Elective Affinities (Magritte)

Elective Affinities

Artist	René Magritte
Year	1933
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	41 cm × 33 cm (16 in × 13 in)
Location	Private collection

Elective Affinities (French: Les affinités électives) is a 1933 painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The title is taken from the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Elective Affinities.^[1]

Magritte had the following to say about this work:

One night, I woke up in a room in which a cage with a bird sleeping in it had been placed. A magnificent error caused me to see an egg in the cage, instead of the vanished bird. I then grasped a new and astonishing poetic secret, for the shock which I experienced had been provoked precisely by the affinity of two objects—the cage and the egg—to each other, whereas previously this shock had been caused by my bringing together two objects that were unrelated.^[2]

References

1. ↑ Gablik, Suzi, Magritte. New York: Thames & Hudson (2000), p. 101.
2. ↑ Quoted in Paquet, Marcel, Magritte. Cologne, Germany: Taschen (2006), p. 26.