抄録
In 1938 Rene Magritte delivered an autobiographic lecture entitled "The Lifeline." This lecture has been discussed exclusively in terms of his new principle of creation which was to seek an image based on the affinity of two objetcs by using the "question-answer" method. This paper elucidates Magritte's use of the motif of light and shade by comparing several versions of the text of the lecture with related paintings. The comparison reveals that, when Magritte prepared the lecture, he considered light and shade as his crucial motif and attempted to gain more insight of them through an analysis of visibility and life. In the lecture Magritte defined the image he had seen in a cemetery in his childhood as "the image found in the light going through the shade" which was related with his intuition of the affinities of objects. Such comprehension of images resulted from the principal motive of his creation that is to grasp the whole "life". This vision produced The Beyond (1938) and works after the 1940's.
