René Magritte

Fernand Quinet, Brussels
Private Collection, Belgium (acquired by descent from the above. Sold: Sotheby's, London, 23rd June 1993, lot 303)
Ronny van de Velde, Antwerp (purchased at the above sale)
Private Collection, Belgium (acquired from the above)
Galleria Marescalchi, Bologna
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1991

Brussels, Galerie Le Centaure, Exposition Magritte, 1927

David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1994, vol. IV, no. 1613, illustrated p. 299

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, hinged to the mount on the reverse. There are remnants of glue from previous mounting along the reverse of all four edges and the paper is showing some discolouration. There is some minor paper skinning to the papier collé elements, mostly intrinsic to the artist's medium. Apart from some scattered spots of retouching covering foxing marks in the blue pigment (visible in the catalogue illustration), and some spots of staining in the margins of the sheet (not visible when mounted), this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly more subtle and less warm in the original.
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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, including the present composition, the artist developed pictorial elements and his signature objects that were going to appear in numerous paintings, gouaches and collages throughout his career. Among these objects were the baluster, or ‘bilboquet’ and the sheet music, both 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. Furthermore, by using a piece of sheet music to represent a ‘bilboquet’, he modifies the original object to give it a new meaning, thus creating unexpected associations and confusing the viewer’s perception of everyday objects.

 

The authors of the catalogue raisonné wrote about the present work: ‘Magritte combines a piece of sheet music – seen here in the shape of a bilboquet – with three lozenge-shaped pieces of paper which he places among the roots in the sky. These three fragments are cut from magazine or newspaper photographs and appear to relate to each other thematically. The one on the left shows a flight of steps in a garden, while the other two, which are more difficult to decipher, show different kinds of goods stored on shelves: uniform rows of bottles and boxes in one, glass scent bottles and cosmetic packages in the other. The juxtaposition of steps and shelves seems a deliberate piece of rhyming on Magritte’s part’ (D. Sylvester (ed.) et al., op. cit., p. 299).

 

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).