According to Sylvester, Magritte painted the Venus de Milo four consecutive times (1931, 1934, and 1936) in an attempt to give her a new “unexpected life”.
The sculpture of 1931 was ordered by Louis Scutenaire and Irene Hamoir after having seen a similar one in Magritte’s workshop that was about to be handed to a collector, probably Claude Spaak. That of 1934, slightly bigger, figured in the London Gallery exhibition of 1937 as well as in 1938 (same place) for a personal exhibition. It would have belonged to Magritte himself, Mesens and Roland Penrose. It was still located in London in 1940 when destroyed due to bombings. Finally, that of 1936 was destined to be exhibited at Charles Ratton’s in the same year. "Magritte spoke of it in a letter dated 19 March 1936 to André Breton, who was, of course, closely involved in the organization of the show:
"This object is reminiscent of the masks on which I used to paint the sky, or a forest. Here, the head is white, the body is flesh-coloured, the drapery is blue, the base and the arms and feet are black. In my opinion this gives the Venus new and unexpected life."
Magritte, earlier in the letter, asked Breron to find a title for the Venus [...] Breton responded in a letter dated 8 April 1936:
"I resign myself to proposing a purely poetic title: the “Copper Handcuffs” which I believe has the advantage of incorporating a new color in the object yet without introducing the arbitrary as copper is the metal corresponding to the Venus."
The proposed title was adopted both for this work and for previous versions." (in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné: Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes 1931 -1948, New York, 1993, vol. ii, pp. 423, 426, 427, 447, no. 673, 677, 678).
The exhibition "Le Surréalisme et l'objet" held by the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art Moderne in Paris from October 2013 to March 2014, hosts a 47 cm-high bronze sculpture of this edition, which also illustrates the "Dictionnaire de l'objet surréaliste", published under the direction of Didier Ottinger, curator of the exhibition.
