René Magritte

Iolas Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist in 1962)
Hanover Gallery, London (acquired from the above after 1964)
Erica Brausen, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Iolas Gallery, René Magritte: Paintings, Gouaches, Collages 1960-1961-1962, 1962, no. 20
Little Rock, Arkansas Art Center, Magritte, 1964, n.n.
Paris, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Magritte, 2003, n.n., illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Magritte executed his first papiers collés in 1925, around the same time as he embarked on his first surrealist paintings. In his early works in this medium (fig. 1) the artist developed pictorial elements and his signature objects that were to appear in numerous paintings, gouaches and collages throughout his career. Among these objects were the baluster, or ‘bilboquet’, the curtain, the bell and sheet music, all of which feature in the present work. The use of paper cut-outs, a legacy from the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, allowed Magritte to explore the play between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space that he also developed in his oil paintings. Furthermore, by using a photograph and a piece of sheet music to represent a ‘bilboquet’ and a curtain, he modifies the original objects to give them new meanings, thus creating unexpected associations and confusing the viewer’s perception of everyday objects. By juxtaposing the cut-out curtain with the drawn one, the artist plays with the notions of the real and the representational, while by shaping a baluster from a photograph of a man, he makes one of his most explicit connections between this form and the human figure.

Writing about Magritte’s papiers collés, Sarah Whitfield observed: ‘The principles of collage, which he continued to employ with the same rigorous logic throughout his career, were ideally suited to an artist who saw the real world in the same abstract terms as he saw his own painting. Everything appeared to him as flat as a scene on a painted backdrop. ‘Despite the shifting abundance of detail and nuance in nature, I was able to see a landscape as if it were only a curtain placed in front of me’, he wrote in 1938. ‘I became uncertain of the depth of the fields, unconvinced of the remoteness of the horizon.’ The way he invariably plots out a space through the use of simple screening devices such as walls, stage flats, frames, mirrors, paper cut-outs and so on, rather than through traditional perspective, derives from the synthetic Cubism in de Chirico’s ‘metaphysical’ interiors as well as from his own early experiments with a quasi-cubist style’ (S. Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition catalogue), The Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, pp. 13 & 15).

Fig. 1, René Magritte, Le Jockey perdu, 1926, papier collé, formerly in the Harry Torczyner collection, New York