La saignée

Author: Marijke Peyser

During the René Magritte solo exhibition that ran from 13 to 24 May 1939 in the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Magritte showed ten canvases and twenty-four gouaches.^[1] The artist had not previously depicted the subjects of a number of the gouaches in oils.^[2] His enthusiasm for working in gouache is revealed in a letter to his friend and fellow artist Marcel Mariën.^[3] Magritte told him that he needed idea-associations because he was suffering from a kind of painter’s fatigue and that the association of specific images like ‘an eagle in a jacket’ could reinspire him.^[4] Magritte used this image in his gouache Le présent (1938 or 1939). In La saignée, a gouache of a framed picture of a brick wall on a wainscoted wall, the images likewise evoke associations other than what one would expect; after all a brick wall does not provide a view whereas a painting can be a window on the world.

The Belgian art magazine Les Beaux Arts of 5 May 1939 carried a review of the René Magritte exhibition entitled ‘Le surréalisme vu à travers l’oeuvre de René Magritte’ – Surrealism viewed through the oeuvre of René Magritte – accompanied by an illustration of La saignée. The journalist asked Magritte how he had come up with the idea for making this work. The artist replied: ‘I think that it was when I was thinking about what would be absolutely forbidden to show in a painting.’^[5] This thought led Magritte to the certainty that it is absolutely forbidden to show the ‘nothingness’, the ‘emptiness’ behind a painting. He continued: ‘behind the paint of the painting there is the canvas. Behind the canvas is a wall. Behind the wall there is… etc. Visible things always hide other visible things. But a visible image hides nothing.’^[6] La saignée exposes the deceptiveness of any attempt to depict. The conventional and traditional role of painting is the depiction of a form of the world around us or of an idea relating to it. Magritte, however, exposed the lack of reality ‘behind a work of art’: it is a medium that reveals absence and instability. Magritte’s thinking, expressed in La saignée, echoes Surrealist ideas: our expectations of reality are once again disordered.

On their return from Paris in July 1930, Magritte and his wife Georgette moved into a small house in rue Esseghem, Jette-Brussels. Life happened in the dining room, a space measuring three by four metres where they had their meals and welcomed friends, but it also served as a studio. Magritte’s easel stood in a corner by a window. There was so little space that it was trapped between the table, the door and the stove. Although Magritte found this cramped layout oppressive he had no need for a painter’s studio, as from 1926 onwards he ‘no longer made paintings, but objets bouleversants’: objects that worked randomly, which called for reflection and which sometimes took the form of paint on canvas.^[7] The house itself proved to be an important source of inspiration; numerous elements feature in the paintings he made after 1930.