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Lost Magritte ‘Discovered’ at MoMA…and Moderna Museet…and…

October 3, 2013 by Marion Maneker

The Enchanted Pose

The Guardian has nice bit from the recently opened Magritte show at MoMA where research into the retrospective resolved the mystery a critically acclaimed painting that was presumed to have been destroyed. It turns out … the work was indeed destroyed when it was divided up and painted over by the artist:

The Enchanted Pose – which depicted two identical female nudes standing side by side [above] – disappeared without trace having received critical acclaim in 1927, shortly before Magritte created his painting of a pipe with the sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (This is not a pipe).

A black-and-white photograph of the “lost” painting from the 1992 definitive study on Magritte – the catalogue raisonné – listed it as “probably destroyed”.

To the excitement of art experts, x-rays and other imaging techniques have revealed two sections of the painting beneath two other Magrittes.

A head and torso from the composition have been found beneath The Portrait of 1935, a painting of an eye on a slice of prosciutto, which is part of a collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA).

The feet of the nude figures were discovered beneath The Red Model of 1935, in which Magritte depicted a pair of feet – from toes to ankles – as surrealist boots. The painting, which is owned by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, inspired Magritte to paint a second version two years later for Edward James, the eccentric British poet, arts patron and collector of surrealist art, during his five-week stay in London. The other two quarters of The Enchanted Pose are now presumed to lie beneath two other Magritte paintings yet to be x-rayed.

Magritte’s missing nudes found hidden under paintings after 80 years (The Guardian)

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Filed Under: Artists Tagged With: Magritte

About Marion Maneker

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