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Lot Essay
'As for the reproach of imitating Renoir, there is some misunderstanding: I have done pictures "after" Renoir, Ingres, Rubens, etc., but without using Renoir's particular technique, but rather that of Impressionism, including Renoir, Seurat, and others' (Magritte, 1946, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 187).
L’Océan was painted during Magritte’s self-proclaimed "sunlit period" which emerged in an effort to overcome the despair of the ongoing war. In defence of the Imoressionist style of the “sunlit period”, Magritte wrote in a letter to Breton in 1946: 'The disarray, the panic that Surrealism tried to create so as to call everything into question again, the Nazi cretins achieved that much better than we did, and there was no getting around it... In the face of widespread pessimism, I propose the search for joy, for pleasure. This joy and pleasure, which are so commonplace and yet so out of reach, seems to me to be up to us alone' (Magritte, 1946, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 187).
Inspired by Renoir's late paintings of voluptuous female nudes depicted in lush, idyllic landscapes, Magritte used a more luminous palette during this period, as evidenced by the present work. Magritte wrote in 1955: "For the period I call 'Surrealism in full sunlight,' I am trying to join together two mutually exclusive things: 1) a feeling of levity, intoxication, happiness, which depends on a certain mood and on an atmosphere that certain Impressionists—or rather, Impressionism in general—have managed to render in painting. Without Impressionism, I do not believe we would know this feeling of real objects perceived through colours and nuances, and free of all classical reminiscences... and, 2) a feeling of the mysterious quality of objects" (letter to G. Puel, as quoted in Harry Torczyner, René Magritte, Ideas and Images, Paris, 1977, p. 186).
L’Océan was painted during Magritte’s self-proclaimed "sunlit period" which emerged in an effort to overcome the despair of the ongoing war. In defence of the Imoressionist style of the “sunlit period”, Magritte wrote in a letter to Breton in 1946: 'The disarray, the panic that Surrealism tried to create so as to call everything into question again, the Nazi cretins achieved that much better than we did, and there was no getting around it... In the face of widespread pessimism, I propose the search for joy, for pleasure. This joy and pleasure, which are so commonplace and yet so out of reach, seems to me to be up to us alone' (Magritte, 1946, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 187).
Inspired by Renoir's late paintings of voluptuous female nudes depicted in lush, idyllic landscapes, Magritte used a more luminous palette during this period, as evidenced by the present work. Magritte wrote in 1955: "For the period I call 'Surrealism in full sunlight,' I am trying to join together two mutually exclusive things: 1) a feeling of levity, intoxication, happiness, which depends on a certain mood and on an atmosphere that certain Impressionists—or rather, Impressionism in general—have managed to render in painting. Without Impressionism, I do not believe we would know this feeling of real objects perceived through colours and nuances, and free of all classical reminiscences... and, 2) a feeling of the mysterious quality of objects" (letter to G. Puel, as quoted in Harry Torczyner, René Magritte, Ideas and Images, Paris, 1977, p. 186).