Painted in 1952. Jane Graverol was a Belgian Surrealist whose work is currently resurfacing on the market and being reexamined by art historians and scholars. Daughter of the Symbolist illustrator Alexandre Graverol, she was born and raised in Belgium. She studied at the Fine Art Academy of Etterbeek before attending the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where she developed techniques relating to landscape and still-life painting. Beginning in the 1940s, Graverol’s work took on a Surrealist style, influenced by the artists René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. She co-founded two significant Surrealist publications, the Temps Mêlés, and in 1954 along with Marcel Mariën and Paul Nougé, the avant-garde review Les Lèvres Nues. In the 1960s, Graverol met André Breton, and later Marcel Duchamp in New York. Even though she eventually moved to France, she stayed in close contact with the Belgian Surrealist artists and exhibited in Belgium for many years.

In this mysterious painting, Graverol depicts an abandoned red coat placed within an empty architectural space. The surreal and ambiguous setting recalls de Chirico’s eerie, classically inspired compositions while its elusive meaning speaks to the artist’s belief that her canvases were “waking, conscious dreams” that elicit sustained observation and encourage multifarious meanings.