Letter to Paul Éluard dated 27 November 1951 regarding ‘Le problème

• An exceptional artist’s letter to the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard • Featuring hand-drawn sketches relating to the creation of Magritte’s famous painting ‘Le coup au cœur’ (1952) • A fascinating insight into Magritte’s creative process, documented in detail in the Catalogue Raisonné This letter to the poet Paul Éluard, featuring hand-drawn sketches, offers an exceptionally direct insight into René Magritte’s creative process. On 27 November 1951, the artist wrote to his friend about a question that had been occupying his mind for some two months: what he inscribed as the ‘problem of the rose’. Magritte describes how he was searching for a visual solution and illustrates his thoughts with several small drawings. The starting point is a rose, from whose stem a diagonal line extends. In his sketches, this line takes on various forms until he finally recognises it as a dagger. In this way, Magritte finds that surprising combination of beauty and menace which, shortly afterwards, takes shape in his painting ‘Le coup au cœur’ (1952, Sylvester 777). The letter itself makes it clear that the juxtaposition of the rose and the dagger is not an entirely new idea for Magritte. The artist refers to his 1943 painting ‘Le retour de flamme’, in which he draws on a well-known depiction of the fictional criminal Fantômas. Magritte replaces the bloody dagger that Fantômas holds in his hand in the original book illustration with a rose. Eight years later, he returns to this motif and develops it in the opposite direction: Now the rose itself is associated with a dagger. It is particularly striking that the letter not only describes this train of thought but also makes it immediately visible in the accompanying drawings. By stating that the rose is ‘fragrant air’ yet at the same time ‘cruel’, Magritte sums up the contradiction underlying his visual concept. The letter also shows that the concept for the painting had already taken shape by November 1951, whilst its final title had not yet been decided. Magritte expressly asks Éluard for a beautiful title for the planned painting. It was not until the spring of 1952 that, at the suggestion of Paul Nougé, it was given the title ‘Le coup au cœur’. The letter is thus an important written and pictorial record of the creation of one of Magritte’s characteristic motifs. Its art-historical significance is underlined by the Catalogue Raisonné, which discusses the letter in detail and reproduces two of the drawings it contains. | 1898 Lessines/Hainaut - Brüssel 1967 | Moderne Kunst | Arbeiten auf Papier | Nummer: 26x0923 | Provenance: Paul Éluard (1895–1952); Seit Jahrzehnten Privatbesitz, Süddeutschland.

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