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Lot Essay
Executed in 1947, René Magritte’s Shéhérazade is one in an important group of pictures depicting a woman, or multiple women, with a face made of pearls. Here, Magritte has painted three faces, which float like apparitions above a table set with a candlestick and glass. The women are serene. The inclusion of pearls, and all their manifold associations, is perhaps a subtle, albeit witty, allusion to Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which the artist would have likely seen at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
The title of the present work, Shéhérazade, is a reference to the protagonist of the epic narrative One Thousand and One Nights, which Magritte re-read in 1946. The story begins with Sultan Shahryar who, enraged to learn of his wife’s infidelity, orders her execution. Embittered and distrustful, he resolves to wed a new woman every day, only to have her killed the following morning before she, too, could dishonour him. Eventually he marries Sheherazade who, on their wedding night, regales him with such an enchanting tale that he forestalls her execution. So captivated is he by the story that each night he begs to hear more, and eventually the two fall deeply in love. In a letter to the poet Marcel Mariën, Magritte discussed the book: ‘I have started re-reading the Thousand and One Nights with pleasure, will it be kept up?’ (quoted in D. Sylvester and S. Whitfield, René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, vol. II, Oil paintings and objects, 1931-1948, Antwerp, 1993, p. 374). His rhetorical question seems a tongue-in-cheek nod to the story itself, as he conceived of the present motif shortly thereafter.
Owing to their transparency, Magritte’s Shéhérazades seemingly occupy a liminal space, between corporeality and immortality, heaven and earth. Like religious icons, these ‘pearl-women’ intercede directly with the viewer, yet despite the conviction of their gaze, they are immaterial and incomplete. It is up to the viewer to fill in the gaps. Such bodily fragmentation was central to both Magritte’s practice and Surrealism more broadly. Intrigued by psychoanalytical theories, the Surrealists used the human figure as a site to explore the subconscious mind. Magritte himself was fascinated by the uncanny and the ways in which reality could be rendered strange. ‘To Magritte,’ observed Suzi Gablik, ‘all the possible acts of the mind – displacement, explanation, etc. – are indifferent unless they directly evoke mystery. Painting manifests that moment of lucidity, or genius, when the power of the mind declares itself by revealing the mystery of things that appear, until that moment, familiar’ (Magritte, Greenwich, 1970, p. 72).
A sense of weightlessness permeates Shéhérazade, and such insubstantiality is a reminder of the pictorial plane’s inherent flatness. This idea was further reinforced by Magritte’s inclusion of the red curtain, which simultaneously invites the viewer into the world of the painting and closes it off. For Magritte, this framing device was used to question the nature of reality and to enclose the story within. The curtain defines the space between certainty and fantasy, truth and fiction, what the artist understood as the relationship between ‘that which is hidden and which the visible doesn’t show us’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 28).
Shéhérazade originally belonged to Magritte’s neighbour, Madame Rosseels, who lived next door to the artist on rue Esseghem in Brussels. The two often spent time together, and as the keys to their two buildings were identical one would simply knock on the party wall before heading over for a visit. Madame Rosseels collected China vessels, and Magritte included one of her dishes in his painting Le bon sens (Sylvester, no. 582; Private collection). Shéhérazade and the related works were first shown at Galerie Lou Cosyn in Brussels in 1947.
The title of the present work, Shéhérazade, is a reference to the protagonist of the epic narrative One Thousand and One Nights, which Magritte re-read in 1946. The story begins with Sultan Shahryar who, enraged to learn of his wife’s infidelity, orders her execution. Embittered and distrustful, he resolves to wed a new woman every day, only to have her killed the following morning before she, too, could dishonour him. Eventually he marries Sheherazade who, on their wedding night, regales him with such an enchanting tale that he forestalls her execution. So captivated is he by the story that each night he begs to hear more, and eventually the two fall deeply in love. In a letter to the poet Marcel Mariën, Magritte discussed the book: ‘I have started re-reading the Thousand and One Nights with pleasure, will it be kept up?’ (quoted in D. Sylvester and S. Whitfield, René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, vol. II, Oil paintings and objects, 1931-1948, Antwerp, 1993, p. 374). His rhetorical question seems a tongue-in-cheek nod to the story itself, as he conceived of the present motif shortly thereafter.
Owing to their transparency, Magritte’s Shéhérazades seemingly occupy a liminal space, between corporeality and immortality, heaven and earth. Like religious icons, these ‘pearl-women’ intercede directly with the viewer, yet despite the conviction of their gaze, they are immaterial and incomplete. It is up to the viewer to fill in the gaps. Such bodily fragmentation was central to both Magritte’s practice and Surrealism more broadly. Intrigued by psychoanalytical theories, the Surrealists used the human figure as a site to explore the subconscious mind. Magritte himself was fascinated by the uncanny and the ways in which reality could be rendered strange. ‘To Magritte,’ observed Suzi Gablik, ‘all the possible acts of the mind – displacement, explanation, etc. – are indifferent unless they directly evoke mystery. Painting manifests that moment of lucidity, or genius, when the power of the mind declares itself by revealing the mystery of things that appear, until that moment, familiar’ (Magritte, Greenwich, 1970, p. 72).
A sense of weightlessness permeates Shéhérazade, and such insubstantiality is a reminder of the pictorial plane’s inherent flatness. This idea was further reinforced by Magritte’s inclusion of the red curtain, which simultaneously invites the viewer into the world of the painting and closes it off. For Magritte, this framing device was used to question the nature of reality and to enclose the story within. The curtain defines the space between certainty and fantasy, truth and fiction, what the artist understood as the relationship between ‘that which is hidden and which the visible doesn’t show us’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 28).
Shéhérazade originally belonged to Magritte’s neighbour, Madame Rosseels, who lived next door to the artist on rue Esseghem in Brussels. The two often spent time together, and as the keys to their two buildings were identical one would simply knock on the party wall before heading over for a visit. Madame Rosseels collected China vessels, and Magritte included one of her dishes in his painting Le bon sens (Sylvester, no. 582; Private collection). Shéhérazade and the related works were first shown at Galerie Lou Cosyn in Brussels in 1947.