèle rouge—the third and NOTE:white largest that Magritte produced—was part of a decorative painting scheme commissioned by the British poet and collector Edward James for the ballroom of his London townhouse. Magritte included in the gravel ground some English coins, a match and cigarette stub, and a scrap of news­ paper that, on closer look, shows a reversed image of part of Les Jours gigantesques, an earlier painting. The finished work was installed, along with Au seuil de la liberté (On the Threshold of Liberty, 1937), displayed nearby, and La Jeunesse illustrée (Youth Illustrated, 1937), behind two-way mirrors that when illuminated from behind dramatically revealed the artworks.

The polished women’s shoes in this painting sprout a mane of auburn hair that spills from their cut-out sides and is partially reflected in a mirror above. But the reflection reveals an uncanny inconsistency: the shadow cast by the mirror suggests that it hangs flush with the wall, but it would only show the hair NOTE:white were it tilted forward. With this sly manipulation of perspective, Magritte introduces another irrational layer to an already inexplicable scenario. Magritte associated this painting, in which a man NOTE:white appears to smoke his own phallus-shaped nose, with “the meditations of an absentminded, obsessive philosopher [that] may conjure up the image of a mental world closed in upon itself as, in this case, the smoker is the prisoner of his pipe.” The man’s face may be a self-portrait, with the obvious exception of the oversize, sexualized nose.

Whereas Magritte put an egg in the place of NOTE:white a bird in Les Affinités electives (Elective Affinities, 1932), on view nearby, in this work a painter con­jures a bird from an egg. The artist in the painting is Magritte himself, engaged in his pro­fession. The unframed canvas, easel, and painter’s palette are rendered with convincing naturalism, but the table tilts strangely and sharply forward, putting the egg on display for the viewer. Here Magritte shows the physical act of painting as well as his ideational process, that of associating one object (an egg on a table) with another (a bird on a canvas). The compartmentalized walls of this imaginary room NOTE:white read as both flat, wallpapered panels and windows opening onto bizarrely incongruous scenes. The cannon—a World War I howitzer—faces suggestively in the direction of the female torso, suggesting the possibility of violently breaking out of the confined room, across the threshold to the unspecified freedom of the title. Magritte’s signature appears on the lower-right edge of the cannon, as if cast into metal during the manufacturing process.

Au seuil de la liberté is the largest of the three deco­ ra­tive panels Magritte painted for Edward James’s ballroom in London. James likely saw a smaller version of this image at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London before commissioning the project.

In 1935 Magritte wrote to the poet Paul Éluard about NOTE: his recent depictions of single objects and parts of white objects “painted with the maximum trompe l’oeil effect I could muster.” This fragment of a nude woman from below her breasts to her thighs is an outstanding example of his technical virtuosity and debt to the Old Master tradition, yet the abruptly cropped genital region and curved, contoured frame render it imme­ diately strange. The only shaped canvas in Magritte’s oeuvre, it was originally rectangular and then cut down, perhaps reflecting the artist’s awareness of Salvador Dalí’s shaped canvases. The double or doppelgänger motif that had fascinated NOTE:white Magritte since the 1920s appears here in the form of a man looking at himself in a mirror that, instead of reflecting his face, shows him (and us) his back. This is one of two portraits—the other being Le Principe de plaisir (The Pleasure Principle, 1937) (displayed nearby)—commissioned by Edward James, both of which take the form of a portrait manqué, a failed portrait in which the subject’s face is hidden. Magritte achieves this enigmatic illusion with scrupulous detail, modeling the figure on a photograph he took of James with his back to the camera. The book on the mantelpiece, however—the French edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), by Edgar Allan Poe—is reflected, as expected, reversed.

In a 1937 letter to his English patron Edward James, Magritte proposed the idea for his second portrait manqué as “a picture representing the man whose head is a light.” James agreed, and he hired Man Ray NOTE:white to photograph him in the precise pose and lighting conditions specified by Magritte. Magritte relied closely on the photographs in composing the painting, except for his obscuring of James’s face with an incandescent orb much like a camera flash. Following the painting’s completion he wrote to James from Brussels, “My friends and I think it is a great success, in fact the work of a genius!” The title is derived from Sigmund Freud’s Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), pub­ lished in French in 1927, which would have been known within the Surrealist circle. Le Chant de l’orage is the second of three paintings NOTE:white Magritte produced in response to what he saw as the problem of rain. In his public lecture “La Ligne de vie” (“Lifeline”), delivered in 1938, he reflected that “the problem of the rain led to a broad, rain-swept country landscape, with great clouds crawling over the ground.” In an inversion of gravity, the downpour of droplets falls onto the clouds instead of from them. After evading him for some time, this resolution appeared suddenly, “simple to an almost dis­concerting degree,” as he wrote in a letter to André Breton.

Magritte’s mysterious substitution of one familiar but unexpected object for another—a train, in this case, for a stovepipe—creates a visual pun: the hearth suddenly resembles a train tunnel, and the train’s billowing smoke rises into the flue as if from a fire. The pairing of train and clock, both emblems of time, gives resonance to the poetic title, whose literal NOTE:white translation is “ongoing time stabbed by a dagger.”

Edward James purchased the painting in 1939, aware that Magritte had modeled the mantelpiece and mirror on those in James’s own dining room. These architectural details reappear in La Reproduction interdite (Not to be Reproduced, 1937), one of Magritte’s portraits of James, on display nearby. A simply laid-out meal is not as simple as it seems. NOTE:white Each singular object is rendered with equally sharp focus and pictorial realism, yet any expectation of everyday reality is overturned, above all by the unblinking eye that stares inexplicably from a slice of ham on a plate. The Belgian Surrealist writer Louis Scutenaire described Magritte’s objects as totems, and the spare arrangement here points toward the significance of a ritual meal. The per­ spec­tive of this still life tilts dramatically toward the surface of the picture plane, as if to confront or perhaps invite the viewer to join the table. After exhibiting the canvas in several international Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s, Magritte produced a life- size, three-dimensional version for a 1945 Surrealist display in Brussels. In La Rencontre two groups of limbless white figures NOTE:white face each other across a stagelike platform and through a wooden frame resembling an arch or doorway. A closer look reveals a barely perceptible line running from the frame’s base to the edge of the painting, suggesting that it contains a mirror and that the figures are looking at their own reflections. Magritte called such figures bilboquets, after the child’s cup-and-ball toy, which they loosely resemble. They appeared frequently in his paintings, collages, and commercial work of 1926–27 as a human stand-in, everyday objects imbued with a new and disturbing presence. He also referred to such figures as table legs (les pieds de table), later recalling that in works such as La Recontre, “Turned wooden table legs lost the blameless being usually attributed to them.”

In 1925 Magritte designed sets for a Belgian experi­ NOTE:white mental theatre group, an experience that perhaps informs the staged and highly artificial character of paintings such as Le Mariage de minuit. Illuminated by Magritte’s typically stark lighting, this work contains a puzzling array of props and objects that, in his words, are “arranged in a new order and take on a disturbing significance.” The two heads on the split-level display stand resemble mannequins, as well as the dummy or model forms seen in the work of the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, which Magritte deeply admired. Magritte shows us only the back of the top head, which appears to be male; the lower head is a hollow shell topped by a curly blond wig. The upside-down trees in the background and the dislocated, craggy rocklike arch further contribute to the scene’s theatrical irrationality. Les Habitants du fleuve demonstrates Magritte’s NOTE:white continuing preoccupation with bodily fragmentation and displacement. Here he replaced the head of the figure on the left with an inverted leg, while the truncated cylindrical “neck” of the right figure seems uncannily smooth, as though manufactured by machine, with the limbs’ black-and-white tones contributing to their unsettling quasi-human char­ acter. The suggestion of dressmaker’s forms and the carefully rendered patterns and textures of the dress and jacket likely relate to Magritte’s contemporaneous work as a commercial illustrator for the fashion industry.

In 1924 André Breton, a poet and the leader of the NOTE:white Surrealist group, wrote that the movement was based in the “omnipotence of the dream.” This is a realm Magritte explored to deliberately mysterious effect in this dramatically lit scene. A motionless, bowler- hatted figure with closed eyes stands upon a beachlike platform strewn with puffy, oddly earth­ bound clouds. Behind him is another man, his back to us, apparently identically dressed. The pair appears oblivious to the disturbing and erotically suggestive form, half-human and half-fur, that intrudes at the lower right, a hybrid creature that is reminiscent of the commercial catalog illustrations that Magritte produced in 1926 and 1927 for the Brussels furrier La Maison Samuel. Magritte borrowed and recombined aspects of NOTE:white previous work in this image: the forest of branch- sprouting bilboquets (Magritte’s term for the chesslike figures he used as human stand-ins) revisits the setting of Le Jockey perdu (The Lost Jockey), a collage from 1926, while the flying tortoise, based on an illustration in the Larousse encyclopedia, appears in an earlier painting. Reassembled in this mysterious open-air drama, these elements contribute to its eerie, discomfiting quality—what Magritte described as a “maximum effect of displacement.”

Le Joueur secret and L’Assassin menacé (The Menaced Assassin, 1927) (displayed nearby) were the largest paintings Magritte had created to date. Both were included in his solo exhibition at the Galerie Le Centaure in 1927, which launched his career as Belgium’s only Surrealist painter. Paul Nougé was a biochemist and the leader of the NOTE:white Brussels Surrealist group, and from 1924 on he and Magritte were close friends and collaborators. Magritte’s portrait of Nougé is reminiscent of images made for the stereoscope, a precinematic device in which two slightly overlapping photographs are viewed side by side to create the illusion of depth. Through the use of doubling, Magritte challenges the conventional idea that a portrait should represent a singular self or an individual. Neither image is Nougé: both are representations.

In Le Ciel meurtrier Magritte suspends four seemingly NOTE:white identical bloodied bird corpses in front of a rocky, mountainous backdrop. The repetition of the birds recalls Magritte’s designs for decorative wallpapers early in his career, but the logical and symmetrical order is undermined by the violent subject matter and thickly applied paint. With its parted curtains, stormy backdrop, and NOTE:white dramatic light and shadows, Entr’acte recapitulates the stagelike settings seen in many of Magritte’s early Surrealist works. Its five protagonists, each reduced to an arm and a leg, are, however, unprecedented. Like grotesque parodies of the Impressionist Edgar Degas’s famous ballet dancers, these fragmented and severed limbs are posed standing, leaning, embracing, or sprawled on the floor. Their quasi-human appear­ ance transforms the intermission of the work’s title into a hallucinatory drama. From 1926 to 1927 Magritte designed numerous NOTE: white advertisements that appeared in avant-garde Belgian case journals such as Le Centaure and Variétés. These advertisements contain spatial ambiguities, strange juxtapositions of objects, and iconographical elements (curtains, mannequins, boxes) that bear striking similarities to the paintings he was creating at the time.

Many of the advertisements Magritte designed, such NOTE: white as this one, for the fashion house Couture Norine, case displayed in an issue of Variétés, continued to be printed after he moved to Paris in September 1927. Couture Norine, one of Magritte’s most important clients, was owned by Norine (Honorine) Deschryver; her husband, Paul-Gustave Van Hecke, was a Belgian dealer and editor who offered Magritte his first gallery contract, which guaranteed the purchase of the artist’s works. In the summer of 1927 Magritte and his Surrealist NOTE: white colleague Paul Nougé collaborated on a catalog case commissioned by a Brussels furrier known as Maison Ch. Müller. S. Samuel et Cie, to promote their colle­c­ tion for winter 1928. Magritte created the images and Nougé wrote the text; the result was a dream scenario that makes this catalog less of a commercial project than an understated Surrealist manifesto. In the image displayed here, a bisected photograph of Magritte’s face, his eyes closed in interior reflection, appears at the bottom right below the model. On the left-hand page Nougé muses about the model, whose face is obscured: “What one guesses is perhaps what she is thinking. Dressed thus, she requires no explanation.”

This small book was Magritte and Paul Nougé’s NOTE: white second collaboration, completed in summer 1927. It case was a spoof on the work of Clarisse Juranville, a well-known nineteenth-century writer of grammar texts—which Nougé parodied in his poems for this book—and etiquette books. Magritte contributed five full-page illustrations. In the image shown here, two ambiguous forms, vaguely evoking a tree and a bush, are in the foreground, while a horizon line appears in the background. After he moved to Paris, Magritte continued to NOTE: white collaborate with his Belgian colleagues. Between case February and April 1928 he contributed text or illustrations to all three issues of the Belgian review Distances. The two images shown here relate to paintings that Magritte completed the same year. The cut-up and twisted figures in the March 1928 issue of Distances are similar to those in the painting Les Idées de l’acrobate (The Acrobat’s Ideas), and the struggling male and female figures in the April 1928 issue are the upper half of those depicted in Les Jours gigantesques (The Titanic Days). Both paintings are displayed nearby. In March and April 1929 Magritte and the Belgian NOTE: white writer and dealer Camille Goemans published a series case of five leaflets, each of which pairs a painting by Magritte with a poem by Goemans. The sheet shown here reproduces Jeune fille mangeant un oiseau (Pleasure) (Girl Eating a Bird [Pleasure], 1927), on view nearby. The poem, although written with the painting in mind, is not a description of it.

Magritte made significant contributions to the NOTE: white January 1929 issue of the Belgian journal Variétés, case edited by Paul-Gustave Van Hecke. On the cover is an illustration after Magritte’s painting Les Amants (The Lovers, 1928), displayed nearby, and repro­ ductions of five word-and-image drawings appear throughout the issue. This publication marked the first time Magritte’s depictions of words and images appeared in print. The December 1929 issue of La Révolution NOTE: white surréaliste opened with André Breton’s “Second case Manifeste du Surréalisme,” which began to orient Surrealism away from the escape of rational con­trol and toward social issues and self-observation during the artistic process. In this new atmosphere Magritte, a prominent contributor to the issue, came to the forefront of the movement, more than two years after he had moved to Paris. His essay “Les Mots et les images” (“Words and Images”) summed up his two years of intense exploration into how language and images function. He began his essay, “An object is not so possessed of its name that one cannot find for it another which suits it better,” thus setting up the idea, developed throughout the essay, that reality as we know it is not fixed but constructed. The related drawings displayed here offer rare evidence of Magritte’s working process.

Another major contribution to the last issue of NOTE: white the avant-garde journal La Révolution surréaliste case was made up of photo-booth portraits of sixteen Surrealists arranged around a reproduction of Magritte’s 1929 painting La Femme cachée (The Hidden Woman). With their eyes closed, the Surrea­lists appear to be engaged in inward reflec­­tion, evoking the worlds of dreams and the unconscious. Magritte is pictured at right, in the second row from the bottom. In the 1930s Magritte designed covers for several NOTE: white prominent Surrealist publications. For the reviews case Bulletin international and Minotaure he created completely new images. For Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme?, a book that included André Breton’s 1934 lecture on the current state of the Surrealist movement, Magritte made a drawing after Le Viol (The Rape, 1934), a painting on view in this exhibition. Upon receiving the image, Breton wrote to Magritte that it is “a marvelously vital and disturbing piece of work, hard to put out of one’s mind.”

This book was published in support of Violette NOTE: white Nozières, an eighteen-year-old girl who poisoned her case parents, killing her father. Magritte was one of many Surrealists who contributed illustrations and poems, and his drawing illustrates Nozières’s claim that she had been raped by her father; a depiction of the case’s presiding judge appears in the foreground. The Surrealists intended the book to be sold during her trial, but the copies arrived from the printer the day after her conviction. Magritte created his first Surrealist objects in NOTE: blue Brussels in 1932, by covering two readymade objects case and with paint: in Les Menottes de cuivre (The Copper blue wall Handcuffs), a statue of Venus de Milo, and in 78% L’Avenir des statues (The Future of Statues), a cast of Napoleon’s death mask. In his preface to the catalogue of Magritte’s 1933 exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Paul Nougé focused on two such works, despite the presence of fifty-seven paintings. In doing so, he deliberately positioned Magritte as a maker of Surrealist objects at a time when the genre was rapidly gaining prominence within the movement.

This pair of monumental busts set before a NOTE: seascape in a shallow, indeterminate space appears white to be a single portrait split in two, with the face set aside to reveal brownish-gray bells, or grelots, interwoven with some sort of fibrous matter, where human organs should be. These bells became a recurring motif for Magritte, who identified them as the type found on a horse’s harness. In its start­ling juxtapositions of solid volume with eggshell thinness and soft flesh with hard metal, the picture demonstrates Magritte’s ability to simultaneously conjure the naturalism and artifice of painting.

Doubling was one of Magritte’s favorite strategies NOTE: for reminding us that pictures of things are not white the same as the things themselves. This precisely doubled image, interrupted by three black lines, resembles a card for a stereoscopic viewer, a device that produces the illusion of three-dimensionality from two identical but slightly offset photographs. The twin figures with their stiff posture, bald heads, and round modeling recall shop-window dummies, while the jaggedly cut edges of their faces and torsos suggest a contradictory two-dimensional thinness. This image imitates the cut-and-paste technique of paper collage, and in a rare and whimsical intro­ duction of a nonpainted element, Magritte “attached” the abstract white shapes with twelve actual snap fasteners pushed into the canvas’s surface. In this spatially ambiguous composition, the surface NOTE: blue of a dark, irregularly contoured frame or mirror seems to morph into wood. In 1927, the year it was made, Magritte wrote an excited letter to Belgian poet Paul Nougé about a “really striking discovery” in his recent work: “I have found a new potential in things—their ability to become gradually something else, an object merging into an object other than itself. . . . There is no break between the two sub­ stances, and no limit. By this means I produce pictures in which the eye must ‘think’ in a completely different way from the usual one.” It is one of only a few artworks in which Magritte incorporated actual collage elements: small pieces of painted canvas attached to the support add a strange and subtly tactile layer to the otherwise flat surface.

In this image Magritte combined different strategies NOTE: blue of pictorial isolation: a sleeping figure rigidly con­ fined to a wooden box set above six items, removed from any logical context, shallowly embedded in an amorphously contoured slab of unknown material. The alienated everyday items vividly demonstrate how Magritte “[forced] objects out of the ordinary, to become sensational.” The juxtaposition of the coffinlike box and the vaguely tombstone-shaped slab point to the Surrealist fascination with sleep, dreams, and death, as outlined by André Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924: “At least from man’s birth to his death, thought presents no solu­ tion of continuity; the sum of dreaming moments— even taking into consideration pure dream alone, that of sleep—is from the point of view of time no less than the sum of moments of reality.” Two men with hunting rifles cower behind a wall NOTE: blue in response to some invisible threat. As in other paint­ings from the same year, the bodies with massive limbs amplify the eerie, unsettling quality of the scene, in which it is hunters, rather than prey, who are trapped. Magritte’s friend Paul Nougé wrote admiringly to the artist about the work, which appeared in several early Surrealist exhibitions in Brussels: “I admire the care you have taken to particularize the event, to endow it, by the precision of certain details, with the maximum of concrete reality, thus guaranteeing, to my mind, the intensity of its effect.”

Magritte’s image of an artist, likely modeled on NOTE: blue himself, in the process of depicting a nude woman is one of his most direct interrogations of the act of painting. Like a sculpture, the woman seems to inhabit the same dimensional space as the painter, yet Magritte points to the powerful artifice of his own pictorial illusionism by leaving her in a partially incomplete state. The painting pays homage to Magritte’s wife, Georgette, who was the model for the female figure, even as its title strongly suggests the impossibility of fully capturing an object of desire on a canvas surface. This random-seeming arrangement of words NOTE: blue divided among four compartments is part of what Magritte described as “research concerning words, language, objects, and the relationships between them.” The frame format may have been inspired by seeing stretched canvases turned to face the wall with titles inscribed on their backs. Rendered in precise script—recalling the standardized fonts that Magritte would have known from his advertising background—the words ciel (sky), corps humain (ou forêt) (human body [or forest]), façade de maison (facade of a house), and rideau (curtain) indicate the objects without representing them, opening the imaginary scene to the viewer’s imagination.

This is the first painting that Magritte completed after NOTE: his move from Brussels to Paris in mid-September 1927. In a letter to Paul Nougé he described this scene as one of concealment: “The floor, lit by the moon which one knows to be behind one, is not surrounded by wall; it hides, with far-off trees, a patch of sky. But a patch of floor is itself concealed by the legs of the sky, which touch down on it.” Magritte employed the techniques of pictorial illusionism in his character­ istic fashion to produce an irrational and impossible scenario: the intricately contoured, irregular bio­ morphic shapes have a flat, cut-out quality, but their crisp outlines and shadows lend them the appearance of solid weight and presence.