The Guest Work

The Menaced Assassin, 1927,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kay Sage Tanguy Fund, 1966
© Charly Herscovici, with his kind authorization c/oSABAM-ADAGP, 2010

This large-scale painting, which Magritte completed in 1927, forms a diptych with The Secret Player (Le Joueur secret). Both were shown at an exhibition held in Brussels at the Galerie Le Centaure.

Magritte took special care with this large work, with its decidedly narrative overtones. He appears to have been inspired by one of five poems that Paul Nougé had published under the title Images Peintes.
In the room, amidst slightly rumpled bed linen, is an almost naked woman, a corpse of a singular depravity. Were it not for the dead body, nothing would disturb the peaceful interior. Everything is of a restful orderliness: the clean floor, the table with only a few objects, a tall gueridon in dark wood. And the scarf that lies limply across the neck, across the shoulder, across the astonishing injury, it is not without a certain good will that one might imagine a severed head.
On the gueridon – as is fitting – a thoughtful cat looks at the body.
His back to the dead woman, a young man of great beauty and very subdued elegance, bends a bit, bends slightly towards this phonograph horn, and listens.
On his lips, a smile perhaps.
At his feet, a suitcase. On a chair, his hat and coat.
At the level of the windowsill, at the back of the room, four heads watch the assassin.
In the corridor, on either side of a large open door, two men move forward who have yet to discover the scene.
They are unattractive.
Stooped, they keep close to the wall.
One has a large net, the other wields a kind of club.
All of this will be called: The Menaced Assassin.
Magritte used the poetic argument and its symbols – the woman in a striking association of death and depravity, the murderer as a music-loving dandy, and the anonymous and impersonal shadows that threaten him.

With this poem, Nougé provided his friend with a detailed script that closely corresponded to a psychic universe Magritte had already developed: a decided taste for the mysteries of crime, a fascination with the unconscious mechanisms of sexuality that link the bloody, naked corpse to the landscape of the mind, and an enthusiasm for the strange. These three aspects connect the subject to the fictional crime lord Fantômas, a theme to which Magritte – with canvases such as The Man from the Sea and The Thief – turned early in 1927.

For the staging of the scene, Magritte also drew on a scene from a Fantômas movie, filmed by Louis Feuillade in 1913. In it, gangsters are laying an ambush. Here, however, the painter has reversed the order of things. Now it is two anonymous representatives of the law, with their austere suits and bowler hats, who lie in wait for the criminal, depicted as a hero in danger. Instead of the cat mentioned by Nougé, it is the young man who has adopted a thoughtful stance.

This reference to the fantasy world of cinema is further underscored by the three identical figures that, at a distance, survey the scene from the balcony. Reminiscent of Max Ernst’s The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses, Magritte’s faces are more voyeurs than witnesses. They give themselves over to the action before them and, for the moment, do not perceive its dramatic outcome. In contrast to the viewer, they do not yet see the approaching threat. Similar to the audience that stares at the movie screen, the three figures behind the balustrade experience the powerful and popular emotions that lend the work its modernity, based on the cinema’s potential for «surprise». Magritte has introduced the concept of suspense into painting.

Magritte was aware of the novelty of his composition. In February 1931, at the end of his stay in Paris, he placed the painting in the front window of the Salle Giso where, at the urging of his friend E.L.T. Mesens, he was presenting a selection of his most recent work. Behind a carpet of electric lights, The Menaced Assassin loomed up like an homage to modern popular culture.

The Menaced Assassin, with its cinematic references, is a companion piece to The Secret Player – forming Magritte’s only diptych. Both are inspired by the creative potential of dreams, and both depict sources of inspiration for the imagination in its poetic struggle to re-infuse reality with a sense of magic.