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Lot Essay
Mirage-like and evocative, the face of Shéhérazade shimmers, barely extant, before the viewer. The pearly curlicues from which René Magritte has summoned this apparition are pierced in three places by human features – sensuous red lips appear alongside a pair of violet-hued eyes that gaze directly out at the viewer, appearing to challenge us to question the impossibility of this vision. There is a baroque decadence to the pearls, an implication of luxury and wealth, while the detailed pattern, wrapping around the nose, eyes and mouth of our mysterious, ethereal character, recall Carnival masks designed to conceal and hide one’s identity. Imbued with a heady sensuality, Shéhérazade invites the viewer in a strange world of sense and nonsense, of narrative and of enchantment that acts as a beguiling invitation into another realm of wonder.
One of Magritte’s favourite recurring motifs, the femme-perles or pearl-woman featured in several of the artist’s most enigmatic and intriguing paintings of the mid- to late-1940s, including Le libérateur (Sylvester, no. 630), Les grands rendez-vous (Sylvester, no. 631) and another work also titled Shéhérazade (Sylvester, no. 629). Usually presented against a landscape background, or in some other more complex context, here the pearl-woman appears alone, her features set against a wall of soft golden-hued pigment. By removing any extraneous details, Magritte brings an almost icon-like strength to the motif’s presentation, allowing the viewer to focus completely on the subject at hand. Owing to her transparency, the woman in the present Shéhérazade seems to occupy a liminal space between corporeality and ethereality, heaven and earth, reality and the imagination. Despite the conviction of her gaze, she remains tantalizingly immaterial, and it is up to the viewer alone to fill in the gaps and conjure her full image in their mind’s eye.
The title Shéhérazade invokes the legend of the narrator in The Thousand and One Nights. Only the year before the present work was begun, Magritte had written to Marcel Mariën that, ‘I have started re-reading The Thousand and One Nights with pleasure, will it be kept up?’ (letter to M. Mariën, 19 August 1946; quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 374). Magritte’s question about his enjoyment appears to have been a playful reference to the framing story within the famous collection of folktales, by which the narrator Sheherazade prolonged her own life by telling tales which so enthralled the king that he stayed her execution, rather than killing her as he had his previous wives. Sheherazade kept her life by leaving her tales unfinished each night, leaving the king on tenterhooks and begging to hear more, until eventually the pair fell in love. In the story, each narrative had been conjured briefly and tantalisingly, a parallel, perhaps, to the woman whose face partially appears in Shéhérazade, a deliberately incomplete and therefore all the more enticing image.
Marrying the seductive elusiveness of the motif with an almost confrontational directness, the present example of Shéhérazade was executed by the artist as a part of a commission for the home of Jean Bourjou in Brussels. A great collector of Magritte’s paintings, Bourjou not only acquired works from galleries and exhibitions, but also directly from the artist. His closeness to the Belgian Surrealist is exemplified in a pair of portraits of Bourjou’s children that Magritte completed around the same period that Shéhérazade was painted. The present work hung in the Bourjou home for close to thirty years, as part of a decorative scheme specifically created for the stylish, art-deco bar. The painted panels, each of which explored one of the artist’s favourite leitmotifs, were sold in the 1970s and dispersed as individual works.
One of Magritte’s favourite recurring motifs, the femme-perles or pearl-woman featured in several of the artist’s most enigmatic and intriguing paintings of the mid- to late-1940s, including Le libérateur (Sylvester, no. 630), Les grands rendez-vous (Sylvester, no. 631) and another work also titled Shéhérazade (Sylvester, no. 629). Usually presented against a landscape background, or in some other more complex context, here the pearl-woman appears alone, her features set against a wall of soft golden-hued pigment. By removing any extraneous details, Magritte brings an almost icon-like strength to the motif’s presentation, allowing the viewer to focus completely on the subject at hand. Owing to her transparency, the woman in the present Shéhérazade seems to occupy a liminal space between corporeality and ethereality, heaven and earth, reality and the imagination. Despite the conviction of her gaze, she remains tantalizingly immaterial, and it is up to the viewer alone to fill in the gaps and conjure her full image in their mind’s eye.
The title Shéhérazade invokes the legend of the narrator in The Thousand and One Nights. Only the year before the present work was begun, Magritte had written to Marcel Mariën that, ‘I have started re-reading The Thousand and One Nights with pleasure, will it be kept up?’ (letter to M. Mariën, 19 August 1946; quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 374). Magritte’s question about his enjoyment appears to have been a playful reference to the framing story within the famous collection of folktales, by which the narrator Sheherazade prolonged her own life by telling tales which so enthralled the king that he stayed her execution, rather than killing her as he had his previous wives. Sheherazade kept her life by leaving her tales unfinished each night, leaving the king on tenterhooks and begging to hear more, until eventually the pair fell in love. In the story, each narrative had been conjured briefly and tantalisingly, a parallel, perhaps, to the woman whose face partially appears in Shéhérazade, a deliberately incomplete and therefore all the more enticing image.
Marrying the seductive elusiveness of the motif with an almost confrontational directness, the present example of Shéhérazade was executed by the artist as a part of a commission for the home of Jean Bourjou in Brussels. A great collector of Magritte’s paintings, Bourjou not only acquired works from galleries and exhibitions, but also directly from the artist. His closeness to the Belgian Surrealist is exemplified in a pair of portraits of Bourjou’s children that Magritte completed around the same period that Shéhérazade was painted. The present work hung in the Bourjou home for close to thirty years, as part of a decorative scheme specifically created for the stylish, art-deco bar. The painted panels, each of which explored one of the artist’s favourite leitmotifs, were sold in the 1970s and dispersed as individual works.