Researchers Discover Hidden Portrait in Magritte Painting

A group of researchers has found the face of a girl peering out from beneath Surrealist painter René Magritte’s 1943 portray “La cinquième saison” (“The Fifth Season”). The determine, uncovered utilizing infrared reflectography, might be a illustration of the artist’s spouse Georgette Magritte.

Francisca Vandepitte, a senior curator of recent artwork on the Royal Museums of Effective Arts of Belgium, and Catherine Defeyt, a researcher on the museum in addition to Belgium’s College of Liège, uncovered the portrait as half of a bigger mission targeted on scientific approaches to finding out Magritte’s oil work. Vandepitte and Defeyt used chemical and lightweight expertise to look at 50 works dated between 1921 and 1967, and their compiled findings are slated to be published later this summer season.

The newly uncovered portrait reveals a blonde girl, and though Georgette had brown hair, her face form, nostril, and coiffure match the portray’s topic, the researchers say. One other potential sitter is Adrienne Crowet, a blonde mannequin Magritte painted in 1940.

René and Georgette Magritte met in 1920 and had been married from 1922 till René’s dying in 1967. Present letters counsel a healthful decades-long love affair (a notion Paul Simon cemented in his 1983 track “René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War“).

Vandepitte and Defeyt identified that the hidden portray is just like three portraits Magritte created a yr later. In 1944, the artist painted Georgette, Jacqueline Nonkels (Magritte’s neighbor and friend), and Lou Cosyn (the spouse of Magritte’s seller) staring straight on the viewer, their realistically rendered faces showing in stark distinction to the swirling brushstrokes behind them.

This nod to Impressionism is on full view within the ultimate model of “La cinquième saison.” Throughout World Battle II, Magritte deserted the outlined shapes of his well-known Surrealist works. He was satisfied that the Soviets would quickly vanquish the Nazis occupying his native Belgium and commenced creating sunny work that includes cheerful imagery, deliberately mimicking the fashion of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The next physique of work was unfavorably dubbed the vache period (which straight interprets to “cow” and could be taken extra loosely to imply vulgar).

Staying true to his Surrealist inclinations, Renoir didn’t utterly depart behind his philosophical musings throughout this era. In “La cinquième saison,” two males wearing bowling hats carry work with gilded frames beneath their arms, a possible reference to the artist’s fixation on the character of illustration. It’s an image inside an image, an idea the artist explored in works equivalent to “The Treachery of Images” (1929), his well-known portray of a pipe with the phrase “This Is Not a Pipe” written in French beneath it.

Whereas the hidden portrait provides yet another layer to Magritte’s work inside a portray, the artist can also be identified to have reused outdated canvases. In 2017, researchers on the Royal Museums of Effective Arts in Belgium found one other hidden gem. After exhibiting “La Pose enchantée (The Enchanted Pose)” (1927) within the Twenties, the artist separated it into 4 items. Between 2013 and 2016, three sections of the portray had been discovered beneath layers of paint in Magritte works at New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and the Norwich Fortress Museum in the UK. “God is Not a Saint” (1935–1936), a portray on the Magritte Museum in Brussels, was the final piece.