![René Magritte - La Géante [1936]](http://c7.staticflickr.com/9/8518/29776262782_5e0b7ee42d_b.jpg)
Executed in 1936, La Géante features one of Magritte’s iconic ‘leaf-trees’, a reoccurring motif in many of his compositions, which first made an appearance in La Géante of 1935. This work is strikingly similar to that first iteration. In a letter to André Breton dated July 1934, Magritte wrote about paintings he was developing as ‘solutions’ to various ‘problems,’ and commented about the problem of the tree stating: “I am trying at the moment to discover what 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. I called it ‘The giantess’ in memory of a poem by Baudelaire.”
[Sotheby’s, New York - Gouache on paper, 43.8 x 35 cm]