20 August 2018

René Magritte. The Eternally Obvious: Knees (‘L'évidence éternelle: genoux’), 1954 (private collection).


Oil on canvas: 20.3 x 21 cm(!). Originally conceived as part of a five-piece work that was never completed. Similar finished versions at: The Menil Collection, Houston (1930) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Pierre and Maria Gaetana Matisse Collection, 1948). Only three of the five projected canvases (the head, breasts and knees) have been traced. Auctioned at Christie’s New York, November 2017. 

More > René Magritte at Wikipedia.

5 August 2018

Neil Stokoe. Diagonal Staircase, ca. 1985 (artist’s estate, UK).


Oil on canvas: 175.5 x 205.7 cm. Neil Stokoe (2015): “There are aspects of Cubism that I can identify with. However, when it goes from analytical into hermetic Cubism I emotionally lose touch with it, though I understand its importance in the history of modern representation. But I didn’t feel it was the kind of space that could represent the emotional content I was interested in, and so my objection to that approach was very conscious”.