Black Magic (La Magie Noir)

I’m about to bum you the fuck out.  So if you’d like to look at this painting as a person at one with their sense of being, in a state of becoming, or making peace with an inevitable emptiness, then stop here.

In Marie Beckmann’s article, The Woman is Always Naked published in Schirn Magazine, she discusses the women in René Magritte’s work. Even without having seen the women in his body of work, you still might be able to tell from the title that they are (mostly) always naked.

Beckmann looks into why using the context of a different painting, Le Viol. The Rape. 

Aside from the obvious interpretations about vulnerability and the male gaze, Marie points to another explanation as to why the woman is always naked.

Firstly, René Magritte was famous for reminding his audience that what they are looking at is a representation.

It isn’t real.

This is best demonstrated in his work, The Treachery of Images: a painting of a pipe atop the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”.

When the audience responded to the work with, “Clearly, this a pipe”, he challenged them to put tobacco in it. It’s not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. You cannot expect the painting to be like a pipe and you cannot expect a pipe to be like a painting.

So, when René Magritte represents, what could be a male sexual fantasy, he is making a point that it is not real. That is not a woman, that is a painting. A woman will never be like a painting, as a painting is merely an image.

That’s not the bummer though, that’s actually a pretty dope he for she kind of attitude.

Beckmann goes on to highlight Martha Wolfenstein’s interpretation of René Magritte’s work, and this is where it gets dark.

You see, René Magritte’s mother committed suicide when he was young and it’s been said that as a young boy, René saw the naked body of his drowned mother being recovered from the river. The story goes that when they pulled her out, her nightshirt wrapped itself around her face exposing only her pale, waterlogged body.

The trauma and tragedy of that image is the reason why the woman is always naked. At least, according to some. 

Looking at René Magritte’s surrealism through this lens shows you an interplay between a world where his mother is alive and a world where his mother is dead.

There has been a motion to discredit this story, but looking at Black Magic, a painting of a woman receding into a horizon that blends itself into the sea below, all three becoming indiscernible from the other, the story of that pain reads clearly.

Can black magic bring a woman in and out of the ether? Is art magic? 

But why tell you this?

Why see the painting in a way that may not be its intent? It is, by all accounts, very depressing?

Because this reading of René Magritte’s work gives us a non-sexual female nude. A nude who is tragic, not because of her relationship to a man, but because of her relationship with death, with her own humanity. 

In both our enjoyment and criticism of art, we need to move past assuming a woman’s body tells a story centered around sex, regardless of whether it is her availability to be or her rejection of being a sexual object.

All bodies, slowly decaying in their personal confusions, are nothing more than flesh and electricity.

That is what makes the body beautiful and would be a pretty good reason to paint a nude if you ask me.