Painted in 1959. Jane Graverol was a Belgian Surrealist whose work is currently resurfacing on the market and being reexamined by art historians and scholars. The 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 the present work, Graverol depicts a surreal landscape dominated by a large barren tree behind a rocky foreground. An ovoid form crossed out with an inky red “x” floats above the tree. The precise, yet detached technique of Untitled recalls Magritte’s style, as does its enigmatic meaning. Magritte admired Graverol’s work, writing in 1953 that her paintings exist “somewhere in this world of feeling where connections between things are contained within precise limits. But it turns out that the power of the unexpected makes it harder to grasp their meaning.”