René Magritte

Mr. and Mrs. Henry A. Markus, Chicago (acquired from the artist circa 1958 and thence by descent)

Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above on October 24, 1994

Brussels, Galerie Dietrich, Magritte, 1946, no. 1

New York, Hugo Gallery, Magritte, 1948, no. 1 (withdrawn from exhibition)

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Magritte, 1954, no. 71

Chicago, International Galleries, Modern Masters, 1961

Chicago, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, René Magritte, 1964, no. 7

Enrique Gómez-Correa, El Espectro de René Magritte, Santiago de Chile, 1948, illustrated p. 15

Louis Scutenaire, Magritte, Antwerp, 1948, illustrated pl. 13

Harry Torczyner, Magritte, Images and Ideas, New York, 1977, n. 411, illustrated p. 190

Harry Torczyner, L'ami Magritte: correspondance et souvenirs, Antwerp, 1992, discussed in letter no. 151

David Sylvester, Magritte, New York, 1992, discussed p. 260

David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, 1993, Antwerp, no. 610, illustrated p. 373

While Magritte was working on the present picture in his studio in the fall of 1946, he wrote to Marcel Mariën, describing his budding enthusiasm for this composition: ''I am working on a big picture for my forthcoming exhibition: 'Alice and Wonderland,' it is becoming my delight'' (letter to Marcel Mariën, dated October 8, 1946, quoted in David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, 1993, Antwerp, p. 373). Magritte also completed two closely related gouaches (Sylvester and Whitfield nos. 1205 and 1218) around the time he executed the present work, attesting to his fascination with this motif and his admiration for Lewis Carroll's time-honored classic of the same title. Magritte's interest in this 19th century children's story was not surprising. The absurd imagery and logic of Carroll's narrative predated the Surrealist vision by over half a century, and with this picture Magritte acknowledges his debt to the English author and photographer.  Even though it is not a depiction of any particular incident in the original story, Magritte's Alice in Wonderland is inspired by the fantastical world which Carroll described so vividly in his writing. ''The tree is imagined to be alive in a world of marvels,'' the artist wrote of this work. ''To this end, the landscape and the tree have been given human features'' (ibid.).

At the time he painted this canvas, the artist had adopted an "impressionistic" style and utilized a feathery brushwork and soft palette that were reminiscent of the work of Renoir. He believed that with this technique, his brushstrokes resembled the rays of the sun and infused his work with an intense light - a light that he compared to that of a sunny day. This effect ultimately enhances the sensation of the uncanny in these pictures (see fig. 1). David Sylvester has discussed this period in Magritte's oeuvre, and how the particular aesthetic of these pictures suited the artist's intentions at the time: "They can have sensuousness, humour, eroticism; above all, they can have the quality relating to a principle which Magritte argued when defending the enterprise to Breton: 'charm and menace can reinforce each other by their fusion.' This is why the quasi-impressionist pictures can be among Magritte's most shocking and disturbing. When disruptive or subversive or indecent things happen on a nice, sunny day with the flowers cheerfully blooming, they undermine all faith in existence. These Magrittes at their best do that not only to life but to - what we think of as safer - art" (David Sylvester, Magritte, New York, 1992, p. 264).

The imagery that he has chosen for this picture, although nominally based on Lewis Carroll's tale, refers to the famous caricatures of Louis-Philippe by the 19th century French draftsman Honoré Daumier, in which the French king is depicted as a gluttonous monster with a pear-shaped head (see fig. 2). This reference, according to Sarah Whitfield, "is a reminder that one of his underlying purposes in adopting Impressionism was to use art to distance his own art from reality. It was, he said, a matter of building new ivory towers. And the way the edges of the sky here are rounded off gave Magritte another way in which to make the image appear, as he put it, 'more like reflections from another world'"Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition catalogue), The Hayward Gallery, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Art Institute of Chicago, 1992-93, n.p.).

Comparables:

Fig. 1, René Magritte, La Bonne Fortune, 1945, oil on canvas, Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

Fig. 2, Honoré Daumier, Gargantua, 1931, Lithograph, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie