Picture this: you are sitting in a cold studio in Brussels in 1935. The Great Depression has swept across Europe, art sales have dried up, and you literally cannot afford to buy a fresh sheet of canvas.
That was the exact predicament facing 37-year-old Belgian painter René Magritte. Propped in the corner of his room sat a massive 1927 oil canvas titled The Enchanted Pose (La pose enchantée). Measuring over four feet tall, it depicted two identical, life-sized nude women leaning against a carved stone column. It was a major work, but it was completely unsold and taking up valuable studio space.
Desperate for raw materials to create new canvas art prints, Magritte did something unthinkable. He laid the large painting flat, grabbed a sharp blade, and sliced the masterpiece cleanly into four equal rectangular quarters.
He stretched each of the four canvas quarters onto smaller wooden frames and painted entirely new surrealist compositions directly over them. Then he sold them off individually. For the next eighty years, surrealism art prints catalogers and art historians listed The Enchanted Pose as lost, assuming it was destroyed during World War II or discarded.
How Four Museums Accidentally Solved an 80-Year Jigsaw Puzzle
The 80-year-old cold case finally cracked open in 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Senior conservator Michael Duffy was running routine X-ray radiography on Magritte's 1935 painting The Portrait, which depicts a single eye staring from a slice of ham on a dinner plate.
When the X-ray developed, Duffy spotted something strange beneath the ham. Beneath the upper paint layers lay the upside-down torso, waist, and arm of a nude female figure. After matching the dimensions against exhibition records, Duffy realized he was looking at the top-left quarter of The Enchanted Pose.
The discovery set off an international search among lovers of modern and abstract wall art. Just months later, conservators at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm X-rayed Magritte's famous 1935 work The Red Model, which depicts leather boots shaped like human feet. Hidden beneath the boots was the bottom-left quarter showing a pair of legs standing on stone tiles.
In September 2016, conservator Alice Tavares da Silva found corner number three (the bottom-right piece) hiding beneath The Human Condition at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery in England.
The fourth and final piece fell into place in 2017. Researchers at the University of Liège scanned God is Not a Saint (1935–1936) at the Magritte Museum in Brussels, revealing the top-right quarter containing the face of the second female twin.
Because Magritte physically cut the canvas apart nearly a century ago, the original painting will never hang in a physical gallery again. But by uniting four separate museum discoveries in New York, Stockholm, Norwich, and Brussels, technology finally restored Magritte's lost masterpiece to the world.
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