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Lot Essay
Magritte painted in 1938 or 1939 three works in gouache on paper (Sylvester, nos. 1153, 1154 [the present picture], and 1155), and in 1939 completed an oil painting on canvas (no. 468), on each of which he bestowed the identical title, Stimulation objective (“Objective stimulus”)—notwithstanding the fact that only two of the gouaches have a single image in common (nos. 1154 and 1155). They nonetheless comprise a related series, insofar as the artist superimposed on each of the objects in these pictures a miniature version of itself; in the present Stimulation objective, he rendered both the ceramic pitcher and green apple in this way.
Magritte exhibited all four works, numbered sequentially in the catalogue, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, during May 1939, in a solo exhibition of recent work consisting of ten paintings and twenty-four gouaches. The latter were displayed in a room of their own. Magritte’s friend Paul Nougé wrote in the catalogue preface, “I recommend the reader to meditate on the strange series on Stimulations objectives; they give one a feeling of those famous ‘new horizons’ that are talked about so often and so inopportunely” (cat rais. op. cit., vol. II, 1993, p. 273).
Working more quickly in gouache than in oil colors enabled Magritte to explore a wider range of imagery as he prepared for the Palais des Beaux-Arts exhibition. In a letter to Marcel Mariën, probably written a few weeks before the show opened, Magritte explained, “I need to be stimulated by some association of ideas, not necessarily sensational but enough in some indefinable way to elicit a particular quality with which [the painting] is invested—the ability to carry me along...” (quoted in ibid.). This is the very idea that informs the present gouache and its companions in the Stimulation objective series, works which amount to an artistic “procedural” on how Magritte went about his work prior to the show.
In one of his most famous paintings, that of a pipe on which he inscribed “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (Sylvester, no. 303; Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Magritte warned us of la trahison des images, the inherent “treachery of images”—this painting of a pipe is definitely not a pipe. Such it is with the pitcher and apple in the present gouache, and twice over! Each object wears, like a label, the miniaturized replica of itself, removed and isolated from the reassuring context of the ledge overlooking the infinitude of azure and ocean beyond. Neither of them are the larger objects they represent—nor, for that matter, are the larger objects themselves, which Magritte would have us believe he had arranged before him to paint. The entire deal is a visual fiction—these are simply images—to which the eye and mind are nonetheless irresistibly drawn for contemplation of an austerely pure poetry, as well as the sly humor in the irresolvable visual double-entendres that Magritte devised to animate and mystify this scene.
Hidden somewhere “behind” the twin images of the pitcher and apple is the reality of these objects, or so we would like to believe: the world as it actually exists, not as it forever appears through the glass darkly of the mind that perceives it. The poet John Keats had an epiphany of the acquired sensibility that guides the true artist, which he called “Negative Capability, that is”—he wrote in 1817—“when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Magritte would have concurred: “All these unknown things which are coming to light convince me that our happiness too depends on an enigma inseparable from man and that our only duty is to try to grasp this enigma” (“La ligne de vie,” 1938; trans. D. Sylvester, cat. rais., op. cit., vol. V, 1997, p. 72).
Magritte exhibited all four works, numbered sequentially in the catalogue, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, during May 1939, in a solo exhibition of recent work consisting of ten paintings and twenty-four gouaches. The latter were displayed in a room of their own. Magritte’s friend Paul Nougé wrote in the catalogue preface, “I recommend the reader to meditate on the strange series on Stimulations objectives; they give one a feeling of those famous ‘new horizons’ that are talked about so often and so inopportunely” (cat rais. op. cit., vol. II, 1993, p. 273).
Working more quickly in gouache than in oil colors enabled Magritte to explore a wider range of imagery as he prepared for the Palais des Beaux-Arts exhibition. In a letter to Marcel Mariën, probably written a few weeks before the show opened, Magritte explained, “I need to be stimulated by some association of ideas, not necessarily sensational but enough in some indefinable way to elicit a particular quality with which [the painting] is invested—the ability to carry me along...” (quoted in ibid.). This is the very idea that informs the present gouache and its companions in the Stimulation objective series, works which amount to an artistic “procedural” on how Magritte went about his work prior to the show.
In one of his most famous paintings, that of a pipe on which he inscribed “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (Sylvester, no. 303; Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Magritte warned us of la trahison des images, the inherent “treachery of images”—this painting of a pipe is definitely not a pipe. Such it is with the pitcher and apple in the present gouache, and twice over! Each object wears, like a label, the miniaturized replica of itself, removed and isolated from the reassuring context of the ledge overlooking the infinitude of azure and ocean beyond. Neither of them are the larger objects they represent—nor, for that matter, are the larger objects themselves, which Magritte would have us believe he had arranged before him to paint. The entire deal is a visual fiction—these are simply images—to which the eye and mind are nonetheless irresistibly drawn for contemplation of an austerely pure poetry, as well as the sly humor in the irresolvable visual double-entendres that Magritte devised to animate and mystify this scene.
Hidden somewhere “behind” the twin images of the pitcher and apple is the reality of these objects, or so we would like to believe: the world as it actually exists, not as it forever appears through the glass darkly of the mind that perceives it. The poet John Keats had an epiphany of the acquired sensibility that guides the true artist, which he called “Negative Capability, that is”—he wrote in 1817—“when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Magritte would have concurred: “All these unknown things which are coming to light convince me that our happiness too depends on an enigma inseparable from man and that our only duty is to try to grasp this enigma” (“La ligne de vie,” 1938; trans. D. Sylvester, cat. rais., op. cit., vol. V, 1997, p. 72).