Description
Magritte began painting glass bottles like Untitled (Woman-Bottle) during the German occupation of Belgium in World War II, a moment when traditional fine art materials were suddenly in short supply. Although he had previously experimented with found objects and sculpture, Magritte did not conceive of painting “in the round” until the war years, when discarded bottles—many of his favored Bordeaux, but also port and sherry—proved useful for his playful experiments at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Over his lifetime, Magritte created more than 25 works in this format, many of which he presented to his friends as gifts.
Provenance
The artist; E.L.T. Mesens, Brussels (1903–1971), c. 1946 (this and the following according to Sylvester 1993, cat. 696); sold through the London Gallery to Eileen Agar (1889–1991), London, by the late 1940s; Hanover Gallery, London, late 1950s [Agar 1967]; Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago; sold to Joseph (1904–1996) and Jory Shapiro (1911–1993), Chicago, by 1961 [according to verso label and letter from William C. Seitz to Joseph R. Shapiro, Feb. 10, 1961; copies in curatorial file]; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1996.
Accession Number
145246
Medium
Oil on glass bottle
Dimensions
37.7 × 7.6 cm (14 3/4 × 3 in.)
Classification
sculpture
Credit Line
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph R. Shapiro
Background & Context
Background Story
"Untitled (Woman-Bottle)" is one of Magritte's most unsettling and provocative objects, executed around 1943 in oil on a glass bottle during the period when he was living in occupied Belgium and producing a series of transformed objects that anticipated the "readymades" of later conceptual art while maintaining the Surrealist commitment to psychological revelation. The composition shows a woman's head or torso emerging from or fused with the form of a bottle, the transformation achieved through painted illusion rather than physical alteration, the glass vessel remaining intact while the image painted on its surface creates the hallucination of metamorphosis. The technique is extraordinarily deceptive: Magritte's oil painting on glass achieves a smooth, enamel-like surface that makes the image appear to float in space, the bottle becoming a transparent container for the impossible. The 1943 date places this work in the darkest period of the war, when Magritte was producing his "vache" period of deliberately crude and provocative works in response to the occupation, though this piece is more refined and disturbing than the burlesque paintings of that moment. Art historians have connected this object to the broader Surrealist tradition of the "objet surréaliste," from Dalí's lobster telephone to Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup, noting that Magritte's treatment is more directly focused on the female body as object, more explicitly fetishistic than these contemporaries. The work also demonstrates Magritte's understanding of consumer culture: the bottle is a container, a vessel for liquid consumption, and the woman's body painted on its surface suggests the commodification of female identity that advertising would exploit in the postwar years.
Cultural Impact
This c. 1943 oil-on-glass object anticipated conceptual readymades through enamel-like female-body metamorphosis, using wartime Belgium darkness to make commodification hallucination disturbingly transparent.
Why It Matters
It matters because Magritte painted a woman on a bottle and made the glass feel like a prison—proving that even a container could become a question if the body was painted on it.
