René Magritte

Marie Dierckxens, Belgium
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1972

David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1994, vol. IV, no. 1587, illustrated p. 286

Executed on white wove paper, not laid down, floating in the mount. There are two very small vertical creases with assosiated tiny losses in the cloud at the centre of the top edge, and a larger vertical crease with associated small losses to the green pigment in the lower left quadrant, which are very small and only visible on very close inspection. Apart from a small diagonal flattened crease in the lower right corner, this work is in good condition. The gouache is fresh and unfaded. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly stronger in the original, particularly in the green tones.
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The image of the bowler-hatted man is the single most iconic motif of Magritte's art. It first appeared in his painting of 1926 titled Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in which the man is seen from the back against a dark evening landscape. The idea of multiple renderings of the bowler-hatted man was first developed as early as 1927 in Le Sens de la nuit (fig. 1), and culminated in the celebrated oil version of Golconde of 1953. Used in a number of paintings and gouaches throughout the artist's career, the bowler-hatted man appears in various guises. He is sometimes depicted from the back, sometimes from the front, his face obscured by an object placed in front of it, as a dark contour faintly visible against the night sky, or fossilised into a block of stone. What is common to all of them is the fact that the man remains impersonal, an individual transformed into a universal symbol.

 

Sometimes, as in the present work, the bowler-hatted man appears as a silhouette, providing a frame in which another subject is depicted. In Les Tambours de la mort the man's silhouetted figure appears twice, one filled with foliage, and the other which appears to be its shadow, filled with a fragmented image of a building. This composition is closely related to an oil painting executed around the same time, La Belle société, in which the cloudy sky, which forms the background of the present work, forms one of the two cut-out male forms. In another well known version, L'Heureux donateur (fig. 2), the identical silhouette is filled with elements of a nocturnal landscape. The image of two juxtaposed figures also appears in the oil La Décalcomanie, in which a silhouette is depicted alongside a more naturalistic depiction of the man. When he was working on this painting, Magritte proclaimed: 'I want to show what is hidden' (quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.) et al., op. cit., vol. III, p. 439).   In this work, and other versions of the silhouetted man, the two-dimensional aspect of the picture surface is particularly emphasised. As Suzi Gablik observed: 'Magritte's bowler-hatted man is more like a figure in a book than a human being, but a figure with all the inessential elements left out [...]. Impassive and aloof he fixes the world in his gaze, but often his face is turned from view, dislocated, or otherwise concealed or obliterated by objects, as if expressing a universal disinclination, for which there exists no complementary inclination' (S. Gablik, Magritte, London, 1991, p. 162). While using imagery from everyday life, the artist changes the context in which we are used to seeing these objects, thus challenging the viewer's ideas of the visible world and of the nature of art itself.

 

Many scholars have interpreted the image of a bowler-hatted man as a disguised self-portrait. As Jacques Meuris wrote: 'There is, in fact, something disconcerting about these false self-portraits in which the man is seen from the rear, silhouetted against the light, like a cut-out in the foreground of pictures of landscapes in which we recognize a number of recurring Magritte settings. It is always a man rather than a woman, and always the same man. The artist himself, in fact, as can readily be supposed from the fact that, when he had himself photographed, notably by Duane Michals [fig. 3], it was in precisely this outfit: dark blue petersham overcoat and derby' (J. Meuris, Magritte, London, 1988, p. 164).

Executed in the last years of Magritte's life, Les Tambours de la mort exemplifies the clarity of thought and execution the artist reached in his mature works. Unlike his earlier paintings and gouaches in which he combined various motifs in a single composition, in his later years Magritte arrived at a simplicity and purity that allowed him to focus on a single idea, thus creating a stronger impact on the viewer. The opposed elements of nature and the man-made, exemplified here in the foliage and cloudy sky on one hand, and urban architecture on the other, are juxtaposed through the simple, yet universal, image of the suited man.

 

 

Fig. 1, René Magritte, Le Sens de la nuit, 1927, oil on canvas, The Menil Collection, Houston

Fig. 2, René Magritte, L'Heureux donateur, 1966, oil on canvas, Musée d'Ixelles, Brussels

Fig. 3, Duane Michals, photograph of René Magritte, 1962