René Magritte (1898-1967)

Magritte's description in his publication Dix tableaux is clear and matter-of-fact: "The picture represents a naked woman, seen full face. She is looking straight to the front. Through a window a brilliantly sunlit landscape is visible. The window is in the woman's body" (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, p. 368). The artist explained the title, La vie privée, which his friend and colleague Marcel Mariën probably suggested, in an untitled manuscript written the same year: "Every person has a private life which, on further acquaintance, can be perceived as through a window" (Titres, quoted in ibid.).
A related drawing Magritte created in 1946 for a text of Paul Éluard (illustrated in ibid.) incorporates a window with closed curtains, which mysteriously infers the intimate secrets of the private life. The present painting with its internalized landscape is, by contrast, more worldly in its implications, perhaps suggesting a visual metaphor artists have often found appealing, in which woman is landscape, woman is the world. Magritte has inverted the place of the outside world, seen just as this young woman would have viewed it through such a window, by transposing it into her innermost being. As a further complicating notion, like a visual double entendre, the window may be regarded as another kind of glass–a mirror–which reflects back to the viewer that world which exists before her. This ambiguous conflation of inner and outer worlds, to constitute the enigmatic totality of a single person, is classic Magritte.
The method that Magritte practiced in this combination of images–typically for him comprising two visually disjunctive elements–is that idiosyncratic approach to creating pictorial parables he employed for most of his career, which he outlined in his 1938 lecture La ligne de vie. "The basic device was the placing of objects out of context," Magritte explained. "The objects chosen had to be of the most everyday kind so as to give the maximum effect of displacement... Such in general were the means devised to force objects of the ordinary to become sensational, and so establish a profound link between consciousness and the external world... This is how we see the world, we see it outside ourselves and yet the only representation we have of it is inside us" (trans. D. Sylvester, in op. cit., 1997, vol. 5, pp. 20 and 21).