Clara Pelvis Presley @tygrilla - Twitter Profile

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The rose is scented air. But it's ruthless. In the fall of 1951, Magritte began working on the rose. On October 24, he wrote to his gallerist, Alexander Iolas, that his research was about the rose and that he needed to find something valuable to say about it. In a November 27 letter to Paul Éluard, he called this quest --the problem of the rose.-- He mentioned he'd been looking for a solution for about two months. In a small sketch in his letter, a sharp, slanted line emerged from the rose's stem. What was he actually looking for? Now let's look at the painting: there's a dagger. The solution lies here. The thorn's sharpness turns into the sharpness of a real weapon. The dagger doesn't look like a foreign object plunged into the stem from the outside. The rose is scented air. But it's also ruthless. This sentence captures the thought in Magritte's letter to the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard. He wrote that once his research was complete, the fact that the rose is both scented air and ruthless could now be 'easily' explained. Keep this sentence in mind.We'll come back to it. Because there's something else. Magritte didn't come up with this painting's title on his own. **Le coup au cœur**, Blow to the Heart: it was Paul Nougé who suggested the title. In his letter, Magritte had asked Éluard to come up with a beautiful title for the painting; ultimately, though, he chose Nougé's suggestion. Nougé was a poet, but he didn't make a living from poetry..He'd studied biochemistry and worked in a medical lab for many years. He was one of the founding and theoretical figures of Belgian surrealism; sometimes, he was called the 'Breton of Belgium.' Alongside Magritte and other writers and artists in his circle, he was at the core of the Brussels surrealist group. Magritte often asked his close friends for title suggestions for his new paintings. Nougé was a key participant in this collaborative process. Nougé described the function of titles like this: '...The title isn't a program to be fulfilled. It comes after the painting. It's like its confirmation...' Another of Nougé's lines about the rose was this: '...Under the influence of a heartbreaking memory, we suddenly perceive that faint scent of roses...' It was Magritte who made the tension in the rose's nature visible; he was the one who brought it to the canvas. But it was another mind that gave this tension its name: Paul Nougé.