friendship with Magritte

Gillion Crowet is full of small odd details of their friendship: how he was obsessed with lobster, so it was pretty much all she ever served him, and how when she went for dinner, “there was a table with a huge tablecloth that fell all the way to the floor, and when you stretched your legs out, you found a huge trombone underneath.” She feels the influence of Magritte everywhere. “He taught me to become like him – to see things in a different way. It’s a virus you catch quickly.” She is still sad, though, that she refused to let him paint her when she was newly married to Roland Gillion. Admittedly, he wanted to portray her made out of precious stones, with a bag of blood attached to her head. The young Anne-Marie, who had wanted something nice to give her husband, declined. “And he was furious! So disappointed, and he never made the picture… I was so young, so stupid.” Instead Magritte painted her much more classically, with a flesh-pink rose beside her, but “he called it ‘Le Combat’ – because it had been a fight!”

 ... he took exception to one of her symbolist birdcages into which she’d put a straw bird. “He said: ‘What are you doing with that straw bird in a cage?’ And I said, ‘honestly, René, what would you have me put in there?’ He replied: ‘an egg!’” So he brought her an ostrich egg, and she put that in the cage instead.

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