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Lot Essay
Executed in 1944, René Magritte's Un Picasso de derrière les fagots is one of a group of only three of his painted bottles, each of which features a pastiche of the work of the eponymous Spanish artist and one of which is in the Menil Collection, Houston. In the case of Un Picasso de derrière les fagots, the figure is clearly based on one of the people in Pablo Picasso's Les trois musiciens of 1921, a picture now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is a rare homage from Magritte, whose own works usually retained his own palpable aesthetic. Here, though, he has amplified the appropriation already introduced through the use of a bottle as a support for this painting by appropriating another artist's work.
Magritte may have been playing with the legacy of Cubism, the movement that Picasso had pioneered at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. One of the ideas that underpinned Cubism was the search for a means of presenting the three dimensional world in two dimensional format. Here, Magritte has playfully complicated this process by painting the musician on the curved bottle, and therefore in the round.
Like Magritte himself, Picasso was an artist who was sometimes associated with the Surreal movement based in Paris, though he also retained his distance from his friend André Breton and the sometimes doctrinaire approach that he took to Surrealism. Instead, Magritte remained linked to the less rigid Belgian group of Surrealists. By the time Un Picasso de derrière les fagots was painted, Picasso was already a world-renowned artist, and his defiant refusal to abandon his adopted home, France, during the Occupation had made him a figurehead while many of the other Surrealists had fled to the United States. Magritte himself had lived through the Occupation in Belgium and, during that time, had continued to create artworks. In Un Picasso de derrière les fagots, Magritte has made a comment on Picasso's fame and near-ubiquity by recreating his work on the bottle and lending it a title that implies that it was found behind the woodpile, a modern equivalent to the antiques that people sometimes hope find in the attic and also, all too aptly in the case of this painted bottle, invoking a phrase used to designate fine wine. The sense of a trouvaille, a hidden treasure rediscovered, may have reflected wishful thinking on Magritte's own part, as he found himself in straitened circumstances during the first half of the 1940s. Intriguingly, David Sylvester has suggested that this financial situation had even prompted Magritte to create imitation pictures by Picasso which could then be sold by Marcel Mariën, in part to fund their Surreal publications - it may, Sylvester has implied, have been this familiarity with recreating Picasso's works that led to the creation of Un Picasso de derrière les fagots and its fellows (see D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 315 and D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, p. 442).
Magritte may have been playing with the legacy of Cubism, the movement that Picasso had pioneered at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. One of the ideas that underpinned Cubism was the search for a means of presenting the three dimensional world in two dimensional format. Here, Magritte has playfully complicated this process by painting the musician on the curved bottle, and therefore in the round.
Like Magritte himself, Picasso was an artist who was sometimes associated with the Surreal movement based in Paris, though he also retained his distance from his friend André Breton and the sometimes doctrinaire approach that he took to Surrealism. Instead, Magritte remained linked to the less rigid Belgian group of Surrealists. By the time Un Picasso de derrière les fagots was painted, Picasso was already a world-renowned artist, and his defiant refusal to abandon his adopted home, France, during the Occupation had made him a figurehead while many of the other Surrealists had fled to the United States. Magritte himself had lived through the Occupation in Belgium and, during that time, had continued to create artworks. In Un Picasso de derrière les fagots, Magritte has made a comment on Picasso's fame and near-ubiquity by recreating his work on the bottle and lending it a title that implies that it was found behind the woodpile, a modern equivalent to the antiques that people sometimes hope find in the attic and also, all too aptly in the case of this painted bottle, invoking a phrase used to designate fine wine. The sense of a trouvaille, a hidden treasure rediscovered, may have reflected wishful thinking on Magritte's own part, as he found himself in straitened circumstances during the first half of the 1940s. Intriguingly, David Sylvester has suggested that this financial situation had even prompted Magritte to create imitation pictures by Picasso which could then be sold by Marcel Mariën, in part to fund their Surreal publications - it may, Sylvester has implied, have been this familiarity with recreating Picasso's works that led to the creation of Un Picasso de derrière les fagots and its fellows (see D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 315 and D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, p. 442).