René Magritte (1898-1967), Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (The hunters at the edge of night). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2014

signed 'Magritte’ (lower right); titled (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 31 7/8 x 45 5/8 in. (81 x 116 cm.). Painted in 1928. Estimate £6,000,000 – £9,000,000 ($9,972,000 - $14,958,000)

Provenance: Galerie L'Epoque (E.L.T. Mesens), Brussels, by August 1928.
Galerie Le Centaure (P.G. van Hecke), Brussels, by whom acquired from the above in January 1929.
E.L.T. Mesens, Brussels, by whom acquired in 1932 at the liquidation of the above.
Claude Spaak, Brussels, by 1933 and until at least June 1934.
E.L.T. Mesens, London.
William and Noma Copley, Chicago, by whom acquired from the above circa 1956-1957.
Acquired from the above by the present owner on 19 October 1978.
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION

Literature: Letter from Paul Nougé to René Magritte, in Lettres surrealistses, April 1928, no. 145.
Postcard from René Magritte to E.L.T. Mesens, 22 August 1928.
Variétés, Brussels, no. 7, 15 November 1928, p. 365 (illustrated).
A.De Ridder, La jeune peinture belge, de l’impressionnisme à l’expressionnisme, Antwerp, 1929, p. 39 (illustrated).
L. Scutenaire, Magritte, Chicago, 1958, no. 34.
P. Waldberg, René Magritte, Brussels, 1965, p. 128 (illustrated).
Exh. cat., Magritte, London, 1969, p. 60.
A.M. Hammacher, René Magritte, London, 1974, p. 90 (illustrated p. 91).
R. Calvocoressi, Magritte, Oxford, 1984, no. 22 (illustrated).
D. Sylvester & S. Whitfield, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, Oil Paintings, 1916-1930, Antwerp, 1992, no. 228, pp. 279-280 (illustrated p. 279).
D. Sylvester, J. Bouniort & M. Draguet, Magritte, Houston, 2009, p. 185 (illustrated).
S. Gohr, Magritte, Attempting the Impossible, Antwerp, 2009, no. 188, p. 128 (illustrated).

Exhibited: Brussels, Galerie l’Epoque, René Magritte, January 1928.
Brussels, Salle Giso, E.L.T. Mesens & E. van Tonderen présentent seize tableaux de René Magritte, February 1931, no. 12, p. 12.
Brussels, Palais de Beaux-Arts, Exposition René Magritte, May – June 1933, no. 9.
Brussels, Palais de Beaux-Arts, Exposition Minotaure, May – June 1934 no. 70.
New York, Julien Levy Gallery, René Magritte, January 1938, no. 7.
Knokke, Casino Communal, Ve festival belge d’été, expositions René Magritte-Paul Delvaux, August 1952, no. 9.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Dertien belgische schilders, October – November 1952, no. 57.
Brussels, Palais de Beaux-Arts, René Magritte, May – June 1954, no. 21, p. 25.
Venice, XXVII Biennale di Venezia, June – October 1954, no. 35, p. 227.
Antwerp, Stedelijke Feestzaal-Meir Antwerpen, Kunst van heden, salon 1956, October 1956, no. 102, p. 11.
Little Rock, Arkansas Art Center, Magritte, May – June 1964.
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, René Magritte, Le mystère de la réalité, August – September 1967, no. 21, p. 74 (illustrated p. 75).
Stockholm, Moderna Museet, René Magritte, October – November 1967, no. 15, p. 6.
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Magritte, December 1977, no. 2.
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Rétrospective Magritte, October - December 1978, no. 75 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Paris, Musée national d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, January - April 1979.
Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Rétrospective Magritte, January – April 1979, no. 75, (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to to Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, October - December 1978.
Humlebaeck, Louisiana Museum, René Magritte, September 1983 – January 1984, no. 31, p. 49.
London, The Hayward Gallery, The Southbank Centre, Magritte, May – August 1992, no. 37 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, September – November 1992, Houston, The Menil Collection, December 1992 – February 1993, and Chicago, The Art Institute, March – May 1993.
Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, René Magritte, Die Kunst der Konversation, November 1996 – March 1997, no. 3, p. 253 (illustrated p. 89).
Paris, Musée national d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, La revolution surréaliste, March – June 2002, p. 437 (illustrated p. 186).
Paris, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Magritte, February – June 2003, p. 76 (illustrated p. 77).
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Magritte, The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, September 2013 – January 2014, no. 53, p. 247 (illustrated p. 114).

Notes: René Magritte's Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit is one of his iconic early Surrealist paintings, having featured in many of the most important monographs and exhibitions dedicated to his work, beginning within his own lifetime. Indeed, already only a few years after it was painted, it was being included on a regular basis in exhibitions of Magritte's pictures, to which it was lent by a succession of owners who were closely involved with Magritte himself: Gustave Van Hecke, E.L.T. Mesens, Claude Spaak and, from the mid-1950s, William Copley. Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was painted in 1928, during the time that Magritte was based in Paris in order to be closer to the Surrealist group around André Breton. That year was the most fruitful of Magritte's entire career, reflecting the sense of enlightenment that had descended upon him as he created masterpiece after masterpiece, tapping into a rich seam of ideas and inspiration. It is a reflection of the importance of these early Surreal works by Magritte that so many of them are now in museum collections around the world. Of the pictures that Magritte painted in 1928, only around one fifth were painted on the large scale of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, which was done in the largest format of canvas that he used that year, indicating his appreciation of the importance of its subject.

Many of the works that Magritte created in and around 1928, during his stay in the French capital, combined the poetic transformations of the everyday world that had already become his hallmark with a certain dark intensity, and even violence. Looking at several pictures from this period, for instance the two versions of Les jours gigantesque which appears to show a struggle as a prelude to a rape, Les amants with its heads covered in winding sheets, or L'idée fixe with its stalking hunter in one of the quadrants of the composition, there was a clear under- or over-tone of suspense, anxiety or violence at play. This may reflect Magritte's own personality, his preferences and his background; at the same time, it appears in tune with Breton's diktat, published in Nadja the same year Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was painted, that, 'Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all' (A. Breton, Nadja, R. Howard, trans., New York, p. 160). Robert Hughes summed up the 'convulsive' energy of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit when he declared:

'for panic, one need go no further than Magritte's Hunters at the Edge of the Night, 1928, with its two stocky, armed and booted chasseurs writhing in apprehension at the sight of an empty horizon. We see their fear but, inexplicably, not what they are afraid of' (R. Hughes, 'Introduction', pp. 5-8, The Portable Magritte, New York, 2001, p. 7).

In the catalogue raisonné of Magritte's works, it was suggested that the atmosphere of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit may owe itself to the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Magritte devoured his writings, not least in the famous translation by Charles Baudelaire, and several of his pictures appear to make references to them. In Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, the walls may recall those in The Pit and the Pendulum, a short story about a victim of the elaborate torture techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, at the end of which hot walls are enclosing him, approaching ever closer (see D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, London, 1992, p. 279). Certainly, the crepuscular light appears to hint at the departing day and the oncoming night, adding a somewhat Gothic dimension to the scene with the hunters, who have themselves become the hunted, caught as though in some monumental trap. They are held fast by the wall into which their own bodies appear to have been partially absorbed: the hunter on the left has lost his foot, while the other's head is missing, seemingly immured. These fragmentary figures recall the intriguing overlapping man and woman of Les jours gigantesques, showing their common heritage. Indeed, in the catalogue raisonné of Magritte's works, it has been surmised that Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was painted after Les jours gigantesques and was part of an almost narrative development that arched through his pictures that year, in this case ending at Le genre nocturne, a missing painting that shows a woman covering the void where her head should be with her hands, while standing next to a void in the wall.

In Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, the sense of tension is accentuated by the bulk of the figures, adding a sheer physicality to their efforts to free themselves. This struggle is likewise made all the more mysterious and dramatic by the gap to the right, where the barren landscape stretches towards the distant, glowing horizon. The corner of wall at which these hunters are standing is made all the more enigmatic by this contrast between confinement and space. According to a letter apparently written by Magritte's friend Paul Nougé around April 1928 and almost certainly discussing this picture and therefore giving its date some certainty, that composition may have changed at some point: 'Thank you so much for drawing me a picture of your latest canvas. I find it absolutely remarkable,' he wrote to the artist.

'I admire the care you have taken to particularise the event, to endow it, by the precision of certain details, with the maximum of concrete reality, thus guaranteeing, to my mind, the intensity of its effect. I also commend the precaution you have taken to eliminate that third figure which might have produced the impression of a "well-made" picture. I understand this all the better since I have often had occasion to modify in a similar way prose pieces whose perfection was becoming embarrassing, because I felt it might charm or arrest attention to the detriment of what I really wanted to achieve' (Nougé, quoted ibid., p. 279).

Reducing the composition to only two figures accentuates the terror through the contrast with the spacious landscape. At the same time, it introduces the theme of duality that runs like a thread through so much of Magritte's work from the period, be it in images that contain repeated motifs, such as his portrait of Nougé, or his earlier works, La pose enchantée, La fin des contemplations, or in pairings such as the man and woman in Les jours gigantesques or the couple in Les amants. In Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, the two figures recall the book-end-like assailants in L'assassin menacé, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In this way, by reducing his subjects to a dualism or dichotomy, Magritte was able to tap into some of the fundamental aspects of human nature, ageless themes which are given new momentum in his works, viewed from new perspectives. Even the concept of the wall, such an everyday element of life, becomes mysterious and dangerous in Magritte's universe, trapping these hunters and suffocating one of them. The solid aspects of our existence become mutable and magical. As Magritte wrote to Nougé the year before he painted Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit:

'I think I have made a really striking discovery in painting. Up to now I have used composite objects, or else the placing of an object was sometimes enough to make it mysterious... I have found a new potential in things - their ability to become gradually something else, an object merging into an object other than itself' (Magritte, quoted in J. Helfenstein & C. Elliott, '"A Lightning Flash Is Smoldering beneath the Bowler Hats": Paris 1927-1930', pp. 70-87, A. Umland, ed., Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary 1926-1938, exh. cat., New York, 2013, p. 73).

Nowhere is this more clear than in Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit with the men being absorbed by the wall; Magritte has also managed to add a terrifying dimension to this forced juxtaposition of two separate concepts, man and material.

Magritte made a second version of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, which was painted by 1936, was exhibited several times, and was owned by Mesens; it was destroyed while in storage in London during the Second World War (see D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. IV, London, 1994, app. 131, pp. 322-23). By an intriguing twist, Nougé would serve as the model when Magritte revisited the theme of the hunter whose body is partially caught in a wall in a subsequent variation, his 1943 picture, La gravitation universelle. That work was based on a photograph that Magritte took, showing Nougé in hunting garb by the wall. The fact that Magritte returned to this subject against the backdrop of the Occupation reveals his own understanding of the ability of this theme to convey feelings of intense anxiety and entrapment, both then and earlier, when he created Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit.

Looking at Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit in comparison with La gravitation universelle, it becomes clear that the former is a far more stylised work, with its stocky hunters. The physicality of these figures, which featured in a number of pictures from the period, adds to the pathos of their plight, as they are trapped regardless of the implied strength of their bodies; this effect is heightened by the large size of the picture - Magritte only painted around a fifth of his 1928 works on a canvas of this scale. These forms are almost expressionistic in their distortions and hint at the possibility, discussed by numerous authors including David Sylvester, that Magritte had been influenced partly by reproductions of the frieze showing the battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Certainly, the missing body parts recall ancient statuary, while the incredible sculptural quality of these squat hunters also recalls the Greek frieze, with its figures shown in high relief. At the same time, the depiction of the subjects also recalls Pablo Picasso's works from the early 1920s; living in Paris at the time, it is reasonable to suppose that Magritte would have been able to see those works as well as Picasso's more recent Surreal output.

Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was sent by Magritte from Paris to the Galerie de L'Epoque in Brussels later in 1928. Indeed, on 22 August, he wrote Mesens a note thanking him for letting him know that 'The Hunters is in perfect condition' (Magritte, quoted in Sylvester, op. cit., 1992, p. 279). This shows an early title that had been adopted for the work; later, it was referred to by Magritte as Les chasseurs condamnés, while Nougé suggested compromis instead. However, by the time it was exhibited publicly for the first time in 1931, the title had reached its current form.

That exhibition took place at the Salle Giso in Brussels and was quite an event. It marked the return of Magritte from Paris the previous year. On the occasion, a number of his more recent works were shown - strangely, few of the pictures from 1928 had been shown in galleries, although Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit had already been published in Variétés, the short-lived review edited by the work's then owner, Van Hecke, having been kept by him from the stock of the then-dissolved Galerie L'Epoque. In 1930, Magritte had tired of Paris and in particular of the strictures of the Surreal movement there, which followed Breton too rigorously for the Belgian artist's liking. He appears to have actively sought out an occasion to squabble with Breton and then, following this, left. He was clearly keen to leave his years of Parisian Surrealism behind him: he apparently burnt many of his photographs, letters and documents from the period with his friend Louis Scutenaire. Indeed, the incinerated objects even included an overcoat, a mark of his desire to eradicate certain memories (see S. Gablik, Magritte, London, 1992, p. 65).

Magritte's return to Brussels was fêted with an exhibition that certainly underlined his Surreal credentials. According to a review, the show in which Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was first revealed, having been lent by Van Hecke alongside fifteen other works mainly from Nougé, was opened in a spectacular manner:

'The first guests were surprised to find the hall plunged in darkness, and two lackeys in scarlet livery and with powdered hair standing on either side of an enormous lighted candle. A double metronome ticked away the while in the empty silence.
'About one o'clock in the morning, some fifty guests, among whom could be discerned up to three Surrealists, including two dissidents, crowded around the buffet, where whisky and gin were flowing freely. A gramophone began playing barrel-organ tunes, and M. Créten-George opened the ball, and was followed by all the bright young things.
'It was only at a very late hour that the assembled guests, intrigued by the ecstatic look which Mlle Solange Moret from the Casino was gazing intently at the walls, suddenly discovered hanging there some pictures belonging to M. Nougé, painted by M. Magritte. A concert of praise was immediately organised under the brilliant direction of M. Gustave van Hecke' (Le rouge et le noir, 18 February 1931, reproduced in D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, p. 9).

In fact, it appears that the valets had their faces painted green; the music was discordant for part of the soirée as different tunes were being played simultaneously on four gramophones, and early in the morning, the lights were raised so that the pictures on the walls, including Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, became visible. The evening clearly passed well, not least for Magritte, about whom it was written elsewhere:

'The painter M... who was the hero of the evening, danced a great deal. To demonstrate his ardent love of the people, he granted a waltz to one of the liveried valets, and then performed the java with the cloakroom attendant. She was, in fact, extremely charming... Which goes to show that Surrealists are not stuck-up' (Midi, 12 February 1931, quoted ibid., p. 9).

Two years later, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was included in a one-man show held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; this was one of the few pictures from the period that had previously been exhibited. By then, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was lent by Magritte's friend, Claude Spaak. The pair had met in 1931, and Spaak would become an important supporter of Magritte's work as well as a prominent collector. Spaak also lent Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit to an exhibition dedicated to the predominantly Surreal review, Minotaure, in 1934, also held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. On this occasion, the picture was shown alongside a formidable selection of works by a wide range of artists including Constantin Brancusi, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Henri Matisse and Picasso (see ibid., p. 26).

In the 1950s, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was acquired by William Copley. Although Copley had initially shown little interest in art, in 1948 he and his brother-in-law John Ploydardt, an artist and animator for Walt Disney, together set up an art gallery (see S. Cochran, 'Passing the Hat: René Magritte and William Copley', pp. 75-79, S. Barron & M. Draguet, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 2006). Although the Copley Gallery which they founded in Beverly Hills was short-lived, it was nonetheless influential, exposing Magritte and a number of other Surreal artists to the West Coast. At the same time, for Copley, who was a man of independent means, it provided a springboard into the world of the Surreal. He would financially back each exhibition by buying works, and was introduced to a number of the artists who had fled France for the United States during the Second World War.

Eventually, after the closure of the gallery, Copley accompanied Man Ray to Europe and lived in France for a decade. Copley himself had become an artist in his own right by this time. During that time, he was introduced to Magritte, with whom he had already corresponded and whose works he had already collected. Apparently, the initial meeting was a disappointment: Copley was surprised, after the flamboyance of the Parisian Surrealists, to find a man wearing respectable bourgeois garb. But soon he was fascinated by Magritte's uniform, which often served as a foil to his outrageous acts and visionary art. Indeed, Copley himself would pay Magritte the ultimate compliment by adopting the iconic bowler hat as part of his own outfit in later years. This was a mark of the esteem in which he held Magritte, which also became the basis of their friendship. It is a tribute to their relationship that Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit would remain in Copley's collection for over two decades.

Christie's. THE ART OF THE SURREAL. 4 February 2014. London, King Street - www.christies.com