René Magritte

Roland Penrose, London (acquired in 1938)
Hanover Gallery, London (acquired from the above in the early 1960s)
Galleria La Medusa, Rome (acquired by 1965)
Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above)
Galerie Le Point, Monte Carlo (acquired by 1992)
Sale: Christie's, London, 25th June 1996, lot 45
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, E.L.T. Mesens présente Trois peintres surréalistes: René Magritte, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, 1937, no. 20
London, London Gallery, René Magritte: Surrealist Paintings and Objects, 1938, no. 37 (titled Good Fortune)
London, Hanover Gallery, René Magritte, 1964, no. 15
Turin, Notizie, Magritte: opere scelte dal 1925 al 1962, 1965, illustrated in the catalogue
L’Aquila, Castello Spagnolo, Alternative attuali 2. Omaggio a Magritte: opere 1920-1963, 1965
London, The Hayward Gallery; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Houston, The Menil Collection & Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Magritte, 1992-93, no. 79, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Letter from Magritte to Edward James, 22nd September 1937
Eric Newton, ‘The self-sufficient idea: Magritte and Surrealism’, in The Sunday Times, London, 10th April 1938, mentioned p. 15
David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II, no. 446, illustrated p. 252
Magritte (exhibition catalogue), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal, 1996, no. 18, illustrated in colour p. 108

The canvas is lined. There is an area of retouching in the upper right corner, a small spot of retouching at the lower edge, an area of small spots of retouching in the sky in the upper left, a few spots and small areas of retouching on the lower part of the nose and a few other scattered small spots of retouching, visible under ultra-violet light. Colours: In comparison with the printed catalogue illustration, the colours are overall less warm and the sky is more blue in the original.
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Painted in 1937, La bonne aventure is related to several oils and gouaches titled Race blanche which Magritte executed in the same year (figs. 1 & 2). Discussing the present work in the catalogue of a major Magritte retrospective held in 1992-93, in which this work was included, Sarah Whitfield wrote: ‘When Edward James saw the last work in the Race blanche series, he pointed out to Magritte that the parts of that bather’s body “were positioned like the stones of a dolmen”. That idea is even more pertinent to this monumental nose whose rounded, polished form has the mystery of an ancient ritual stone. The careful modelling of the nasal bone and the two lower lateral cartilages heightens the phallic suggestiveness of the image’ (S. Whitfield in Magritte (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., n.p., note to no. 79).

 

In February 1937 Magritte arrived in London, where he stayed for five weeks in the home of Edward James, working on several large commissions. After his return to Brussels the two men kept a lively correspondence, and in a letter dated 22nd September 1937 Magritte wrote to James: ‘I have just finished the picture with the big nose and am very interested by the result achieved: the atmosphere in the picture is quite new, and seems much more effective than the idea, which is nevertheless mentally disturbing, since the big nose is out of proportion, set as it is against the sea, rather like our body when, on suddenly waking up in the night, we sometimes experience the sensation of being immense or reduced to the size of a speck of dust’ (quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., p. 252).

 

La bonne aventure combines a recurrent preoccupation of Magritte’s art, the juxtaposition of human flesh with generic landscapes. The fragmentation of the human body and depiction of isolated body parts is not only an important theme in the works of René Magritte, but also one that expresses the essence of Surrealism in general. It contains two concepts central to Surrealist art: that of desire and fetishism, as in the works of, amongst others, Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró, and that of threat and violence, such as in the early sculptures of Alberto Giacometti. Magritte’s use of such imagery and body parts, however, is rarely violent. Rather than evoking a mutilation of a human body, he uses its segments in the same way he would isolate a segment of a landscape or an object and place it in a different, unexpected environment.

 

In the present work, a sense of mystery and ambiguity is created by placing the oversized nose against a quiet, unidentifiable landscape. The setting is framed by a brick wall along the left and bottom of the composition, and the timeless seascape is dominated by a cloudy sky, the large nose and a small tree in the background. By changing the context in which we are used to seeing these images, the artist challenges our ideas of the visible world and of the nature of art itself. Magritte returned to this imagery later in his career, creating a number of paintings in which the cut-out nose, together with other facial features, appears to belong to an invisible face, seen against a monochrome background (fig. 3) or floating in the sky (fig. 4).

 

La bonne aventure was sent to London for the Magritte exhibition at the London Gallery, which was due to open in April 1938. It was bought by Roland Penrose before the show opened, and remained in his collection until the early 1960s.