Property of Adelaide de Menil
Rene Magritte (1898-1967)

La voix du sang

Details
Rene Magritte (1898-1967)
La voix du sang
signed bottom right 'Magritte'
oil on canvas
31 x 23 in. (78.8 x 58.6 cm.)
Painted in 1948
Provenance
Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist on Aug. 8, 1949)
Acquired from the above by the present owner on Jan. 1, 1955
Literature
L. Scutenaire, Magritte, Antwerp, 1948, p. 13 (illustrated, pl. 20)
P. Demarne, Rhétorique, Sept., 1961, no. 3 (illustrated, pl. 7)
D. Sylvester, Magritte, New York, 1969, p. 8
C. Moser, "Magritte's Show is One Step Beyond Surrealism," Houston Chronicle, Oct. 3, 1976
D. Sylvester, S. Whitfield and M. Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II (Oil Paintings and Objects, 1931-1948), p. 419, no. 668 (illustrated)
Exhibited
New York, Hugo Gallery, René Magritte, May, 1948, no. 21
Brussels, Galerie Lou Cosyn, Les tableaux parlants de René Magritte, Feb.-March, 1949
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Facetten van hedendaagse schilderkunst: België, Luxembourg, Nederland, June-Aug., 1949, no. 66
New York, Hugo Gallery, Magritte, March-April, 1951, no. 5 (illustrated on the cover)
Dallas, Museum for Contemporary Arts, René Magritte in America, Dec., 1960-Jan., 1961, no. 24. The exhibition traveled to Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Feb.-March, 1961.
New York, Albert Landry Galleries, René Magritte in New York Private Collections, Oct.-Nov., 1961, no. 50
Little Rock, Arkansas Art Center, Magritte, May-June, 1964 (illustrated)
Houston, Rice University, Institute for the Arts, Secret Affinities: Words and Images by René Magritte, Oct., 1976-Jan., 1977
Sale room notice
This painting has been requested for the exhibition Retrospective René Magritte, to be held at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, March-June, 1998.

Lot Essay

David Sylvester has translated the title of this painting as Blood Will Tell. Magritte made three versions of the picture in oil in 1947 and 1948; the present version is the final one. The first shows the trunk of the tree in close-up and the second depicts the tree before a curtain that is partly drawn to reveal a landscape; only in the present painting is the whole tree visible. In addition, Magritte made four versions of the picture in gouache in 1947 and 1948 and painted it again in 1961. Magritte also adapted the image for his advertising work for a perfumer and used it for a plate in an illustrated edition of Lautréamont's Maldoror.

All the versions show three compartments in the trunk of the tree, containing a house, a sphere and a partially open door. In 1950 Magritte commented on the image, "The sphere and the house suggest enigmatic measurements to the tree" (quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte, Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, p. 110). In 1959 he said, "What we can see that delights us in a painted image becomes uninteresting if what we are shown through the image is encountered in reality; and the contrary too: what pleases us in reality, we are indifferent to in the image of this pleasing reality--if we don't confuse real and surreal, and surreal with subreal" (letter from R. Magritte to A. Bosmans, quoted in ibid., p. 109).

Magritte composed this painting from images that he used on many other occasions. Of the tree he wrote in 1947:

Pushed from the earth toward the sun, a tree is an image of certain happiness. To perceive this image we must be immobile like a tree. When we are moving, it is the tree that becomes the spectator. It is witness, equally, in the shape of chairs, tables and doors to the more or less agitated spectacle of our life. The tree, having become a coffin, disappears into the earth. And when it is transformed into fire, it vanishes into the air. (Quoted in L. Scutenaire, op. cit., p. 69)

The house in La voix du sang resembles the one that Magritte built for himself in 1963; Magritte represented it in several paintings, including his most celebrated image, L'empire des lumières (Sylvester, no. 709). Magritte had drawn two houses in Les mots et les images, 1929 with the captions "real" and "represented" and the note, "Everything tends to make one think that there is little relation between an object and that which represents it" (quoted in S. Gablik, Magritte, New York, 1985, p. 133). Jacques Meuris compared the half-open door to a box of secrets that has a kind of psychoanalytic "association of feelings, of unconscious memories carrying an emotional charge" (J. Meuris, Magritte, New York, 1990, p. 114).