René Magritte

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, the artist conceived pictorial elements and signature objects that would appear in numerous paintings, gouaches and collages throughout his career. Among these images were the bowler-hatted man, the dove, the 'painted' words and the sheet music, some 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 same principle of flatness and the lack of depth and perspective that he developed in his oil paintings. By juxtaposing the cut-out element with the painted ones, the artist plays with the notions of the real and the representational. The sheet music he used here for the dove has been identified as being from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.

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 wit a quasi-cubist style' (S. Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition catalogue), The Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, pp. 13 & 15).

Regarding the dating of this work, the Catalogue Raisonné of Magritte's work explains that this is 'one of a group of four papiers collés all of which have been dated to 1931 (two of them bear this date in Magritte's hand on the verso), but which were manifestly done in 1961 and 1962. All include fragments of the same sheet music [...] Magritte must have put on the false dates as usual because he had sold works outside his contract with Iolas, and the size of the discrepancy here was no doubt determined by the fact that he had done no papiers collés for over thirty years before taking up the medium again in 1961 (David Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., p. 318).