.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'I have started re-reading the Thousand and One Nights with pleasure, will it be kept up?' (Magritte, letter to Marcel Mariën, 19 August 1946, quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, London, 1993, p. 374).
Executed in 1947, Shéhérazade is one of a group of pictures with the same main motif, the woman with a face largely made up of strings of pearls, which René Magritte exhibited at the Galerie Lou Cosyn in Brussels that year. That exhibition, which gained positive acclaim, appears to have included fifteen variations on the pearl-faced woman, shown in different contexts. Here, she is shown as an apparition above what appears to be a chess piece; in the background is a lushly-depicted landscape in dappled light, recalling the work of the Impressionists. In this way, Magritte has brought about a fascinating collision between the world of the trailblazers of half a century earlier and his own pioneering Surrealism.
Magritte had turned to both the Fauve and the Impressionist styles in part as a reaction to the state of the world, not least during the Second World War. His pictures introduced a new light and luminosity that was designed to entertain and even to amuse. He was irreverently co-opting their styles for his own uses, while also indulging in the sheer pleasure with which Impressionist pictures were now viewed. In Shéhérazade, this is clear from the lyrical landscape in the background, which Magritte has captured with deft virtuosity in his gouaches.
That sense of pleasure and escapism against a threatening backdrop may be invoked by the title, Shéhérazade, which recalls the storyteller in the Thousand and One Nights, who had to tell her tales in a manner entrancing enough that her death would be forestalled. Magritte had re-read the tales in 1946 and named a painting after them, as well as taking the name of their protagonist for these pictures. The woman in these pictures appears a fragile fiction, comprising eyes for observation, mouth for telling stories and the wealth and exotic luxury of the pearls themselves. Magritte, writing in the third person for a draft of the catalogue for the 1947 exhibition in which Shéhérazade appeared, explained the motif in terms that revealed his interest in the imaginary narratives and their power, while also discussing the atmosphere, so different to his earlier works:
'The series of little gouaches which show eyes and mouths set in pearls enriches our minds with a new concept which forces reason to draw back its frontiers... The new aspect of the world that M.'s painting aims to acquaint us with had necessarily to appear in an atmosphere different from that of his previous works. This new aspect of what once appeared severe and disturbing had to prove its strength through being able also to smile and to char. This is why the impressionist technique was appropriate to M.'s new pictures thanks to the possibilities it affords' (Magritte, quoted in ibid., p. 146).
Executed in 1947, Shéhérazade is one of a group of pictures with the same main motif, the woman with a face largely made up of strings of pearls, which René Magritte exhibited at the Galerie Lou Cosyn in Brussels that year. That exhibition, which gained positive acclaim, appears to have included fifteen variations on the pearl-faced woman, shown in different contexts. Here, she is shown as an apparition above what appears to be a chess piece; in the background is a lushly-depicted landscape in dappled light, recalling the work of the Impressionists. In this way, Magritte has brought about a fascinating collision between the world of the trailblazers of half a century earlier and his own pioneering Surrealism.
Magritte had turned to both the Fauve and the Impressionist styles in part as a reaction to the state of the world, not least during the Second World War. His pictures introduced a new light and luminosity that was designed to entertain and even to amuse. He was irreverently co-opting their styles for his own uses, while also indulging in the sheer pleasure with which Impressionist pictures were now viewed. In Shéhérazade, this is clear from the lyrical landscape in the background, which Magritte has captured with deft virtuosity in his gouaches.
That sense of pleasure and escapism against a threatening backdrop may be invoked by the title, Shéhérazade, which recalls the storyteller in the Thousand and One Nights, who had to tell her tales in a manner entrancing enough that her death would be forestalled. Magritte had re-read the tales in 1946 and named a painting after them, as well as taking the name of their protagonist for these pictures. The woman in these pictures appears a fragile fiction, comprising eyes for observation, mouth for telling stories and the wealth and exotic luxury of the pearls themselves. Magritte, writing in the third person for a draft of the catalogue for the 1947 exhibition in which Shéhérazade appeared, explained the motif in terms that revealed his interest in the imaginary narratives and their power, while also discussing the atmosphere, so different to his earlier works:
'The series of little gouaches which show eyes and mouths set in pearls enriches our minds with a new concept which forces reason to draw back its frontiers... The new aspect of the world that M.'s painting aims to acquaint us with had necessarily to appear in an atmosphere different from that of his previous works. This new aspect of what once appeared severe and disturbing had to prove its strength through being able also to smile and to char. This is why the impressionist technique was appropriate to M.'s new pictures thanks to the possibilities it affords' (Magritte, quoted in ibid., p. 146).