No-one knows why the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte decided to cut up and paint over his work La pose enchantée (the enchanted pose, 1927), but the mystery of its scattered whereabouts is one step closer to being solved. The Norwich Castle Museum in the county of Norfolk, in eastern England, announced that a piece of the painting, which was divided in four, has been found under a work in their collection by Magritte, La condition humaine (The human condition, 1935). The conservator Alice Tavares da Silva had suspected La condition humaine might be hiding a piece of the puzzle because of exposed paint on the back and sides of the canvas. She was proved right by an X-ray during conservation work on the piece, which is currently on loan to the Centre Pompidou in Paris for their upcoming survey on the artist, René Magritte: the Treachery of Images (21 September-23 January 2017). In 2013, two other pieces of the painting were located underneath Magritte’s works Le Portrait (The Portrait, 1935) in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and subsequently Le modèle rouge (The Red Model, 1935) at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The hunt is still on for the fourth piece.
