René Magritte

Galerie Alexander Iolas, Paris (acquired from the artist)

Private Collection, France (acquired from the above circa 1964)

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1986

London, Hanover Gallery, René Magritte, 1964, no. 25

Paris, Galerie Alexander Iolas, Magritte: le sens propre, 1964, no. 31, illustrated in the catalogue

Paris, Artcurial, L'Aventure surréaliste autour d'André Breton, 1986, no. 165

Paris, Artcurial, Le Belvédère Mandiargues: André Pieyre Mandiargues et l'art du XXe siècle, 1990, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from 1963 and with inverted measurements)

New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999

David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1994, vol. IV, no. 1545, illustrated p. 263

Executed in late 1963 or early 1964, La Belle hérétique is a captivating example of one of the central themes of Magritte’s art, that of unexpectedly juxtaposed objects seen in a generic, unidentified landscape. In this work, the artist has turned an everyday scene, that of a person sitting on a brick wall, into one that is at the same time comical and macabre, by replacing the figure with a coffin. With the extraordinary simplicity of means and sharpness of execution that characterised his later work, Magritte created an image of mystery and ambiguity: it is unclear whether the figure has metamorphosed into a coffin or is hidden inside it. In either case, we are confronted with an image in which life has been turned into death.

Magritte first realised this subject in a gouache titled Perspective from 1949, showing a coffin as if seated on an armchair in front of a brick wall. Over the next two years, he applied this theme to famous images from art history, most notably in Perspective: Le Balcon de Manet (fig. 2) and Perspective: Madame Récamier de Gérard (fig. 3), both painted in 1950. The latter painting was executed from a squared-up postcard of François Gérard’s Madame Récamier, found among Magritte’s possessions (fig. 4). Several months after executing the present work Magritte produced another gouache (D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., no. 1571), this time showing two coffins seated on a similar stone wall, slightly turned towards each other, suggesting the act of conversation, which gives them a more animated character, thus further confusing the notions of life and death.

Siegfried Gohr wrote about this group of Magritte’s work in relationship to Edouard Manet’s Le Balcon (fig. 1), which was his point of departure: ‘Manet’s critical contemporaries had already disapproved of the coldness of his composition with its green shutters – precisely the aspect which, despite its largely negative reception at the time, Magritte considerably augmented in his reinterpretation. He transformed the stiffness and paleness of three people on the balcony, their obvious ennui and the lack of relationship among the figures, into a séance of coffins. In other words, rather than creating an alternative image to Manet’s, he amplified its essential mood into the absurd and horrifying. The idea of a coffin in human shape and its link with Manet was vividly and revealingly described by Marcel Mariën:

“[…] Magritte began by painting a small gouache with a front view of a seated coffin that had dropped into an armchair. I remember exactly that Nougé and I, when we first saw it, immediately broke out in laughter. In this way we reawakened the pleasure Magritte himself must have felt when he discovered this idea, but which had evaporated in the meantime. For this was (which is no false assertion!) a funny picture – death and laughter, as we all know, have always gone hand in hand”’ (S. Gohr, Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, p. 237).

The authors of the Catalogue Raisonné of Magritte’s œuvre offer the following explanation regarding the dating of La Belle hérétique: ‘It is one of a group of seven gouaches in this large format done for Iolas, who included them in the Magritte show which he organized in London in collaboration with the Hanover Gallery and which opened there in May. All appear under 1963 in Magritte List 1964, but any inscriptions include the date 1964 […]. Several letters Magritte wrote in December 1963 say how busy he is trying to finish work in hand, and it seems likely that this group of gouaches was painted over the turn of the year’ (D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., p. 263).