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Lot Essay
Rene Magritte painted Nu in 1925, at a crucial turning point in his early career as he began to leave behind the cubo-futurist style of his earlier work and forge his unique Surrealist idiom. Magritte's path to Surrealism had begun two years earlier in 1923, when he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's 1914 masterpiece Le chant d'amour (Museum of Modern Art, New York). The Italian painter's juxtaposition of incongruous, unrelated objects struck Magritte with the force of an epiphany, revealing to him for the first time how art could be freed from strictly formal investigation and imbued with the power of poetry. Having lost faith in the post-cubist-futurist aestheticism that had governed his previous work, Magritte painted very little for roughly two years. In 1925, he picked up his brushes again, and, using the same stylized, flattened planes of his earlier work, composed images that featured enigmatic spatial dislocations and unexpected juxtapositions; characteristics that would become central to his unique form of Surrealism.
These spatial enigmas are clearly evident in Nu. Amidst an interior setting, a highly stylized nude figure stands in front of what appears to be a folded screen. Behind her, to the left of the composition, there seems to be a window that leads out into a snow-covered landscape in the distance. The pink surroundings of this apparent opening distort the viewer’s understanding of this composition: is this a window into an exterior world, or is it an image hanging on the wall of the interior? These perspectival riddles would become central to Magritte’s oeuvre, and particularly to his work of 1926. Magritte later recalled this formative period in his 1938 lecture ‘La Ligne de vie’: ‘I obtained sets of objects shorn of their details and accidental particularities. These objects displayed only their essential being and, in contrast to the image we have of them in real life where they are concrete, the painted image aroused a very strong feeling of an abstract existence… I eventually found the same abstraction in the real world itself as in my pictures, since, despite the complicated combinations of details and shades of colour, I could see it as if it were just a curtain hanging in front of my eyes. I became quite uncertain of the depth of the countryside, and far from being convinced of the remoteness of the light blue of the horizon, which I experienced immediately as being simply situated on a level with my eyes I was in the same state of innocence as a child in its cot who thinks he can grasp a bird flying past in the sky’ (Magritte, ‘La Ligne de vie’, lecture given in Antwerp on 20 November 1938, in G. Ollinger-Zinque & F. Leen, eds., Magritte Centenary Exhibition, exh. cat., Brussels, 1998, p. 45).
These spatial enigmas are clearly evident in Nu. Amidst an interior setting, a highly stylized nude figure stands in front of what appears to be a folded screen. Behind her, to the left of the composition, there seems to be a window that leads out into a snow-covered landscape in the distance. The pink surroundings of this apparent opening distort the viewer’s understanding of this composition: is this a window into an exterior world, or is it an image hanging on the wall of the interior? These perspectival riddles would become central to Magritte’s oeuvre, and particularly to his work of 1926. Magritte later recalled this formative period in his 1938 lecture ‘La Ligne de vie’: ‘I obtained sets of objects shorn of their details and accidental particularities. These objects displayed only their essential being and, in contrast to the image we have of them in real life where they are concrete, the painted image aroused a very strong feeling of an abstract existence… I eventually found the same abstraction in the real world itself as in my pictures, since, despite the complicated combinations of details and shades of colour, I could see it as if it were just a curtain hanging in front of my eyes. I became quite uncertain of the depth of the countryside, and far from being convinced of the remoteness of the light blue of the horizon, which I experienced immediately as being simply situated on a level with my eyes I was in the same state of innocence as a child in its cot who thinks he can grasp a bird flying past in the sky’ (Magritte, ‘La Ligne de vie’, lecture given in Antwerp on 20 November 1938, in G. Ollinger-Zinque & F. Leen, eds., Magritte Centenary Exhibition, exh. cat., Brussels, 1998, p. 45).