René Magritte

Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York

William N. Copley, Los Angeles, Paris and New York

Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York (acquired from the above circa 1993-94)

Acquired from the above on 23 November 1994 by the present owner

New York, Albert Landry Galleries, René Magritte in New York: Private Collections, 1961, no. 38

Little Rock, Arkansas Art Center, Magritte, 1964, n.p., illustrated (dated 1937)

London, The Hayward Gallery; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Houston, The Menil Collection and Art Institute of Chicago, Magritte, 1992-93, no. 85, n.p., illustrated in color

Marcel Marien, Magritte, Brussels, 1943, pl. 1, illustrated in color

L’Echo du Zoute et du Littoral, Brussels, 13 July 1946, p. 3, illustrated

De Roode vaan, Brussels, 27 December 1945, p. 4, illustrated

Patrick Waldberg, René Magritte, Brussels, 1965, pp. 18 and 338; p. 21, illustrated

Suzi Gablik, Magritte, Greenwich, 1970, p. 26 and 196; pl.15, illustrated (dated 1940)

Harry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, no. 63, p. 48, illustrated; p. 266 (dated 1940)

René Magritte, La destination: lettres à Marcel Mariën, 1937-1962, Brussels, 1977, nos. 46-48, pp. 51-55

Suzi Gablik, Magritte, London, 1985, pp. 23-24, 27 and 200; pl.15, illustrated (dated 1940)

David Sylvester, Magritte: The Silence of the World, New York, 1992, p. 92; p. 93, illustrated in color

Sarah Whitfield; David Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, Oil Paintings and Objects 1931-1948, vol. II, London, 1993, no. 504, p. 298, illustrated

Sarah Whitfield and Michael Raeburn; David Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné: Supplement, Exhibitions Lists, Bibliography, Cumulative Index, vol. V, San Francisco, 1997, pp. 26 and 33

Exh. Cat., Paris, Jeu de Paume, Magritte, 2003, p. 132, illustrated in color

Siegfried Gohr, Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, no. 125, p. 80, illustrated; pp. 81-82

Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 2013, pp. 29 and 40

Among the pantheon of images reimagined and recontextualized by René Magritte throughout his career, the horse-and-rider motif exists as one of the most recognizable and defining of his oeuvre. Executed in 1942, at the prime of the artist’s technical bravura, the present work represents a radical foray into the Surrealist milieu and stands as the most exceptional depiction of the subject in oil.

An early encounter with the work of Giorgio de Chirico would forever alter the course of Magritte’s career. In 1922, the young artist was moved to tears upon seeing a reproduction of the metaphysical painter’s 1914 Le Chant d'amour for the first time (see fig. 1). De Chirico’s uncanny depiction of disparate objects amid an empty, penumbral piazza heralded for Magritte a new direction in artistry—one untethered from reality yet rooted in familiar forms.

In the wake of this discovery, Magritte’s style shifted away from the Cubist-inspired and commercially driven figuration that dominated his work in the late 1910s and early 20s toward a new idiom premised on the juxtaposition of incongruous imagery. In 1926 the first incarnations of Le Jockey perdu were born.

Though the precise order of execution is not known, Magritte created four works by the same title over the course of 1926. Each of the Jockey perdu—one pencil drawing, two papier collés and the seminal oil painting—feature a horse and jockey at the center of a wooded area comprised of towering, even ominous, bilboquet with sprouted tree limbs. In all except the pencil drawing, the scenes are framed by curtains, a theatrical device which the artist would reprise frequently throughout his oeuvre. Such imagery, which existed in at least one of the papiers collés prior to the oil, would soon coalesce in what Magritte would view as his “premier tableau”—his first true Surrealist painting (Sarah Whitfield and Michael Raeburn; David Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, Oil Paintings, 1916-1930, vol. I, London, 1992, p. 169; see fig. 2).

Describing the sense of enchantment the composition conjures, Patrick Walberg writes: “Like the rider and his steed, the inanimate objects [that Le Jockey perdu] contains are represented simply… Still, in all, gazing at the scene in which they are disposed one has the feeling, and it is intense, of never having seen the like of it, before it one is at the same time reduced to astonishment and, literally, entranced… For the moment we may remark that this jockey's headlong ride through the ambiguous forest evokes the leap through the looking-glass whereby Alice entered Wonderland. Here as there, it is a passing from the everyday world into a second world, one born of inspiration and whose substance is mystery” (Patrick Waldberg, René Magritte, Brussels, 1965, pp. 21-22).

Magritte’s pioneering juxtaposition of the known and unknown in Le Jockey perdu triumphantly proclaimed the artist’s entrée into a new artistic echelon. As David Sylvester writes of the initial painting: “[Le Jockey perdu] was seen from the very start as something special—and not just by the artist. A few months after it was realized, it became the first of his surrealist paintings to be reproduced, and the first of any of his paintings to be reproduced abroad” (ibid.). Sylvester continues, stating that Magritte’s practice of creating multiple variations on a theme—one which would come to define the very nature of his artistry—indeed originated with Le Jockey perdu.

Decades later, Magritte would recall the import of this imagery in a self-referential text on his Surrealist awakening: “He executed the [1926] painting ‘The lock jockey’, conceived with no aesthetic intention, with the sole aim of RESPONDING to a mysterious feelings, a ‘causeless’ anguish, a sort of ‘call to order’ which impinged on his consciousness at certain non-historic moments and which guided his life ever since birth” (ibid.).

While the image of the bilboquet—Magritte’s curious and often biomorphic chess-like form—as well as the drawn red curtains would proliferate in his works over the coming years, it would be another decade and a half before the artist returned to his foundational Surrealist subject of the horse and rider. In the lengthy interim between his Jockey perdu iterations, Magritte moved from Belgium to France and back again, his three-year stint in Paris proving a brief yet a pivotal period of development and intellectual exchange with the French Surrealists led by André Breton.

Indeed, it was a work by the Italian Renaissance painter Uccello—the only Old Master mentioned by name in Breton’s canonical manifesto on Surrealism—that is believed to have partly inspired Magritte’s Le Jockey Perdu. Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest, itself a mastery of varying perspectives, features a nocturnal menagerie of man and beast with hunters bounding into the forest astride horses and on foot alongside their dogs (see fig. 3). The frieze-like composition, repeated verticality of trees and emphatic contrasts of light and dark within Magritte’s Jockey perdu finds resonance in the stage-like format and dramatic wooded backdrop of Uccello’s panel.

The iconography of the horse and rider, first unleashed in Magritte’s work in 1926 to much acclaim in Belgian Surrealist circles, including writers and patrons Camille Goemans and Paul-Gustave van Hecke, would by 1942 resurface in his oeuvre with unparalleled finesse. While the initial painting of Le Jockey perdu revealed a new dimension of ideation and conceptual alignment in Magritte’s work, the execution of the early composition proved somewhat rudimentary, displaying the broad brushwork and crude draftsmanship characteristic of his nascent oeuvre. David Sylvester touches upon this critique of the 1926 painting: “What is puzzling is why Magritte saw this particular work as his breakthrough: it seems a less convincingly realized work than Nocture… and was followed within a few months by several pictures which are more powerful and telling by a long way” (Siegfried Gohr, Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, p. 82).

Siegfried Gohr expands upon this assessment, highlighting the exceptional quality of the present work: “It is true that the compositional idea [of the 1926 painting] is more precisely and convincingly expressed in the concurrent collages. And that later reprises can serve to clarify an idea is evidenced by the two 1942 versions of the painting [the present work in oil and a gouache], where the contrast between the jockey rooted to the spot despite his gallop and the row of tree trunks transformed into a balustrade is much more evocatively treated.” Gohr continues: “But why did Goemans and van Hacke attach such prominent significance to the 1926 work? Probably the type of visual invention was more important to them than the finished composition, because here Magritte succeeded, possibly for the first time, in inventing a poetically romantic situation that was entirely emancipated from de Chirico. The interpretation that the jockey has lost his orientation in the mysterious woods surrounding him would seem to be only half the truth. Though his real path has been replaced by a kind of red carpet, he has found entry into a fantastic, alternative world. Motion and haste, vegetable and sculptural elements, a fixed point (the rider) and extreme perspective create harsh oppositions that go beyond the Surrealist juxtaposition of apparently unrelated objects seen in a few other compositions of 1926. This combination of horseman and landscape would in fact concern Magritte once again much later” (ibid.). As Gohr underscores, the present composition adroitly captures the weight and significance of the subject imbued by the 1926 painting, yet is rendered with such skill and sensitivity as to compound the impact of the initial concept, bringing to bear decades’ worth of experience to exalt the seminal Surrealist motif.

The present painting was likely conceived on the occasion of Louis Scutenaire’s forthcoming monograph on Magritte, in which the artist aimed to feature Le Jockey perdu. However, according to Sylvester, a photograph of the 1926 composition either proved too difficult to procure (the work had been unseen since its sale to a collector in Africa), or, too unsophisticated to illustrate: “The first version was clumsy in execution and [Magritte] had [since] come to take a certain pride in exhibiting technical skill” (Sarah Whitfield; David Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, Oil Paintings and Objects 1931-1948, vol. II, London, 1993, p. 298).

In his 1992 monograph on the artist, Sylvester mused on Magritte’s desire to reprise the subject in 1942: “It must have been something about the image that made Magritte so attached to The lost jockey. Maybe he felt that it had the romantic significance attributed to it by Goemans and Van Hecke. Maybe it had to do with the facts that, when he was a student his favorite painter (according to Charles Alexandre) was Uccello, that in the Manifesto Breton had named Uccello as the one old master painter relevant to Surrealism, and that The lost jockey looks as if it must surely have been based upon the cassone panel by Uccello of a hunt in the forest” (David Sylvester, Magritte: The Silence of the World, New York, 1992, p. 92).

Ultimately, it would be Marcel Marien’s 1943 monograph, Magritte, which would prove the first book on the artist, superseding Scutenaire’s eventual publication. A testament not just to the power of the motif but also to the virtuosic execution of the present painting, Le Jockey perdu of 1942 is the very first—and, notable for the period, color—illustration in that volume.

From the 1940s onward, Magritte would go on to create five additional compositions bearing the same title, each executed in gouache on paper. While, in subsequent years, the jockey and rider duo would be recontextualized alongside other imagery like automobiles and interiors in La Colère des dieux (see fig. 4) and L'Enfance d'Icare, the present work remains one of only two know oils titled Le Jockey perdu. 

William N. Copley acquired the present work from Magritte’s principal dealer, Alexander Iolas. Copley, himself an artist, is perhaps best remembered as one of the foremost patrons of the Surrealist movement. Heir to a publishing magnate, Copley began to paint while working for the family business, soon befriending Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte and other luminaries of the movement. The death of his father in 1947 paved the way for a short-lived gallery in Beverly Hills where he exhibited works by Magritte, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Matta and Yves Tanguy among others.

Though the market for Surrealism proved limited in Los Angeles, Copley remained steadfast in his commitment to the movement, eventually establishing the William and Noma Copley Foundation, directed in part by Marcel Duchamp and advised by the foremost proponents of Modern art including Alfred H. Barr Jr., Herbert Read, Julian Levy, as well as artists Max Ernst, Jean Arp, and Man Ray. By the 1960s, Copley’s Upper East Side apartment had become a gathering space for artists and an intellectual hub for his collaborative journal SMS, which brought together the work of Surrealists with a younger generation of artists from Roy Lichtenstein to Yayoi Kusama.

The present painting remained in Copley’s personal collection until the early 1990s—far beyond the public sale of his collection in 1979. Presented as the finest array of Surrealist works to ever appear at auction, the sale held at Sotheby Parke Bernet ultimately achieved $6.7 million in sales, marking The William N. Copley Collection as the highest valued single collection ever sold in America at the time. Many of the artworks sold at the 1979 auction now reside in museum collections, including Magritte’s iconic La Trahison des images (see fig. 5).

The present painting was later acquired in 1994 by Matthew and Carolyn Bucksbaum from Copley’s own dealer, Nolan/Eckman Gallery. One of the most prized works in the Bucksbaum collection, Le Jockey perdu was acquired after many years of dedicated searching. A visit to the Art Institute of Chicago during the museum’s 1966 Magritte retrospective would spark the couple’s lifelong appreciation for the artist, setting in motion an enduring quest to acquire a work of this caliber. As Carolyn recalled of that time, “We fell in love with Magritte's paintings, and many years later when we felt we might be in a position to buy one, we looked very hard to find one we could buy. We looked through the auction catalogues and we saw many of them personally. We saw them at auction, and we saw them with private collectors who wanted to sell; but for ten years we were unable to find one which we liked well enough…until this picture came to our attention.” Le Jockey perdu has been treasured in the Bucksbaum collection ever since.