![René Magritte - The Giant (La Géante0 [1936]](http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8868/17319599195_a350a3b0ed_o.jpg)
La Géante is one of Magritte’s most vibrant variations on the theme of a leaf tree. The artist’s use of the leaf tree image first appeared in the 1935 oil titled La géante, and would reoccur in his painting over the next several decades. In a letter to André Breton of July 1934, in which he wrote about paintings he was developing as solutions to various problems, Magritte commented about the problem of the tree: ‘I am trying at the moment to discover what it is in a tree that belongs to it specifically but which would run counter to our concept of a tree.’ He soon found the answer to this question in the image of the tree-leaf: ‘the tree, as the subject of a problem, became a large leaf the stem of which was a trunk directly planted in the ground.’
[Sotheby’s, New York - Gouache on paper, 30.5 x 38.5 cm]