René Magritte (1898-1967)  - Le printemps

signed 'Magritte' (lower left) - oil on canvas - 18 1/8 x 21 5/8 in. (46 x 55 cm.) - Painted circa 1965 - Estimate: £2,000,000-3,000,000 - Adjugé £2,708,500 ($5,330,328/€3,588,763)

Provenance: Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1968.

Literature: S. Alexandrian & P. Waldberg, René Magritte, Paris, 1970 (illustrated p. 51).
J. Meuris, René Magritte 1898-1967, Cologne, 1990 (illustrated p. 141).
J. Meuris, Magritte, New York, 1991, no. 252 (illustrated p. 170).
D. Sylvester (ed.), René Magritte: catalogue raisonné, vol. III, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes 1949-1967, Antwerp, 1993, no. 1016 (illustrated p. 412).

Exhibited: Brussels, Galerie Isy Brachot, Art sans frontières IV, December - 1968 - January 1969, no. 75.
Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, Ensor, Delvaux, Magritte..., March - April 1969 (dated '1965').
Lausanne, Fondation de l'Hermitage, René Magritte, June - November 1987, no. 115.
Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, René Magritte, November 1987 - February 1988, no. 127 (illustrated).

Notes: Caught in the air, flying above a nest filled with eggs, a bird is shown against the backdrop of a pleasantly cloud-specked sky. And yet the bird is a silhouette, a cut-out, its shape filled with a foliage that appears to be a continuation of the woodland in the background in the lower portion of the painting. This picture is filled with the strangeness and poetry so unique to the vision Magritte.

By the time Le printemps was painted, circa 1965, Magritte had long been filtering the visual world from his unique perspective, taking the simple elements and assumptions from everyday life and converting them, twisting them, giving them just enough of a nudge and a disruption that they would take on new qualities. In this picture, Magritte has chosen a selection of simple elements bird, trees, eggs and reconfigured their properties to marvellous effect. In turn, the genuine world of visual impetus surrounding the viewer regains some of its poetry and mystery - when next we see a bird, we no longer take for granted the strangeness of its ability to fly or the uniqueness of its appearance. Le printemps has been painted in such a way as to give a sense of stillness, even contemplation, that is deliberately at odds with the dynamism of flight; the trees, too, which comprise the bird's body imply rootedness and therefore stillness. They imply a link to the ground which is not there, Magritte presenting the viewer with a range of paradoxes, riddles to which there is no true answer and which beg us only to look upon the world around us as a riddle, a source of mystery and wonder.

Magritte himself explained that the elements that comprise his works are not stand-ins for other meanings, are not products of the worlds of dream and the subconscious that had so fascinated other artists associated with the Surreal. 'In the images I paint, there is no question of either dream, escape, or symbols,' Magritte explained.

'My images are not substitutes for either sleeping or waking dreams. They do not give us the illusion of escaping from reality. They do not replace the habit of degrading what we see into conventional symbols, old or new.
'I conceive painting as the art of juxtaposing colours in such a way that their effective aspect disappears and allows a poetic image to become visible. This image is the total description of a thought that unites-- in a poetic order-- familiar figures of the visible: skies, people, trees, mountains, furniture, stars, solids, inscriptions, etc. The poetic order evokes mystery, it responds to our natural interest in the unknown.
'Poetic images are visible, but they are as intangible as the universe. These poetic images hide nothing: they show nothing but the figures of the visible. Painting is totally unfitted for representing the invisible, that is, what cannot be illuminated by the light: pleasure, sorrow, knowledge and ignorance, speech and silence, etc.
'After having attempted to understand non-traditional painting, we admit that it cannot be understood. In any case, we are not assuming any serious responsibility: we do not have to know or to learn anything. Imaginary irrationality is futile and boring. However, we can understand poetic thought by making it a part of ourselves and by taking care not to remove from the known the unknown elements it contains' (R. Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, translated by R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 224).

In Le printemps, it is clear, then, that the bird, the eggs, the woodland are not symbols, but are there representing themselves, bringing to light their own particularities and peculiarities, making us all the more aware of their singular properties, in short, forcing the viewer to contemplate the 'unknown elements' that they contain.

During Magritte's career, he became increasingly adept at converting his vision of the mysteries of the world into pictures that, through their iconic simplicity, conveyed their messages all the more strikingly. Where some of his earlier Surreal pictures had a wealth of details and juxtapositions, from the 1930s onwards, he pared back the elements, making each one pack a far greater punch. It is in its simplicity that Le printemps gains its strange, distinctive, revelatory power. By limiting himself to only a few elements bird, sky, nest, parapet, woodland Magritte succeeds in presenting the viewer with a concise range of objects and, crucially, a concise range of the relationships between them. The sense of impossibility within the realm of this Magrittean epiphany is exemplified by the interplay between, for instance, the egg-filled nest and the foliage-bird-- could such a strange, two-dimensional, cut-out bird have laid eggs? This quandary recalls the stone eagle shown above a parapet furnished with an egg-filled nest in Le domaine d'Arnheim. Where in that work, the bird is made of mountain, in Le printemps the eggs appear (within the two-dimensional world of the picture) three-dimensional, painted in the round as opposed to the silhouette-like bird. The interplays between the elements in this painting even throw the sky itself into question. After all, if the bird is a cut-out, are the trees behind the sky? It is confronting us with these simple, sometimes discreet interplays, juxtapositions, relationships, contrasts and comparisons, with incongruities and incompatibilities, that Magritte prompts us towards a more awe-filled appreciation of the world.

In the 1930s, many of Magritte's pictures dealt with problems and questions, riddles posed by simple elements such as the door, the window, the sea, the horse... In a sense, flight and the bird are the 'problems' that Magritte has attempted to solve in Le printemps. However, these 'problems,' as Magritte was at pains to point out, 'are not themes. These are images that come together, that impose themselves upon me. Always images of the simplest objects, those anyone can see around him: a hat, a bell, an apple, an easel, a bird, a street lamp, a brick wall, shoes, a three-piece suit. Except that sometimes the hat is resting on the apple, the bird is made of stone, the shoes are feet with real toes, the brick wall takes the form of a desk, and the three-piece suit is really a pleasant valley. These ideas for combining images occur to me without my looking for them' (Magritte, quoted in ibid., p. 202). This statement is important as it reveals the extent to which inspiration, pure and simple, would provide Magritte's pictorial solutions. These were ideas that would occur to the artist, not as the result of active investigation, but instead as miniature revelations.

Many of Magritte's pictures, especially his iconic La trahison des images, in which a painting of a pipe was accompanied by a caption stating that this was not a pipe, deal with the properties and limitations of the act of representation. The picture of a pipe clearly is not a pipe, as Magritte pointed out. In Le printemps, Magritte appears to question the nature of the two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional world in part through the visual puzzle with which the viewer is presented, and also through the deliberate cut-out appearance of the bird itself. Is Magritte deliberately pointing out the flatness of painting in comparison to the 'depth' of the real world? Is he implying that another dimension lies beyond our grasp, beyond the veil of our prosaic, habit-numbed appreciation of the world around us?

The interplays in Le printemps are brought into bolder relief by the title, which reinforces the notions of the verdant foliage, life, birth and rebirth introduced by the various elements depicted. Magritte's titles, which were sometimes suggested by his friends rather than being integrally linked to his works, are nonetheless evocative, and he was well aware of the way in which they could add an extra dimension to his works, an extra layer of questioning, an extra layer of interpretation, or to be interpreted. As he himself stated, 'The titles of my paintings accompany them like the names attached to objects without illustrating or explaining them' (R. Magritte, letter to Barnet Hodes, 1957, quoted in ibid., p. 203).

René Magritte (1898-1967) - La malédiction

signed 'Magritte' (lower left) - oil on canvas - 21 1/2 x 29 in. (54.5 x 73.5 cm.) - Painted in 1931 - Estimate: £800,000-1,200,000

Provenance: (Probably) Claude Spaak, Brussels, by whom acquired from the artist.
Emile Happé-Lorge, a gift from the above.
Anonymous sale, Guillaume Campo, Antwerp, 13-15 October 1964.
Private collection, Belgium, by whom acquired at the above sale.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1973.

Literature: M. Mariën, 'La malédiction', in Le Ciel bleu, Brussels, 12 April 1945, p. 3.
D. Sylvester (ed.), René Magritte, catalogue raisonné, vol. II, Oil Paintings and Objects, 1931-1948, Antwerp, 1993, no. 337 (illustrated p. 173).

Exhibited: Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Art wallon contemporain, December 1931 - January 1932, no. 55.
Brussels, Galerie Robert Finck, Exposition de peinture belge moderne: de Jacob Smits à Roger Dudant, March 1962, no. 42 (illustrated).
Ferrara, Gallerie Civiche d'Arte Moderna, Palazzo dei Diamanti, René Magritte, June - October 1986, no. 22.
Punkaharju, Finland, Retretti Art Centre, Surrealism in Visual Arts and Film, May - October 1987.
London, The Hayward Gallery, The South Bank Centre, Magritte, May - August 1992, no. 57 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, September - November 1992; Houston, The Menil Collection, December - February 1993 and Chicago, The Art Institute, March - May 1993.
Brussels, The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, René Magritte, 1898-1967, March - June 1998, no. 97 (illustrated p. 116).

Notes: A patch of sky fills the canvas in La malédiction. Magritte has restrained himself from painting any extraneous, distracting details, creating a picture that appears deliberately incomplete. Is this intended to resemble a window on the wall? Perhaps Magritte is conveying the extent to which his pictures act as windows into a dimension of infinite and subtle poetry, forcing the viewer to appreciate anew the mysteries of everyday existence to which we have become all too inured. By presenting the viewer with a portion of sky on the canvas, Magritte shows both his credentials as a Surrealist, inviting us into his unique visual world, and as an artistic innovator, flagrantly disregarding pictorial convention and bending it to his own use.

In David Sylvester's catalogue raisonné of the works of Magritte, it has been deducted that La malédiction was the painting that the Belgian Surrealist made for his friend Claude Spaak in 1931, which was exhibited in Brussels later that year. This would make it the earliest work to bear the title La malédiction: the single painting filled with the sky alone would be a theme to which Magritte returned several times over the following decades, especially in a group of small oils which he gave as gifts to his friends. This, then, reflects the fact that these works, showing the cloud-specked sky, must have been close to the artist's heart.

The picture's background as a gift for Spaak, a prominent novelist and playwright who would also become one of the greatest collectors and advocates of Magritte's works, marks this as a milestone in the Belgian Surrealist's career. For this picture dates to the period immediately after Magritte's break with the Parisian Surrealists and André Breton in particular. It was on his return from Paris that Magritte first met Spaak, who was the first Director of the Societé Auxiliaire des Expositions at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, where La malédiction was exhibited in the year of its execution. Magritte had broken with the Surrealists in Paris for various reasons, tensions having increased between himself and Breton, the self-appointed guru of the movement. This culminated in Magritte and his wife Georgette storming out of a Surrealist meeting when Breton questioned why Georgette was wearing a crucifix. The break seemed, at the time, final, and it is a tribute to the importance and influence that Magritte wielded already after only a few years painting 'Surreal' works that many friends attempted to mediate and heal this rift. In the end, it lasted only a few years, but even after the rapprochement, Magritte was a committed 'other', living in Belgium and following his own path, rather than what he perceived as the more prescriptive path of the Parisian Surrealists. On his return to Brussels, Magritte had encountered old friends, made new friends, moved into the house that would remain his home for over two decades, and thus began his strange and idiosyncratic assault on the hierarchies and hegemonies of the world, of our perceptions, from the deceptively unassuming vantage-point of his bourgeois home. Unlike the flamboyantly Surreal artists, thinkers and writers congregating in Paris, Magritte channelled his vision into his pictures, appearing as the calm, bowler-hatted man, almost anonymously pushing his viewers towards great revelations.

Perhaps the presence on one's walls of a canvas showing the cloudy sky was intended to imply that the viewer had already stumbled into an epiphany, somehow appearing within the disjointed universe within Magritte's paintings. In several works from the preceding years, and again in works that would punctuate the remainder of his career, Magritte had included sky-paintings within his pictures, and yet had not produced sky-paintings per se. This had begun when 'panels' of sky, strange and incongruous areas within a work's composition, appeared in pictures such as L'usage de la parole, L'idée fixe (in the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin) and Au seuil de la liberté (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam), all of 1928; actual paintings-within-paintings showing the sky 'framed' occurred around this time in works including La vie secrète and Le salon de Monsieur Goulden of the same year; and Magritte then appears to have chosen to paint a group of sky-pictures similar to those featuring as paintings-within-a-painting in those two works, when he created the four-panelled Les perfections célestes in 1930. In that work, as in La malédiction, there is the implication that some element from within Magritte's own universe has leapt into our dimension, has crossed the boundary of the canvas. Or, instead, that we have entered Magritte's realm.

There is a discreet absurdity to this sky-filled canvas. It lacks any frame of reference to the world that surrounds the sky: Magritte has taken what is traditionally the upper portion of a painting, perhaps a landscape, perhaps a narrative work, and has ripped it away from any other frame of signification. And yet, why should a section of the sky, as beautiful as it is, not merit the status of subject in its own right? The sky, after all, has been painted on many ceilings by many great artists. Magritte, then, has taken an art historical theme, something from the accepted canon of what is and what is not traditionally considered art, and has turned it discreetly upon its head. If seascapes and landscapes should exist as pictures, why not skyscapes? The sky is a canopy arching over us all, a great uniting bond between all the inhabitants of the Earth, and its absence from older paintings as a theme in its own right (except in occasional studies) appears an injustice. Magritte has jarred us into a better and more active appreciation of one of the everyday elements of our everyday worlds, bringing to the fore the sense of wonder that we should feel each and every day. It is on this level, far from the subconscious or hidden dimensions that were such a source of fascination to his Parisian Surrealist contemporaries, that Magritte's pictures work. Rather than revealing hidden realms, he asks us to appreciate the crazy wonders of the universe that we inhabit and to which we are all too accustomed. It is a tribute to his success in this that another friend of Magritte's, Paul Nougé, himself the owner of the second, 1936 reprisal of the theme of La malédiction, wrote in his final text on his artist friend:

'The sky. No one has yet pursued the analysis of this considerable object far enough. A human history of the sky should be written, in order to disentangle the curious, age-long mishmash of naïve impressions, stimulations and illuminations (The eternal silence...), of more or less exact physics, and of flimsy religious constructions. In this domain, painters' revelations have been rare. And banal just open any encyclopedia of painting.
'Magritte, however, is the exception' (P. Nougé. 'Les points sur les signes', 1948, from Histoire, trans. B. Wright, reproduced in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh.cat., London, 1992, no. 57).

René Magritte (1898-1967) - Le jockey perdu

signed 'Magritte' (upper right) - gouache on paper - 25 1/2 x 19 7/8 in. (64.8 x 50.5 cm.) - Estimate: £350,000-550,000

Provenance: Galleria Internazionale, Milan (no. 166).
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1960s.

Notes: Le jockey perdu is one of the largest format gouaches by René Magritte, a variation of one of the artist's favourite themes, the crazily displaced horse racing with its rider through an incongruous landscape. In this gouache, Magritte has introduced several other motifs as well: floating above the lost jockey of the title is a mysterious sphere, while the entire scene is shown through a strange, rocky portal, as though the viewer were in a colossal cave at the edge of this flat scrubland.

Magritte first tackled the theme of Le jockey perdu in 1926, a watershed period for the artist, in which he suddendly found a means of exposing the mysteries of the world, the poetic associations between the objects that form our reality and which we take all too much for granted. His strange juxtapositions challenged the viewer, demanding that we consider afresh the properties of the everyday elements of the world around us. So, in this gouache of Le jockey perdu, it can be seen the racetrack that would usually play host to a jockey is absent, the racer taken out of context. At the same time, a strange new planet hovers as though within the atmosphere of the Earth; this ball has replaced the sun and the moon; its looming presence adds a cosmic oddness to the entire picture.

It is a tribute to the importance of this theme that Magritte himself would write, with reference to his original oil of the subject, that 'Le jockey perdu (The Lost Jockey) is the first canvas I really painted with the feeling I had found my way, if one can use that term' (R. Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, translated by R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 48). Magritte's own revelation had occurred when he had seen a painting by Giorgio de Chirico. Presenting the viewer with an eccentric assortment of seemingly unassociated objects, de Chirico's Le chant d'amour introduced the viewer to a realm in which another hidden logic appeared dominant. While the mysticism of de Chirico did not influence Magritte, the break with perceived reality and the use of juxtapositions did. For this reason, Magritte denied the open influence of de Chirico, making specific reference to his first version of Le jockey perdu:

'If one takes into consideration what I've painted since 1926 (Le jockey perdu-1926-- for example, and what followed), I don't think one can talk about 'Chirico's influence' I was 'struck' about 1925 when I saw a picture by Chirico Le chant d'amour. If there is any influence it's quite possible there's no resemblance to Chirico's pictures in Le jockey perdu. In sum, the influence in question is limited to a great emotion, to a marvellous revelation when for the first time in my life I saw truly poetic painting. With time, I began to renounce researches into pictures in which the manner of painting was uppermost. Now, I know that since 1926 I've only worried about what should be painted. This became clear only some time after having 'instinctively' sought what should be painted' (R. Magritte, quoted in ibid., p. 258).

As in several of Magritte's strongest works, Le jockey perdu is made all the more visually striking by the contrast between stillness and dynamism, here articulated by the difference between the speed of the jockey and the emptiness of the landscape around him. Where de Chirico's works were often marked by an intense sense of poise and stillness, Magritte has prompted the viewer into a profound investigation of everyday elements, items and qualities from the world around us such as movement, horses, gravity and the celestial bodies.

Christie's. The Art of the Surreal. 4 February 2008, 6:00 pm. 8 King Street, St James's, London