Late in 1929, René Magritte and his wife, Georgette, attended an unexpectedly fraught dinner party at the home of André Breton, the leader and co-founder of Surrealism. The couple had moved to Paris from their native Belgium two years earlier, with Magritte hoping to establish himself as a Surrealist par excellence.

Also there, was the film-maker Luis Buñuel, who recorded in his autobiography that Breton spent the night growing more and more irate: “He suddenly pointed at a small cross that Georgette was wearing around her neck and announced that this was an outrageous provocation.” The Surrealists were almost all anti-clerical, and apparently Breton asked Georgette to take the crucifix off. “Magritte took up the cudgels on his wife’s behalf, and the dispute went energetically on,” Buñuel continued – before the Magrittes finally upped and left. Soon afterwards, the couple quit Paris to return to Brussels for good.

Magritte wouldn’t speak to Breton again until 1937 – a year that proved to be crucial in his career. The 1930s were a tricky decade for him professionally. He had been making quite a name for himself in the French capital: he exhibited a number of times with his fellow Surrealists and was described by Breton (before their falling-out) as an artist “of the most enormous importance”.

Newly cut off from Paris, though, Magritte found that demand for his paintings dried up. He began to channel his creative energy into advertising instead, even setting up his own agency. He briefly toyed with the idea of giving up art altogether.

René Magritte (1898-1967). Torse nu dans les nuages, oil on canvas signed ‘Magritte’ (lower left) 28½ x 24in (71.4 x 61cm). Painted c.1937. Estimate: $6,000,000 - 9,000,000 (£4,300,000 - 6,500,000. C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

René Magritte and his wife Georgette Berger, in 1937, the year in which the artist painted Torse nu dans les nuages. Copyright: PVDE / Bridgeman Images

Le modèle rouge (The Red Model) by René Magritte (1935). Neither of a model nor especially red, the picture is an example of Magritte’s capricious titles. Photo by Phillippe Migeat CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY; C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Magritte’s La vengence (c.1938-1939) reiterates the floating cloud motif. Copyright: C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Success would come again, however, in an ostensibly unlikely place – the United Kingdom – where the International Surrealist Exhibition took place in the summer of 1936 in London’s New Burlington Galleries. This was the country’s first significant showing of Surrealism and is best remembered for an infamous lecture given by Salvador Dalí from inside a deep-sea diver’s suit. (He nearly suffocated in the process.)

The exhibition featured 14 works by Magritte, with the rich British collector Edward James among the admirers. James would invite the artist to his London home, on Wimpole Street, the following year to paint three pictures for the ballroom. This was Magritte’s first major international commission and marked a big upswing in his artistic fortunes. He was almost 40 – and would, from now on, earn enough money from painting to devote himself to it full time.

It was also in 1937 that he painted Torse nu dans les nuages, which will be offered from the distinguished private collection of Amalia de Schulthess (1918-2021) in New York’s Impressionist and Modern Art Sale in November. When it came to titles, Magritte often turned to poet-friends, such as Paul Nougé, to think one up after a picture was finished. He asked for “a title compatible with the… emotion [they] experienced when looking at the painting”.

In many cases, this meant little obvious connection between image and name. Take The Red Model, one of the works Magritte painted for James, of a pair of boots metamorphosing into a pair of feet. There’s no model to speak of and it is not ostensibly even red.

Torse nu dans les nuages is, by contrast, a straightforward title for a very complex picture. It depicts the sculpture of a nude female torso, around and above which clouds can be seen floating. The torso has a seascape (sky, horizon and sea) painted on it in blue – and the clouds might well be considered extensions of that scene. The sense of the surreal is heightened by a backdrop of black walls, and an ochre floor on which the sculpture rests.

This is a pictorial puzzle in which interior and exterior impossibly co-exist. Other striking juxtapositions and contradictions are the passing clouds (which in a moment will be gone) and the classically sculpted torso (which might have been around for millennia). Then there is the way in which the moonlight falls on the surface of the water within the shape of the torso itself, but the figure of the moon itself is absent. The way he plays with the elements of the time and space of the scene is quintessential Magritte.

One is struck, too, by the very concept of looking at a painting of a painting on a sculpture. Magritte, as always, is playing with our visual expectations, asking viewers to look carefully at what’s in front of us. “Everything we see hides another thing,” he once said, using words that ring truer than ever today, in our era of rampant misinformation and fake news.

And another thing: is the torso a real marble sculpture or a plaster-cast reproduction of one? What even is real? In Paris in the late 1920s, Magritte – like Dalí – had been a driving force behind what may be called Surrealism’s second wave. Artists in the movement initially, such as André Masson and Joan Miró, tended towards an automatist technique, relying on elements of chance, the subconscious and abstraction. Magritte, on the other hand, as he did throughout his career, produced well-thought-out imagery, with naturalistic depictions of ordinary things. The surreal element came from the far-from-ordinary way he combined them.

His most famous paintings include Time Transfixed (which is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago), featuring a steam train emerging from a dining-room fireplace; and Golconda (Menil Collection in Houston), of myriad bowler-hatted men falling like rain from the sky.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Magritte’s spell in Paris was short-lived. The Surrealists there were an outré bunch – Dalí, for example, drove a Rolls-Royce whose back seat was packed full of cauliflowers. Magritte, by contrast, was a conventional individual. He led a life of bourgeois anonymity: married to Georgette for 45 years till his death did them part, he counted walking their pet Pomeranian dogs among his great pleasures.

Le beau navire by René Magritte (1942). Copyright: C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Le miroir universel by René Magritte (c.1938-1939). Copyright: C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Quand l’heure sonnera by René Magritte (c.1964-1965). Copyright: C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

When it came to painting, Magritte disliked studios, preferring to work in a suit and tie within the comfort of his own home. (He prided himself on not letting a single drop of paint fall on the carpet.) The artist always rejected autobiographical interpretations of his work. Countless critics, though, have seen his pictures of women in light of his mother’s suicide when he was 13. Mme Magritte drowned herself in the River Sambre. When her body was found, the night-dress she’d been wearing was reportedly rucked up in such a way that it covered her head.

Is it too much of a stretch to see the headless torso of Torse nu dans les nuages, up to its waist in water, as inspired by that episode? Probably. Having said that, there is surely more to Torse nu dans les nuages than just visual games. A female figure with breasts and genitalia, but no eyes, mouth, arms or feet, is quite a statement.

It is also worth mentioning Magritte’s long-standing rivalry with Dalí. This dated back to their time together in Paris in the late 1920s. At first, Magritte was the more fêted. However, in the following decade, as his star fell, the Spaniard’s rose and rose. To be fair, Dalí always spoke warmly of Magritte, describing him in 1968, the year after his death, as both “an exemplary painter” and “perhaps the most important of Surrealist painters”. The Belgian, however, never returned the compliments. He said that Dalí produced “work which only the unintelligent could find interesting” and felt that Dalí was a little too fond of appropriating his (Magritte’s) favourite motifs.

One of those was an azure sky filled with dreamy clouds – which Dalí adopted for a pair of shaped canvases in 1936-1937 called Couple aux têtes pleines de nuages. (One of these was painted for Edward James; the other sold at Bonhams in London last year for £8.1 million.) The interaction between clouds and sky in Torse nu dans les nuages might well be seen, in the spirit of one-upmanship, as Magritte’s response to Dalí.

The key point to make, though, is that Magritte’s visual puzzles aren’t really for solving. He took our world to pieces and reassembled it as a tantalisingly familiar otherworld. Many have tried to analyse it, but Magritte’s message to them was simple: “One cannot speak about mystery. One must be seized by it.”

Alastair Smart is an art critic for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Mail on Sunday, among other publications. He is currently writing a book on Raphael