L’éloge de l’espace 

René Magritte painted this enigmatic nude, titled L’éloge de l’espace, sometime during his mature period. It synthesizes the key issues that concerned the Surrealists of his time, as well as the longer history of modern art, and can be read as a critique of both. By the time Magritte painted this, European painting had long been obsessed with the representation of the human body, which had become an academic exercise severed from reality. Here, Magritte shows us a kind of body-as-column, one that is at once solid and spectral, both there and not there, so as to question the authority of representation itself. Magritte’s repeated female figure in some ways recalls Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, but the earlier painting’s debt to scientific motion studies is replaced here by something far more dreamlike, and even uncanny. This is a painting that benefits from historical study. By researching the culture in which it was produced we can have a clearer idea of what Magritte was responding to, and challenging.