“On my way to spend a day with Magritte in Brussels, for once I walked to the station. I was going along the boulevard Avroz (in Liège) when I came to a wide opening (it no longer exists) with a view of the Meuse. I looked into the distance. Suddenly, on the other side of the river, I saw a series of windows appear high up in the sky. The grey walls of the large buildings in the place d’Italie had melted into the sky. On arriving at Magritte’s house, I told him what had happened. This gave him an idea for several gouaches, three of which were called ‘The waking state’…”
The present work, L’État de veille, is one of several gouaches Magritte painted in the first half of 1958. Inspired by the figment of his friend Jacques Wergifosse’s imagination, it takes as its subject matter two of Magritte’s most iconic motifs within his oeuvre: that of a cloud-filled sky and of framed windows. In the background, the rather nondescript Belgian streetscape is not unlike that of Magritte’s own rue de Esseghem, the street where he lived and worked for nearly twenty-four years. Yet in the foreground, architectured in velvety gouache is a patch of sky bent into the shape of a rowhouse. The building hovers over the pavement, a vision grounded only by a milky white doorstep - a proverbial, humorously short stairway to heaven. Bathed in midday light, the luminescent composition glows in cool tones.
Magritte’s masterful use of his media is a slide of transubstantiation: where gouache is gouache and yet also cloud, brick, asphalt, and stucco. His command is so transformative that L’État de veille is a place where reality strikes the dreamstate and vice versa. Siegfried Gohr points out, “the colored works on paper reveal the brilliant talent of Magritte the painter. Even though [Magritte] repeatedly denied his 'artistry', belittling the traditional habitus of the virtuoso artist genius and emphasizing instead the artist's intellectual work, his gouaches, in particular, reveal how masterfully he was able to apply his extraordinary gift of visualizing his pictorial ideas” (quote in Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, pp. 77-78). Such astute fragmentation, converging, and reimagining of reality bolsters Magritte as a master of Surrealism, the art and philosophical movement for which he was baptized in 1926 upon the creation of his first surreal painting Le Jockey perdu (see Fig. 1).
Nearly thirty years before L’état de veille, Magritte wrote “Les mots et les images” for the avant-garde publication La Révolution surréaliste (see Figs. 2 and 3). It is a succinct meditation on the relationship between words, images, and reality articulated in 18 panels of captioned illustrations. “Les mots et les images” is a prescient manifesto of the philosophies Magritte would remain committed to throughout his career. Two panels from the manifesto strike as particularly significant in relation to L’État de veille. The first is a small drawing of a brick wall with a caption that reads (in translation): “An object that makes you think there are other objects behind it.” The present work begs the question, what is concealed behind the cloud-washed building? Though the sky pattern suggests an infinite expanse, that notion is punctured by closed-curtained windows and an opaque door. A second panel from “Les mots et les images" reads (in translation): “However, the visible contours of objects, in reality, touch each other as if they formed a mosaic.” Here, the composition of L’État de veille is a mosaic convergence of dreamstate and reality – a magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true. Brick melts into sky, sky into brick. L’État de veille is Magritte at his best—witty, incisive, original, and technically superb. Comparable works are held by esteemed institutions such as The Art Institute of Chicago and The Menil Collection.