The Man who Fell to Earth

René Magritte’s L’ami intime (The Intimate Friend), 1958, goes up for auction at Christie’s in London, UK, with an estimated price of £30m-£50m ($37m-$63m). Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP.

A Platonic Love

René Magritte, Les Amants (IV), 1928. Photo: Private collection via DailyArt Magazine.

Hat On, Hat Off

Amedeo Modigliani’s 1908 Nude with a Hat is hung upside down because another painting by him, Maud Abrantes, on the reverse side of the same canvas is oriented correctly, while on display at Haifa University’s Hecht Museum. Photo: Ariel Schalit/AP.

The Volatile Times

Henri Matisse, Playing Chess, 1928. Courtesy of WikiArt.

《愛撤防》 (Love Disarm’d)

René Magritte, L’Amour Désarmé (Love Disarmed), 1935. Private collection. Courtesy of The New Criterion, November 2013 issue.

Gender Equality

香港 (Hong Kong), China: A Sotheby’s employee presents Pablo Picasso’s 1937 oil painting “Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée (Marie-Thérèse Walter)” during a media preview. Photo: Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images.

And Venus is Blue

Amedeo Modigliani, Woman Sitting in Blue Dress, 1917-1919
Courtesy: WikiArt/Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

La corde sensible

René Magritte, La corde sensible, 1960
Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

Bureau of Surrealist Research

René Magritte, Les Amants, Le Perreux-sur-Marne, 1928. In this unsettling image — the first in a series of four variations of Les Amants that Magritte painted in 1928 — the artist invokes the cinematic cliché of a close-up kiss but subverts our voyeuristic pleasure by shrouding the faces in cloth. The device of a draped cloth or veil to conceal a figure’s identity corresponds to a larger Surrealist interest in masks, disguises, and what lies beyond or beneath visible surfaces. The melodramatic scene may also relate to the graphic illustrations that accompanied pulp fiction and thriller stories, which Magritte’s friend Paul Nougé, in a letter from 1927, encouraged the artist to emulate. Image and caption courtesy of MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York, United States.

比賽造假 (Truqué)

René Magritte (Les Amants, 1928)

Les nuages, c’est quoi?

René Magritte, Le Genre Nocturne, 1928. Photo: Damian Griffiths/© ADAGP/DACS.