Apartis made this relief stele in response to a commission for a monument to the Boy Scouts of Smyrna, who had been tortured during the Asia Minor Disaster. But in the end the memorial was not approved by the commissioners because it depicted a naked male figure. In 1983 the relief, incorporated into the copy of the iron door of a cell, was used for the composition of a monument in honor of the patriots who were tortured during the German Occupation, in the holding cells of the Gestapo. The composition also bears the titles “The Prisoner”, “The Martyr”, “The Victim”, “On Execution” and “So the Land You Walk upon Will be Free”.
Apartis, wanting to make a work that would symbolize all the young men who sacrificed themselves for an ideal, combines elements from Maillol’s “Bicyclist”, from ancient funerary steles, as well as the inclination of the head which, in works by Michelangelo, Rodin and Bourdelle expresses inner anguish and death.
“The Healer” is one of the eight pictorial images that surrealist painter Rene Magritte “translated” into three-dimensional form.
Magritte had a precise idea of what he wanted to achieve and went about finding the ideal means to execute these sculptures. For “The Healer” he made a plaster cast from the feet of a live model, and did the same for the bird cage.
“The Healer” has a number of features characteristic to Magritte’s enterprise, including the element of the unexpected, the extraordinary within the ordinary, and the mysterious. This sculpture, variations of which can be found in at least four of his paintings, came from a photograph that Magritte took in 1937, titled “God on the Eight Day”.
Although he was a painter, by translating eight paintings into sculptures, Magritte provided a different perspective on the function of objects and forms. Detached from the confines of the picture plane, they are placed in the space as autonomous presences and, through the change in scale, become different entities.
