René Magritte

Alexander Iolas, Paris and New York (acquired directly from the artist in February 1962)

Hanover Gallery, London (acquired from the above in 1965)

Private Collection (acquired from the above)

Byron Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by 1968 by the present owner

New York, Iolas Gallery, René Magritte, Paintings—Gouaches—Collages, 1960—1961—1962, 1962, no. 16

Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, The Vision of René Magritte, 1962, no. 91

Little Rock, Arkansas Art Center, Magritte, 1964, n.n.

(possibly) San Francisco, Gump's Gallery, Magritte, 1964

(possibly) New York, Iolas Gallery, Magritte: le sens propre, 1965

Paris, Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Magritte: les images en soi, 1967

Brussels, Galerie Isy Brachot, Magritte, cent cinquante oeuvres: première vue mondiale de ses sculptures, 1968, no. 99

New York, Byron Gallery, René Magritte, 1968, no. 27, p. 61, illustrated

Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró, Magritte, 1998-99, no. 87, p. 166, illustrated in color 

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 153, p. 217, illustrated in color

Letter from Magritte to Iolas, 15 March 1961

Art and Artists, September 1966, p. 7, illustrated

René Passeron, René Magritte, Paris, 1970, p. 20, illustrated in color

Sarane Alexandrian, Dictionnaire de la peinture surréaliste, Paris, 1973, p. 36, illustrated in color

Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983, pp. vii, 8 and 44-45; pl. 22, n.p., illustrated

Harry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, p. 50, illustrated

Georges Roque, Ceci n’est pas un Magritte, Paris, 1983, no. 46, p. 43, illustrated; p. 196

Sarah Whitfield and Michael Raeburn; David Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, London, 1993, no. 940, p. 355, illustrated; p. 356

René Magritte; Francine Perceval, ed., Lettres à André Bosmans: 1958-1967, Brussels, 1990, pp. 178-79 and 189

Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Houston, The Menil Collection and Art Institute of Chicago, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1936, 2013, p. 39, illustrated in color

René Magritte’s La Représentation was chosen by the influential postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault as a key example of the crucial distinction he drew between “resemblance” and “similitude” as two modes of representation: the former grounded in mimesis and fidelity to an original, the latter operating through analogy, repetition, and open-ended similarity. “Take Representation,” wrote Foucault in his seminal thesis, “an exact representation of a portion of a ball game, seen from a kind of terrace fenced by a low wall. On the left, the wall is topped by a balustrade, and in the juncture thus formed can be seen exactly the same scene, but on a smaller scale… Must we suppose, unfolding on the left, a series of smaller and smaller other “representations,” always identical? Perhaps. But it is unnecessary” (Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), Berkeley and Los Angeles 1983, p. 44).

Painted in 1962, the idea for this scene came to Magritte a year earlier, just as he was finishing his mural for the Palais des Congrès in Brussels and yearning for new and challenging motifs; writing to his primary dealer Alexandre Iolas in March 1961, Magritte stated: "One of these ideas is remarkable by the fact that it will allow me to paint a picture containing 'impossible' images: those of Football-players! You will be very interested to see it I think" (René Magritte quoted in Sarah Whitfield and Michael Raeburn; David Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, London, 1993, no. 940, p. 355).

It would be this “impossible” image that prompted Foucault to ask, “What ‘represents’ what?” (Michel Foucault, ibid., p.44). This question invites another reading of the visual dilemma Magritte sets up—one that reverses the logical progression of the image. Rather than moving from a full composition (at right) toward increasingly smaller representations (at left), the viewer is prompted to imagine the opposite: a movement from the smallest-scale image outward toward infinite expansion. This inversion shifts the paradigm from constriction to proliferation and suggests that the edge of the canvas functions like the stone balustrade within the painting—a threshold rather than a boundary. The space beyond the frame therefore becomes the next logical progression in the series. Magritte’s original title for the work, La Fête continuelle, alludes to this idea of endless visual continuation embedded within the painting itself.

This investigation finds its most explicit visualization in his 1933 canvas, La Condition humaine, on which the artist expounds: “I placed in front of a window, seen from inside a room, a painting representing exactly that part of the landscape which was hidden from view by the painting.

Therefore, the tree represented in the painting hid from view the tree situated behind it, outside the room. It existed for the spectator, as it were, simultaneously in his mind, as both inside the room in the painting, and outside in the real landscape. Which is how we see the world: we see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves” (Réne Magritte quoted in Suzi Gablek, Magritte, London, 1970, p. 87).

In positioning the easel in front of the window, and depicting that which is hidden within the landscape as a painting on the canvas’s surface, Magritte maintains that both versions of reality can exist simultaneously. The landscape can, with reason, continue unbroken behind the canvas at the same time that the canvas depicts an exact replication of the scene behind it. In Le Soir qui tombe, executed a year prior to La Représentation, Magritte begins to ask the question of which version of reality, if any, is in fact the original. Here Magritte depicts a window, set within a domestic interior, looking out onto rolling hills illuminated by the same glowing sunset pictured in the present work. The large pane has shattered inwards, and the shards of glass, piled below the sill still hold the image that can be seen through the jagged hole above. In this doubling, Magritte points to the fact that in our passive mode of viewing, the image and its source are not merely correlated but have in fact become the same thing.

In La Représentation, unlike in La Condition Humaine, Magritte subverts expectations by using a framing device that lacks a clear precedent—unlike an easel or window, which we intuitively understand as vehicles for depiction—thereby creating a non-linear relationship between the two images, where the smaller version disruptively fails to belong logically within the larger.

By harnessing the quotidian subject of a soccer match—perhaps an homage to one of his earliest Surreal images, Le Jouer secret (1927), one of the very few other works in the artist’s oeuvre which explores sporting motifs—Magritte undermines the viewer’s trust in visual reality. By presenting a duplicated scene in La Représentation, in which neither version claims to be original or derivative, the familiar becomes uncertain, turning the title itself into a commentary on the ambiguous nature of representation.

The present work also reveals parallels between Magritte’s La Domaine d’Arnheim, also from 1962, revealing a sustained preoccupation with the conflation of interior and exterior space. In both works, Magritte deploys his signature precision of execution and a cool, hyperreal palette that lends ordinary objects an uncanny, cerebral stillness. Each painting establishes a dialectic between containment and infinity: in La Représentation, the recursive image of the soccer match generates an infinite regress of representation, while in Le Domaine d’Arnheim, the mountain’s eagle-shaped form emerges as both landscape and image, a natural phenomenon that simultaneously reads as an artificial construct born of the object of the eggs and nest at the fore. Both compositions hinge upon a visual paradox that transforms realism into conceptual speculation, made visible through the artist’s favored motifs of the stone ledge. The polished, matter-of-fact style with which Magritte renders these impossible conjunctions—bathed in cool light and defined by crisp edges and calm tonal transitions—heightens their intellectual charge, underscoring his capacity to disguise metaphysical inquiry within the familiar language of pictorial realism.

In this sense, both 1962 canvases mark a mature synthesis of Magritte’s lifelong investigation into the limits of resemblance, making visible the philosophical terrain that Foucault would later articulate as the play between representation and similitude. La Représentation was acquired by the present owner by 1968, just a few years after its creation, and has never before appeared at auction.