by Alex Day (Modern & Contemporary Art Trainee)
http://www.artuk.org/artworks/la-condition-humaine-1475
Unfolding
When I was a teenager, I had two primary fascinations. The first was art.
The second was the television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and the many offerings like it. I had therefore narrowed down my future career aspirations down to two highly feasible options: fantastic detective or world class artist.
One of the books I remember inspiring my love of art – and particularly modern art – was a coffee table book about René Magritte. The book was Magritte by Richard Calvocoressi, which I recently asked my mum to relocate for me. It hasn’t fared brilliantly in time, well-thumbed, its glossy cover now torn and peeling. Such is the sad destiny of all much-loved books. Whilst it’s safe to say my forensics career didn’t work out, I wouldn’t change my job for the world. I love my role as a Modern and Contemporary Art Trainee and getting to explore the collections is a dream come true. And I do get to wear nitrile gloves a lot of the time, which is a bonus.
Whilst researching the oil paintings in the Norwich Castle collection, I came across a familiar work that caused me to double-take. I was astounded to find that we have our very own Magritte painting within the Norfolk Museums Service. However, I soon found out that this initial surprise was just the beginning of a truly incredible story.
The Human Condition
La Condition Humaine was painted by René Magritte in 1935. Belgian born Magritte (1898 – 1967) is heralded as one of the greatest surrealist artists, and often painted familiar objects outside of their usual context. La Condition Humaine is part of a series of 4 paintings with the same title by Magritte. In the series, he portrayed a painting within a painting, often a canvas obscuring a part of the image. Within La Condition Humaine, the viewer can see a castle in the distance through the mouth of a cave – especially apt for our Norwich Castle collection. It is thought that the painted canvas within the image is showing the actual view from the cave, rather than an illusion – however we do not know for certain.
I initially wanted to write about the physical journeys this painting has been on over the last 30 or so years as an integral part of the NMS collection. Thanks to a detailed record on our digital collections catalogue, I can see a wealth of information. There are timestamped location updates of where the piece has been, what conservation work has been completed, where the work has been stored and which exhibitions it has been featured in. Each museum uses a different internal collections management system (CMS) to document and track their objects. At NMS, we use MODES. This stands for Museum Object Data Entry System, and just so happens to be nice and catchy too. Gone are the days of tracking a museum’s collection through individual paper object indexing cards (some allegedly even carrying residual cigarette burns from curators past). All collections were digitised onto MODES when it came into play around 1996. For more information about MODES and its functions, you can read this fantastic blog by my predecessor Kathryn Goulding Mountford. Using MODES allows you to view a wealth of information on a museum object. You can see when a piece entered the collection, where it has travelled to whilst out on loan, its history, date of production, and what conservation work has been completed on it.
In Transit
René Magritte’s piece entered the collection as a donation in 1995. Its first digital exhibition location was in Norwich Castle’s very own Timothy Gurney Gallery in 2011 as part of the Collection Highlights exhibition. Between 2016 and 2017, our lucky Magritte painting took a once in a lifetime trip to Centre de Pompidou, Paris to star in a touring exhibition titled Magritte: La Trahison des Images. Then, La Condition Humaine travelled to Frankfurt to feature in the exhibition of the same title – which translated means The Treason/Treachery of Images. The painting has recently returned from another touring exhibition with The Hayward Gallery, entitled Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imagery. This has taken the piece to Exeter, Cork, Nottingham and then back home to Norwich Castle.
I found the physical journey of this work interesting and enjoyed tracking the individual exhibitions and the fact that such a wide audience would have been able to view the piece. However it wasn’t until I opened a conservation report from La Condition Humaine’s time at the Hamilton Kerr Institute that things really stepped up a gear.
[image taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXJN6Vk6mww]
The Missing Pieces
In 1927, Magritte painted a piece entitled La Pose Enchantée. The piece depicted two identical nude figures, stood side by side, leaning on broken columns in an empty room. Rumour has it that although the work was highly praised, it never sold to anyone, and therefore never entered a private or museum collection. Unfortunately, the work was assumed missing or destroyed since the 1930s, and all hope of locating and conserving it had been lost. It is not unusual for works of art to go missing, especially when society has faced war and a great depression. Painters often recycle their canvases, tearing and re-stretching them; over-painting works they favour less in the hopes of creating something new and more exciting – or potentially appealing to buyers. La Pose Enchanteé was considered one of many works that had been lost to time.
In 2013, conservators and technicians of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) inspected the Magritte painting, The Portrait (1935). They noticed some irregularities in the piece, such as paint not wrapping fully around the edges and varnish sitting unusually in places. The painting also had an odd appearance under UV light. This caused both excitement and confusion, so it was decided that La Portrait would be x-rayed. There, the conservators were greeted with a wonderful surprise – there was a composition underneath the piece, and it happened to look just like a part of La Pose Enchantée. The top left-hand corner, to be precise. After analytics were completed on the paint used and the canvas was dated, it was confirmed. A piece of La Pose Enchantée had been found.
A fantastic art world mystery began to unfold – a real life, conservation jigsaw puzzle. MoMA sought after another accessible piece to test in a similar fashion, and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet shipped over Model Rouge (also painted in 1935). Conservators spotted the same signs they had seen in La Portrait; Magritte typically painted the edges of his paintings white, but the edges of Model Rouge were ochre. The painting was x-rayed and amazingly, when rotated, the appearance of a column and the lower half of a female nude became visible. When the two paintings were placed one above the other, it was clear that the canvas had been cut and re-used. It was official – the left half of La Pose Enchantée was located. But where on earth was the rest?
I think you may be able to guess the answer to that by now. Well, perhaps a quarter of it, anyway.
An (Accidental) Art World Treasure Hunt
In 2016, paintings conservator Alice Tavares de Silva began routine work on La Condition Humaine, before it was loaned to The Pompidou Centre in Paris. Whilst examining the painting, she noticed miniscule parts of the border were seemingly painted a colour unrelated to the main image. She spotted the now tell-tale ochre paint around the edges. With a calm excitement, the painting was transferred to The Hamilton Kerr Institute, where it underwent the same X-ray and UV testing as the other pieces. Tavares de Silva accessed the reports made by the conservators at MoMa, and this validated her suspicions. She found a drawing of La Pose Enchantée and was able to trace this over the X-ray taken of the underlying shapes scanned from La Condition Humaine.
The resulting image lined up perfectly with the lower right hand of the missing painting, now confirmed to have been cut into quarters, then repainted entirely.
This must have been an incredibly exciting discovery for the conservation and art teams. Not only do we have a piece in the collection by such a notable artist, but now the work has a further significance. It becomes central to a cascading mystery, a treasure hunt that had meandered for over 80 years. This discovery was aided by technology, expertise, information sharing and passion for knowledge.
In 2017, the final piece of the puzzle was complete when 1936 painting Dieu N’est Pas Un Saint was x-rayed in the same manner in Brussels. It was confirmed that this image, depicting a bird with outstretched wings standing on a woman’s shoe, was the final part of the global riddle. The entirety of La Pose Enchantée had been located, and experts had worked together globally to do it.
I know I don’t spend my days crouching under CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS tape whilst wearing mirrored sunglasses. However, I do get to work in an environment where paint chips and varnish are chemically analysed.
Where worldwide painted puzzle pieces can take you from Norfolk to New York, to Stockholm, Frankfurt, Paris and back again. Objects are put through MRI scans to be aged and identified, and detectorists work the land to unearth ancient artefacts.
A single object can travel the world, and I can log its movements right here from my laptop.
A lost painting can return almost a century later, having been disguised completely until it is rigorously scanned under UV light and X-rayed.
Now, that doesn’t seem so different from forensic investigation after all, does it?
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