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Lot Essay
On a table by a gas lamp, a cigar is perched in a box, its ash end protruding, smoke lazily curling up, almost parallel to the lines of some untroubled curtain; meanwhile in the background, a storm rages, tossing a ship to and fro. Executed in 1946, La traversée difficile is a variation upon the central theme of one of the pictures dating from the formative period of René Magritte's unique Surrealism: with its depiction of a shipwreck in progress as a backdrop behind an image of stillness and incongruousness, this is clearly a gouache reprisal of one of Magritte's paintings of the same title from two decades earlier in 1926. However, there are numerous differences that allow La traversée difficile to infiltrate our world more easily: Magritte has jettisoned the clutter of Surreal objects that filled the original, for instance the mannequin's severed hand on a table and the bilboquet, instead using elements that we can recognise and that are not strange in themselves yet which, in combination, exert a strange and mysterious power.
When the oil painting entitled La traversée difficile was painted, Magritte had been experimenting with newly-discovered techniques of juxtaposition in order to create pictures that were filled with illogic, with enigma, and with impossibility to the extent that they would prompt a revelation in the viewer. In this 1946 revisitation of the theme. However, with the cigar and the lamp appearing as direct substitutes for the more surreal elements such as the bilboquet and the hand, and with the interior of the early work replaced with a balustrade that implies that this view is being seen from some balcony or veranda, Magritte has heightened the jarring difference between the atmosphere in the calm, still room and the stormy seascape beyond. In this way, La traversée difficile plunges the viewer deeper into a world of paradox and possibility.
When the oil painting entitled La traversée difficile was painted, Magritte had been experimenting with newly-discovered techniques of juxtaposition in order to create pictures that were filled with illogic, with enigma, and with impossibility to the extent that they would prompt a revelation in the viewer. In this 1946 revisitation of the theme. However, with the cigar and the lamp appearing as direct substitutes for the more surreal elements such as the bilboquet and the hand, and with the interior of the early work replaced with a balustrade that implies that this view is being seen from some balcony or veranda, Magritte has heightened the jarring difference between the atmosphere in the calm, still room and the stormy seascape beyond. In this way, La traversée difficile plunges the viewer deeper into a world of paradox and possibility.