René Magritte

Emile Langui, Brussels (acquired from the artist)
Margaret Krebs, Brussels
Acquired from the above in the early 1970s

(possibly) Brussels, Galerie Lou Cosyn, Magritte, 1947

David Sylvester, ed., Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. IV, London, 1994, no. 1233, illustrated p. 87

Executed on wove paper, laid down on card. The gouache is very fresh and unfaded and the work is overall in very good condition. Colors: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly fresher in the original.
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The present work brings together several recurring motifs of Magritte's art. Three of the four compartments contain a bell, one of Magritte's signature images, accompanied by a different element in each segment. The upper left quadrant contains two leaf-birds, a subject that Magritte was developing in the 1940s. The leaf-birds are often presented as a family, in a closely-knit group or as a pair, as in the present work. In the leaf-bird image the artist combines the two elements of the natural world into a creature that is half-animal and half-plant. The upper right quadrant is occupied by a paper cut-out or découpage, an important feature that Magritte developed throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. The simple children's game of cutting out bits of a folded sheet of paper which, when unfolded, results in unexpected shapes and images introduces the element of automatism, which was at the heart of the Surrealists' creative process. This semi-abstract, two-dimensional paper cut-out, superimposed onto the three-dimensional image, evokes the remark of another famous Surrealist, Max Ernst, who said that Magritte's pictures are "collages painted entirely by hand" (quoted in David Sylvester, Magritte, London, 1992, p. 110).

Magritte first experimented with the division of his compositions into separate compartments in 1926, and he returned to this method several times throughout his career. He would divide the surface into four planes, often by means of a trompe l'œil depiction of wooden bars resembling the artist's stretcher, or frames within a frame. Unlike most other works from this series in which the objects populating each of the quarters are represented against a flat monochromatic surface, in Un Siècle de patience they are placed inside three-dimensional box-like spaces, the depth of each compartment emphasized by the shadow inside it.

The image of the pearl-woman, which here occupies the lower left quadrant, was explored in Magritte's Shéhérazade series. The figure is made up of strings of pearls forming various shapes, some of them filled with images of a woman's eyes and mouth. The pearl-woman appeared in several early gouaches and in oil paintings from 1947, the year the present work was executed. The intricately composed female face alludes to the mystery surrounding the legendary storyteller and the lavish palace setting of the Arabian Nights. Her beauty is evident yet fleeting; she is an image, a fantasy that is visible though intangible.