Insight in René Magritte's reused paintings

The research project, Magritte on practice, consists of the systematic study of the world's largest collection of works painted by the Belgian surrealist (1898-1967), housed at the Magritte Museum in Brussels, through a large panel of non-invasive scientific imaging and analytical techniques (Raman, FTIR, MA-XRF, hyperspectral, IRR, XRR and digital microscopy) [1]. The technical and material study conducted on a corpus of works covering the entire career of the artist (60 oil paintings realised between 1921 and 1967), appeared highly informative about the making process of Magritte’s pictures but also lead to the discovery of six overpainted compositions, among which the last missing part of La pose enchantée, a 1927 large-scale painting transformed into four separate new pictures that are currently dispersed across the world [2]. The present study proposes an overview of the freshly discovered paintings and explores how the painter reused specific elements from the sacrificed compositions for creating the new ones.
References
[1] C. Defeyt and F. Vandepitte, (in preparation). René Magritte: The artist’s materials. (Los Angeles,
CA: Getty Publications)
[2] C. Defeyt, E. Herens, F. Leen, F. Vandepitte and D. Strivay, Heritage Sci., 6 (2018)