The Talkative Jewels (les Bijoux indiscrets), for the Christmas issue of “Twentieth Century (XXe Siècle)

Description

It was only late in life that Magritte began making prints. The present work, which relates to a painting of 1963, is his first lithograph, printed the same year at the Moulot atelier in Paris. The lithograph appeared as a deluxe edition and, in the case of the impression seen here, as a plate bound within each Christmas 1963 issue of the French art magazine XXe Siècle (Twentieth Century).
This image of an arm from which a face, like a bizarre, living bracelet, emerges from the wrist, has a witty title, itself an allusion to the salacious novel of the same name, written in 1743 by French philosophe Diderot.
Label copy from exhibition "Dreamscapes: The Surrealist Impulse," August 22 - October 25, 1998