Desire and violence, eroticism and sadism, the real and the imaginary: the female in René Magritte’s work.
“She is always naked. In some anecdotal scenes a number of her incarnations do just about keep their clothes on,” writes painter and art historian René Passeron. Whereas his men, in their suits and bowler hats, “are encased from head to toe in the armor of their respectability,” the women in Magritte’s work are enigmatic, statue-like and usually literally naked.
Her gaze is empty, averted, her face frozen into a mild smile or entirely covered; her skin is smooth and unblemished. Her nakedness is often underscored by the clothing she has just removed. Her feminine body is fragmented, duplicated or alienated. We are confronted by it in the guise of a motionless torso; naked breasts jut out of nightshirts, lower abdomens and legs sprout from the bodies of fishes. And although the woman is naked and thus potentially under threat, vulnerable, at the last moment she eludes our grasp and our gaze.
Violent, sinister and unpleasant
“It is the face of a woman consisting of part of her body. Her breasts are her eyes, her belly button is her nose and her genitals replace her mouth.” This is how Magritte described “Le Viol” in his lecture “La Ligne de Vie” (The Lifeline) in 1938. A sketch of the work had appeared in 1934 on the title page of André Breton’s publication “Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme?” The sketch was subsequently developed as a motif and was to become a textbook example of Surrealist pictorial strategies and themes.
Dating from 1945, “Le Viol” (“The Rape”) shows the face of a woman framed by curly blonde locks; behind her is a whirling vortex of pastel shades. She appears to be looking at us, her face expressive. However, here too her eyes, nose and mouth have been replaced by her breasts, belly button and lower abdomen. Initially, this motif of a woman who is deprived of her senses by means of anatomical rearrangement and whose body has been exposed to the gaze of other people appears violent, uncanny and provocative in an unpleasant way. However, for Magritte, the act of rape is considerably more complex.
A sexual fantasy that is going nowhere
According to author and women’s studies researcher Susan Gubar, in “Le Viol” it certainly is the case that woman has become a visible construct of male desire, that her body is at the latter’s mercy, subjugated, positively offering itself up for rape, something suggested in the picture’s title. However, at the same time the woman would appear totally unsuitable as an “object of desire.” Indeed, because her face and body have been fused the man’s sexual fantasy has nowhere to go, thus, so to speak, undermining itself.
Martha Wolfenstein, in turn, suggests a biographical interpretation of the picture. In “Le Viol” the American author and psychoanalyst sees a way of working through a trauma. As a child, Magritte saw the dead body of his mother, who drowned herself in a river. When she was recovered she was naked and her face was covered by her nightshirt, which had wrapped itself around her head. According to Wolfenstein, this was one of the reasons why the subject of rape was a recurring theme in Magritte’s oeuvre.
Naked and defiant
This is also the case in “Les jours gigantesques” (“The Titanic Days”) dating from 1928. The iridescent dark-blue background suggests a nighttime scene. A woman looks in horror at her hands, which are clasping her hips and her leg. Her body is naked and brawny. With one hand she is warding off the man approaching her. However, her attacker can only be seen inside the woman’s silhouette; his shadowy presence is unable to overcome that of her powerful body.
In Magritte’s work the real and the imaginary, desire and violence, eroticism and sadism come together. They ultimately also lead us to the question of how woman and the female body are seen and perceived, and not only in art: as a silent muse, as a beautiful beloved creature, as a sexual object? Is merely looking at woman’s naked body in itself a kind of rape? Whatever the case, they blonde lady in “Le Viol” defiantly confronts our gaze with her nakedness.
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