Belgian surrealist master René Magritte's 'La Magie Noire' ('Black Magic') has been held in a private collection for nearly 100 years, but will finally go on sale in Paris later this month.
The surrealist painting, depicting a nude woman against a hazy blue sea and sky, measures just 73 x 54 cm. It has been displayed in Brussels' Magritte Museum and has rarely been seen outside Belgium for over 90 years. World-renowned auction house Sotheby's estimates that it will sell for between €5-7 million in Paris on 24 October.
Painted in 1934, 'La Magie Noire' is the first and finest of ten mysterious variations, most of which were given different names, and has been part of 20 exhibitions. The series features the artist's wife, Georgette Berger, who resembles a marble statue and on whose right shoulder perches a white dove. One-third of the background shows a semi-wood-panelled interior wall.
It blurs the border between the inner and the outer, and the visible and the hidden, transforming black magic into art. It recalls the Belgian artist's words: "Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us."
"Like all of Magritte’s work, it challenges perception and invites us to question what we believe to be real," according to Sotheby's. "Here, the essence of surrealism breathes – turning the ordinary into a riddle of the mind and the senses."
It has been hailed as the most iconic nude of the surrealist movement, as groundbreaking in its way as Manet's 'Olympia' was for Impressionism or Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' was for Cubism.
'The superstar of surrealism'
The painting was bought the same year it was created by the family of the Second World War resistance heroine Suzanne Spaak, and it has remained in the same collection ever since.
Spaak was shot by the Gestapo in Paris for helping 163 Jewish children escape deportation and hiding them in her home. Her family were Magritte's benefactors while he struggled financially and failed to sell a single work for two years, due to the Great Depression that hit France in the 1930s. Surrealists were considered revolutionary troublemakers and no one was buying paintings from them, according to Sotheby's France's vice-president Thomas Bompard.
But the Spaak family were like royalty and pulled Magritte out of his financial woes, Bompard told the Guardian. Claude Spaak was a celebrated Belgian playwright who knew Magritte. He became a benefactor, commissioned portraits of his wife and children and arranged a monthly stipend for the artist.
Suzanne Spaak's sister Alice Lorge bought 'La Magie Noire' to mark the birth of her first child in 1934 – also marking Magritte's rebirth as an artist.
"It is the first time I have handled a major Magritte work that has been in the same family since it was painted. It is extraordinary, as is the history of the family," Bompard told the Guardian.
"This painting is the Taylor Swift of surrealism," Bompard said. "If you were to ask a group of schoolchildren to do a presentation on the surrealist movement, this painting alone would be enough to define it. I call it the superstar of surrealism."
