René Magritte

Barnet & Eleanor Cramer Hodes, Chicago (acquired from the artist in 1957)
Private Collection, Chicago (by descent from the above)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Magritte, 1993, no. 150
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, no. 148, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Letter from Magritte to Eleanor Cramer Hodes, 10th March 1957
Letter from Magritte to Avis Palmer, 6th May 1957
David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1994, vol. IV, no. 1429, illustrated p. 198

Depicting a forest landscape at sunset, with the bright red sun pasted onto the trees, Le Banquet is a magnificent example of two key elements of Magritte’s art: the influence of papiers collés on his painterly technique, and the juxtaposition of the visible and the invisible. The first version of this image was executed in a gouache of 1956 (D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., no. 1421). In a letter dated 9th November 1956, Magritte wrote that the subject of Le Banquet was one of his two latest ‘trouvailles’ (‘finds’), and described the image as ‘trees against a reddish sky at sunset. The red sun is visible on the mass of the trees hiding it’ (quoted in ibid., p. 193). The brightly coloured and sharply defined image of the setting sun, which would normally be hidden behind the trees, evokes the paper cut-outs that Magritte first developed in his early drawings and papiers collés of the 1920s.

 

In the last decade of his life, Magritte executed several versions of Le Banquet in oil and gouache, in some of which the landscape is seen through a window from an interior, or from a balcony, as in the present work. A neutral landscape is transformed here by revealing what would normally be hidden, and the visible and invisible elements coexist on the picture plane. The perfectly round shape in the centre of the composition, depicting the disc of the setting sun, appeared in several other compositions in gouache and oil (fig. 1). It is also reminiscent of the moon, one of the frequently used elements throughout Magritte’s œuvre (fig. 2). This synthesis of night and day evokes the artist’s celebrated image of L’Empire des lumières (fig. 3), and imbues this work with a mysterious and poetic quality unique to Magritte’s art.

 

The present work is one of a number of gouaches commissioned from Magritte by Barnet Hodes, one of the artist’s earliest patrons in the United States. On the occasion of a major Magritte retrospective exhibition held in 1992-93, which included 150 gouaches from his collection, Sarah Whitfield wrote: ‘Between 1956 and 1964 Magritte painted perhaps sixty gouaches for Barnet Hodes, a prominent Chicago lawyer with a passion for Surrealism. Through one of his clients, the painter and collector William Copley, Hodes had got to know several artists living in America in the 1940s and 1950s who had been closely associated with the movement, such as Ernst, Duchamp and Matta. As a collector, one of his early ambitions had been to acquire one work by each of the artists represented in the first surrealist group exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in 1925, and in this he was extremely successful. Another was to own a gouache version of each of Magritte’s major pictures. […]’

 

‘Hodes revealed to Magritte that his aim was to acquire a sufficient number of gouaches to cover the wall of a room in his Chicago apartment. By September [1956] his goal must have been in sight for he ordered another four works ‘to complete the design’. Shortly afterwards he and his wife Eleanor published a small booklet in celebration of what they called the ‘Magritte wall’ which listed the twenty-five works they had acquired so far. However, Hodes did not stop there. He went on to commission well over thirty more gouaches and because of his perseverance – obsession may be a better word – the wall became much more than just another handsome feature in a Chicago apartment: it grew into a remarkable and unique tribute to Magritte, a museum of his work in miniature. [… Magritte] had always found the idea of recreating his own images a desirable one, and to have the chance to create a collection of them in miniature must have appealed as much to his sense of humour as to his desire to reach a wide audience’ (S. Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., n.p.).