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Lot Essay
Le changement des couleurs is a rare, early work by René Magritte, dating from the formative years in which he honed his distinctive Surreal aesthetic. Imbued with understated tension and invisible drama, Le changement des couleurs evokes a dark landscape, perhaps by the ocean, swept by strong winds and covered by menacing clouds. In the foreground, a large plant agitates its leaves like fleshy tentacles probing the air, while the sky has the distinctive heaviness of an imminent storm.
In Le changement des couleurs, Magritte avoided the characteristic visual subversion of his work: by simply reducing his palette to a few dark tones he has succeeded in creating an image of disquiet, in which the elements seem to be confounded with each other, the sky becoming sea, the sea becoming sky, and the vegetable turning animal, prefiguring, in this regard, a later, celebrated series of paintings, such as L’île au trésor (1942, S. 1170), in which green leaves turn into birds.
Le changement des couleurs seems to be the first of a small series of related paintings, in several of which Magritte developed the idea of a group of bells hovering over a landscape. If in Le changement des couleurs Magritte set the mysterious and nocturnal mood of the series, in Les Fleurs de l’abîme (S. 239) - painted that same year and in the exact same dimensions – the artist emphasised the dramatic character of the landscape by transforming it into a chasm and placing a group of metal bells amid the leaves of the plant. The image would further evolve in La voix des airs (S. 241), in which Magritte would let leaves and landscape disappear into a dense dark night, leaving only the bells in the foreground to dominate the scene. Round bells, with a slit in their middle, were first used by Magritte in 1926 in The Silvered Chasm (S. 87), in which the bells appear attached on an ambiguous surface, reminiscent of a curtain, yet grey as rock. The same type of surface appears on the right side of Les Fleurs de l’abîme, yet the bells are placed in the middle to form a tight group between the leaves, a feature that would eventually overrule in La voix des airs. Capturing the enigmatic character of a dark, empty landscape, Le changement des couleurs might have provided Magritte with a crucial image in the development of a poetic idea involving bells, an element that would become – as expressed by David Sylvester – ‘Magritte’s trademark’ (D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 116).
In 1928, the year Magritte executed Le changement des couleurs, Breton – the Surrealists’ leader – started buying Magritte’s paintings, acquiring some of the artist’s most recent production. Sylvester defined 1928 as Magritte’s most fruitful year, both in terms of quantity and quality. Alongside Le changement des couleurs, Magritte did in fact paint some of his most momentous pictures – such as Les amants (S. 250); L’homme au journal (S. 270); Tentative de l’impossible (S. 284) - and devised some of his most enduring pictorial riddles, such as the collision of words and images.
In Le changement des couleurs, Magritte avoided the characteristic visual subversion of his work: by simply reducing his palette to a few dark tones he has succeeded in creating an image of disquiet, in which the elements seem to be confounded with each other, the sky becoming sea, the sea becoming sky, and the vegetable turning animal, prefiguring, in this regard, a later, celebrated series of paintings, such as L’île au trésor (1942, S. 1170), in which green leaves turn into birds.
Le changement des couleurs seems to be the first of a small series of related paintings, in several of which Magritte developed the idea of a group of bells hovering over a landscape. If in Le changement des couleurs Magritte set the mysterious and nocturnal mood of the series, in Les Fleurs de l’abîme (S. 239) - painted that same year and in the exact same dimensions – the artist emphasised the dramatic character of the landscape by transforming it into a chasm and placing a group of metal bells amid the leaves of the plant. The image would further evolve in La voix des airs (S. 241), in which Magritte would let leaves and landscape disappear into a dense dark night, leaving only the bells in the foreground to dominate the scene. Round bells, with a slit in their middle, were first used by Magritte in 1926 in The Silvered Chasm (S. 87), in which the bells appear attached on an ambiguous surface, reminiscent of a curtain, yet grey as rock. The same type of surface appears on the right side of Les Fleurs de l’abîme, yet the bells are placed in the middle to form a tight group between the leaves, a feature that would eventually overrule in La voix des airs. Capturing the enigmatic character of a dark, empty landscape, Le changement des couleurs might have provided Magritte with a crucial image in the development of a poetic idea involving bells, an element that would become – as expressed by David Sylvester – ‘Magritte’s trademark’ (D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 116).
In 1928, the year Magritte executed Le changement des couleurs, Breton – the Surrealists’ leader – started buying Magritte’s paintings, acquiring some of the artist’s most recent production. Sylvester defined 1928 as Magritte’s most fruitful year, both in terms of quantity and quality. Alongside Le changement des couleurs, Magritte did in fact paint some of his most momentous pictures – such as Les amants (S. 250); L’homme au journal (S. 270); Tentative de l’impossible (S. 284) - and devised some of his most enduring pictorial riddles, such as the collision of words and images.