René Magritte (1898-1967)

René Magritte's unique vision was in part based on his unceasing investigation of the way that we experience the world, and the way in which we see it. Nowhere is this fascination with the act of seeing more clear than in La femme du maçon, painted in 1958. This picture, which featured in a string of exhibitions during the artist's own lifetime, shows a woman in profile staring at a large floating leaf. Her eye, though, has been shown as vast, taking up most of her face, magnified to a fantastic and absurd degree. In this way, Magritte has created a miniature manifesto, a treatise on the act of seeing.

Magritte contemplated several variations upon the theme, creating drawings which showed a face staring with its outsized eye at the moon, a bird and a floating stone. During the course of 1958, Magritte had written to his friends the Copleys discussing the idea for this picture: 'For some time now I have been thinking of this face. In a recent painting it is looking at the leaf of a tree. But in addition Scutenaire has thought of the title "The Mason's Wife" for this picture' (Magritte, letter to the Copleys, circa 18 July 1958, quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, London, 1993, p. 302). William Copley, an artist in his own right, had also run a short-lived gallery space in Beverly Hills which had important exhibitions of various Surrealists including Magritte a decade earlier.