The final piece of the work was found beneath the surface of another painting, after the artist had cut up and recycled the original canvas.
Researchers have found the final piece of a painting by René Magritte that the artist scrapped, over 80 years ago, by cutting up its canvas into four surfaces he later reused. The last section of “La Pose enchantée (The Enchanted Pose)” (1927), which shows two identical nude women leaning against broken columns, has been hidden beneath the layers of paint of “God is Not a Saint,” an artwork Magritte made between 1935 and 1936 that depicts a bird on a brown shoe. The once-lost fragment came to light during the painting’s examination by a team comprised of individuals from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB) and the European Centre of Archaeometry of the University of Liège, as part of a comprehensive study of the collection at the Magritte Museum. Researchers announced the news yesterday at a press conference at the museum.
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