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Lot Essay
First painted in 1942, in an oil version that is now in the collection of the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels, La mémoire (Memory) is one of the most magical and enduringly mysterious of all of René Magritte’s images and a theme which the artist himself considered among the most successful of his many creations. Painted on numerous occasions by Magritte, the enigma of his La mémoire paintings centres around the surprise appearance of a bleeding wound on the marble-like face of the plaster-cast head of a woman that has been set into an open landscape. This image, accompanied by an often incongruous collation of other objects such as a metal grelot, or bell, conjures a disquieting sense of both stillness and violence that appears to transcend the supposed division between the worlds of life and death.
Painted in 1948, this early gouache version is a famous example that relates most closely to the second, and probably best-known oil version of La mémoire that Magritte made (also in 1948) and which is now in the collection of the Ministère de la Communauté francaise, Belgium (Sylvester, no. 666). As in the 1948 oil painting, in this gouache, the image of the bleeding sculptural head has now been set more poetically in front of the sea. In the oil version this background is fenced off by a curtain, whereas here, Magritte has left the scene entirely open and instead added the image of a rose. First exhibited at the Gallery Hugo in New York in 1948, Magritte and the gallerist Jacques Wergifosse chose to include in the catalogue for this exhibition a specific description of this gouache that, echoing its title, read: ‘This painting will never leave your memory’ (Magritte, exh. cat., Hugo Gallery, New York, May 1948, n. p.).
For Magritte, the titles he gave to his paintings were always significant additions aimed at extending and invoking the same innate sense of mystery and enigma that he sought to achieve through his imagery. Towards this end, he would often involve many of his Surrealist poet friends in seeking an appropriate title for each of his pictures. In an interview Magritte gave in 1962, he spoke at length specifically about this innate relationship between the title and the image with direct reference to La mémoire, explaining that ‘the title is related to the painted figures in the same way that the figures are related to each other. The figures are brought together in an order that invokes mystery. The title is joined to the painted image according to the same order. For instance, the picture La mémoire shows a plaster face with a bloodstain on it. When I gave the picture the title, I felt they went well together... but first I must say that when I painted the picture La mémoire I wasn’t thinking about what I’m going to say now. I only thought about harmonizing the image and the title that names the image. Consequently, the picture is not the illustration of the following ideas. When we say the word “memory,” we see that it corresponds to the image of a human head. If memory can take up space, it can only be inside the head. Then the bloodstain may suggest to us that the person whose face we can see is the victim of a fatal accident. Lastly, it’s a question of an event in the past that remains present in our minds thanks to the memory’ (in Jan Walravens, ‘Ontmoeting met René Magritte’ in De Vlamse Gids, Antwerp, Nov 1962, reproduced in K. Rooney and E. Platter, (eds.), René Magritte Selected Writings, Richmond, 2016, pp. 198-202).
The central motif of all of the pictures that Magritte entitled La mémoire is that of the bleeding plaster head. This plaster head, without a wound, had made its first appearance in Magritte’s 1941 painting Les eaux profondes (Sylvester, no. 491). In this work it functioned in the place of the face of a painted female figure and thereby reflected, in some respects, the artist’s pictures entitled La magie noire – an extensive series of works from these years that contrasted the living flesh of a female nude with the cold, dead, stone of a statue. Magritte owned several examples of this plaster head of a woman and was even to use them as the basis of two sculptures he made around 1945 in which he painted these casts blue.
With its downcast eyes and its hair tied back with a band, these casts resemble the mournful beauty of a famous death mask known as L’inconnue de la Seine. This was the notoriously beautiful image of an unknown young girl of around sixteen years old who was believed to have drowned in the Seine in the 1880s and which subsequently became a, rather morbid, erotic fetish for a whole generation of Bohemians in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s as well as the inspiration for numerous literary works. Magritte, as David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield have pointed out, seems to have mistakenly believed his casts to also be that of L’inconnue de la Seine as he had bought them from his sister-in-law at the Maison Berger who also believed these casts to be that of the famous L’inconnue (D. Sylvester and S. Whitfield (eds.), René Magritte, catalogue raisonné, vol. II, Oil Paintings, London, 1994, p. 299).
The origin of Magritte’s startling idea of bringing this plaster cast to life through the image of a bleeding wound in its temple is also thought to have derived from Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) in which a beautiful female statue, (played by a naked Lee Miller covered in butter), mysteriously comes to life while, in a mirrored dimension, the male poet shoots himself through the temple. The apparent mystery as well as the sinister connotations of this wound on the face of a beautiful woman was however also something that evidently played on Magritte’s mind throughout the dark and difficult years of the early 1940s. In the same year that he painted his first version of La mémoire for instance, Magritte’s wife Georgette also appeared with a similar bleeding wound to her temple in the first film to be made about Magritte, Robert Cocriamont’s 1942 movie Recontres de Magritte.
As so often in Magritte’s work, however, the most potent source of inspiration for La mémoire is to be found in the work of Giorgio de Chirico and in particular, the Italian artist’s famous 1914 picture, Le chant d’amour (The Song of Love). It was this painting, with its strange juxtaposition of a marble bust, a ball and a surgeon’s glove set into an urban landscape that caused an epiphany of revelation for Magritte in 1923 and first led him on the artistic path he was to follow for the rest of his life. Magritte was later to say about de Chirico’s painting, that, for the first time, ‘I saw thought’, and recognised in this picture that it ‘represented a complete break with the mental habits peculiar to artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity, and all the little aesthetic specialities. It was a new vision through which the spectator recognizes his own isolation and hears the silence of the world’ (quoted in Alex Danchev, René Magritte, London, 2020, p. 114).
It is this same ‘silence of the world’ that penetrates Magritte’s La mémoire where de Chirico’s classical bust, glove and ball have now been replaced by Magritte’s bleeding cast of a woman’s head, a rose and a grelot in front of the sea. The surprising poetics of this strange juxtaposition of objects both reflects the elegance of what Magritte referred to as their ‘elective affinity’ and also refers back to the underlying sense of trauma that had distinguished so much of his early work of the 1920s.
Painted in 1948, this early gouache version is a famous example that relates most closely to the second, and probably best-known oil version of La mémoire that Magritte made (also in 1948) and which is now in the collection of the Ministère de la Communauté francaise, Belgium (Sylvester, no. 666). As in the 1948 oil painting, in this gouache, the image of the bleeding sculptural head has now been set more poetically in front of the sea. In the oil version this background is fenced off by a curtain, whereas here, Magritte has left the scene entirely open and instead added the image of a rose. First exhibited at the Gallery Hugo in New York in 1948, Magritte and the gallerist Jacques Wergifosse chose to include in the catalogue for this exhibition a specific description of this gouache that, echoing its title, read: ‘This painting will never leave your memory’ (Magritte, exh. cat., Hugo Gallery, New York, May 1948, n. p.).
For Magritte, the titles he gave to his paintings were always significant additions aimed at extending and invoking the same innate sense of mystery and enigma that he sought to achieve through his imagery. Towards this end, he would often involve many of his Surrealist poet friends in seeking an appropriate title for each of his pictures. In an interview Magritte gave in 1962, he spoke at length specifically about this innate relationship between the title and the image with direct reference to La mémoire, explaining that ‘the title is related to the painted figures in the same way that the figures are related to each other. The figures are brought together in an order that invokes mystery. The title is joined to the painted image according to the same order. For instance, the picture La mémoire shows a plaster face with a bloodstain on it. When I gave the picture the title, I felt they went well together... but first I must say that when I painted the picture La mémoire I wasn’t thinking about what I’m going to say now. I only thought about harmonizing the image and the title that names the image. Consequently, the picture is not the illustration of the following ideas. When we say the word “memory,” we see that it corresponds to the image of a human head. If memory can take up space, it can only be inside the head. Then the bloodstain may suggest to us that the person whose face we can see is the victim of a fatal accident. Lastly, it’s a question of an event in the past that remains present in our minds thanks to the memory’ (in Jan Walravens, ‘Ontmoeting met René Magritte’ in De Vlamse Gids, Antwerp, Nov 1962, reproduced in K. Rooney and E. Platter, (eds.), René Magritte Selected Writings, Richmond, 2016, pp. 198-202).
The central motif of all of the pictures that Magritte entitled La mémoire is that of the bleeding plaster head. This plaster head, without a wound, had made its first appearance in Magritte’s 1941 painting Les eaux profondes (Sylvester, no. 491). In this work it functioned in the place of the face of a painted female figure and thereby reflected, in some respects, the artist’s pictures entitled La magie noire – an extensive series of works from these years that contrasted the living flesh of a female nude with the cold, dead, stone of a statue. Magritte owned several examples of this plaster head of a woman and was even to use them as the basis of two sculptures he made around 1945 in which he painted these casts blue.
With its downcast eyes and its hair tied back with a band, these casts resemble the mournful beauty of a famous death mask known as L’inconnue de la Seine. This was the notoriously beautiful image of an unknown young girl of around sixteen years old who was believed to have drowned in the Seine in the 1880s and which subsequently became a, rather morbid, erotic fetish for a whole generation of Bohemians in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s as well as the inspiration for numerous literary works. Magritte, as David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield have pointed out, seems to have mistakenly believed his casts to also be that of L’inconnue de la Seine as he had bought them from his sister-in-law at the Maison Berger who also believed these casts to be that of the famous L’inconnue (D. Sylvester and S. Whitfield (eds.), René Magritte, catalogue raisonné, vol. II, Oil Paintings, London, 1994, p. 299).
The origin of Magritte’s startling idea of bringing this plaster cast to life through the image of a bleeding wound in its temple is also thought to have derived from Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) in which a beautiful female statue, (played by a naked Lee Miller covered in butter), mysteriously comes to life while, in a mirrored dimension, the male poet shoots himself through the temple. The apparent mystery as well as the sinister connotations of this wound on the face of a beautiful woman was however also something that evidently played on Magritte’s mind throughout the dark and difficult years of the early 1940s. In the same year that he painted his first version of La mémoire for instance, Magritte’s wife Georgette also appeared with a similar bleeding wound to her temple in the first film to be made about Magritte, Robert Cocriamont’s 1942 movie Recontres de Magritte.
As so often in Magritte’s work, however, the most potent source of inspiration for La mémoire is to be found in the work of Giorgio de Chirico and in particular, the Italian artist’s famous 1914 picture, Le chant d’amour (The Song of Love). It was this painting, with its strange juxtaposition of a marble bust, a ball and a surgeon’s glove set into an urban landscape that caused an epiphany of revelation for Magritte in 1923 and first led him on the artistic path he was to follow for the rest of his life. Magritte was later to say about de Chirico’s painting, that, for the first time, ‘I saw thought’, and recognised in this picture that it ‘represented a complete break with the mental habits peculiar to artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity, and all the little aesthetic specialities. It was a new vision through which the spectator recognizes his own isolation and hears the silence of the world’ (quoted in Alex Danchev, René Magritte, London, 2020, p. 114).
It is this same ‘silence of the world’ that penetrates Magritte’s La mémoire where de Chirico’s classical bust, glove and ball have now been replaced by Magritte’s bleeding cast of a woman’s head, a rose and a grelot in front of the sea. The surprising poetics of this strange juxtaposition of objects both reflects the elegance of what Magritte referred to as their ‘elective affinity’ and also refers back to the underlying sense of trauma that had distinguished so much of his early work of the 1920s.