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Lot Essay
In this exquisitely rendered gouache, René Magritte returned to one of his most beloved images, a seated coffin. These anthropomorphised objects, at once fantastical and impossible, macabre and humorous, had become a central part of Magritte’s oeuvre. Set in everyday locations, such as the present work, or inserted into popular masterpieces by Edouard Manet, Jacques-Louis David, and François Gérard, with this motif Magritte explored the concept of appropriation as well as playfully alluding to themes of life and death. The act of metamorphosis or transformation was one that obsessed the artist: bottles morph into carrots, shoes into feet; figures into sky; or as in the present work, a deceased historcal figure into a wooden coffin.
The concept of a seated coffin first appeared in a closely related gouache of 1949 entitled Perspective (Sylvester and Whitfield, no. 1307). The Surrealist poet and friend of Magritte, Marcel Mariën described exactly how this playful composition percolated Magritte’s artistic imagination, providing a rare glimpse into the artist’s working practice: ‘This is how things happened and, as I can truly say, under my very eyes. Magritte began by painting a little gouache with a frontal view of a seated coffin installed in an armchair. I well remember that when Nougé and I saw it together for the first time, our immediate reaction was to burst out laughing, thus reawakening Magritte’s own amusement which had necessarily subsided in the interval since he had found the idea. Because the fact is (not the sort of thing to say!) that the image is comic – laughter and death, it is well-known, have always gone hand in hand. Half an hour or so later, there was still louder laughter when Nougé announced the title he had just thought of: Perspective (in both the temporal and geometrical senses)’ (‘Activité surréaliste,’ quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, 1949-1967, London, 1993, p.146)
Out of this motif, Magritte painted a small series of works in which he appropriated a famous work of art history by replacing the protagonists with the same coffin-figure forms. He first turned to Manet’s Le Balcon (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); Perspective: Le balcon de Manet (Sylvester, no. 710; sold Christie’s London, 5 February 2020, lot 34) was the first of this series. He painted a second, near identical version the following year (Sylvester, no. 721; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent). Magritte subsequently took two more paintings, Jacques Louis David’s Madame Récamier (1800, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and François Gérard’s portrait of the same sitter (1802, Musée Carnavelet, Paris) and, remaining faithful to the other compositional details, likewise turned the female protagonists into wooden coffins (Sylvester, nos. 741, 742, 757).
When confronted about the meaning of these strangely compelling ‘coffin-figures’ Magritte denied the implication of any symbolic or iconographic connotations of this motif. The motif however, had perhaps been born of a childhood memory, which the artist described in his famous lecture, titled La Ligne de la Vie, of 1938. ‘As a child’, he explained, ‘I used to play with a little girl in the old provincial cemetery. We would go down into the family vaults, when we could lift their heavy iron doors, and would come up into the light again to find an artist from Brussels at work on a very picturesque path, where broken stone columns were scattered among dead leaves’ (quoted in J.T. Soby, René Magritte, exh. cat., New York, 1965, p. 44).
La belle hérétique is one of seven gouaches of this scale that Magritte created for the dealer, Alexandre Iolas (Sylvester, nos. 1546-1551), who included them in a one-man show of the artist which he organised in London with the Hanover Gallery in May 1964, then in Paris later the same year. Together with the present work, Magritte similarly returned to beloved themes and motifs, including Le château des Pyrénées (Sylvester, no. 1546), Le chef d’oeuvre ou les mystères de l’horizon (Sylvester, no. 1547) and L’arc de triomphe (Sylvester, no. 1551). The Paris exhibition, entitled Le sens propre at Magritte’s request, included a text by André Breton, as well as a short text written by the artist himself. ‘Only someone knowing nothing about my painting would associate it with symbolism,’ he stated, ‘whether naïve or sophisticated. At the same time, what I paint implies no superiority of the invisible over the visible: the latter is rich enough to constitute the language of a poetry evoking the mystery of the invisible and the visible’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., p. 129).
The concept of a seated coffin first appeared in a closely related gouache of 1949 entitled Perspective (Sylvester and Whitfield, no. 1307). The Surrealist poet and friend of Magritte, Marcel Mariën described exactly how this playful composition percolated Magritte’s artistic imagination, providing a rare glimpse into the artist’s working practice: ‘This is how things happened and, as I can truly say, under my very eyes. Magritte began by painting a little gouache with a frontal view of a seated coffin installed in an armchair. I well remember that when Nougé and I saw it together for the first time, our immediate reaction was to burst out laughing, thus reawakening Magritte’s own amusement which had necessarily subsided in the interval since he had found the idea. Because the fact is (not the sort of thing to say!) that the image is comic – laughter and death, it is well-known, have always gone hand in hand. Half an hour or so later, there was still louder laughter when Nougé announced the title he had just thought of: Perspective (in both the temporal and geometrical senses)’ (‘Activité surréaliste,’ quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, 1949-1967, London, 1993, p.146)
Out of this motif, Magritte painted a small series of works in which he appropriated a famous work of art history by replacing the protagonists with the same coffin-figure forms. He first turned to Manet’s Le Balcon (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); Perspective: Le balcon de Manet (Sylvester, no. 710; sold Christie’s London, 5 February 2020, lot 34) was the first of this series. He painted a second, near identical version the following year (Sylvester, no. 721; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent). Magritte subsequently took two more paintings, Jacques Louis David’s Madame Récamier (1800, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and François Gérard’s portrait of the same sitter (1802, Musée Carnavelet, Paris) and, remaining faithful to the other compositional details, likewise turned the female protagonists into wooden coffins (Sylvester, nos. 741, 742, 757).
When confronted about the meaning of these strangely compelling ‘coffin-figures’ Magritte denied the implication of any symbolic or iconographic connotations of this motif. The motif however, had perhaps been born of a childhood memory, which the artist described in his famous lecture, titled La Ligne de la Vie, of 1938. ‘As a child’, he explained, ‘I used to play with a little girl in the old provincial cemetery. We would go down into the family vaults, when we could lift their heavy iron doors, and would come up into the light again to find an artist from Brussels at work on a very picturesque path, where broken stone columns were scattered among dead leaves’ (quoted in J.T. Soby, René Magritte, exh. cat., New York, 1965, p. 44).
La belle hérétique is one of seven gouaches of this scale that Magritte created for the dealer, Alexandre Iolas (Sylvester, nos. 1546-1551), who included them in a one-man show of the artist which he organised in London with the Hanover Gallery in May 1964, then in Paris later the same year. Together with the present work, Magritte similarly returned to beloved themes and motifs, including Le château des Pyrénées (Sylvester, no. 1546), Le chef d’oeuvre ou les mystères de l’horizon (Sylvester, no. 1547) and L’arc de triomphe (Sylvester, no. 1551). The Paris exhibition, entitled Le sens propre at Magritte’s request, included a text by André Breton, as well as a short text written by the artist himself. ‘Only someone knowing nothing about my painting would associate it with symbolism,’ he stated, ‘whether naïve or sophisticated. At the same time, what I paint implies no superiority of the invisible over the visible: the latter is rich enough to constitute the language of a poetry evoking the mystery of the invisible and the visible’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., p. 129).