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Lot Essay
Executed circa 1950, Le retour presents a variation on one of René Magritte’s most poetic motifs: the oiseau de ciel, or ‘Sky-Bird,’ whose form, captured mid-flight, appears to be hewn from the very environment it inhabits. No longer made of flesh and feathers, the bird instead appears to be cut from the sky itself, its body filled with a pale blue expanse, dotted with soft, fluffy clouds. Appearing almost like a silhouette or cut-out, the oiseau de ciel introduces a pool of daylight into an otherwise twilit scene – the surrounding sky is cloudless and filled with twinkling stars, the light of an unseen moon bouncing off the surface of the water below. As such, the bird is transformed from an ordinary avian into a magical creature, becoming a portal, a route to another place, another time zone, another world. As with Magritte’s most successful images, Le retour prompts the viewer to perceive everyday reality in a new light, while also introducing a contemplative note, forcing us to reconsider the wonders of flight, something so familiar that it takes a cue such as Le retour for us to reassess and truly appreciate its inherent magic.
The motif of the oiseau de ciel had first appeared in Magritte’s oeuvre in the composition Le retour, painted in December 1940 and now in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Writing to Claude Spaak in late November of that year, Magritte outlined several ideas that were percolating in his imagination as he prepared for an exhibition at the Galerie Dietrich in Brussels. The letter contained a trio of sketches, including one the artist described as a ‘blue bird with clouds against a starry sky, foreground: nest with eggs’ (R. Magritte, quoted in in D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield and M. Raeburn, René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, London, 1993, p. 285). Le retour appears to have evolved from this initial concept, the silhouette of the bird changing to appear mid-flight rather than about to land on the parapet. While Magritte played with the silhouette of a bird in his 1942 gouache Le repos de l’esprit (Sylvester, no. 1182; Private collection), it was not until the early 1950s that the oiseau de ciel reappeared in Magritte’s art, forming the central focus of La promesse (Sylvester, no. 719; Private collection). Here, the sky-filled bird now hovers above a rolling seascape that deliberately echoes Wartan Mahokian’s painting La vague, a postcard of which the artist kept in his collection and which he drew on repeatedly for inspiration.
The present gouache appears to have emerged around this time, as Magritte returned to the motif of the oiseau de ciel and ruminated on the potential expansion of the theme. It echoes in form and style La promesse very closely, the sky-bird soaring above the empty beach while the waves gently lap the shoreline below. The play between night and daylight, seen through the precise contours of the bird’s silhouette, suggests not only a world beyond that which we can see, but also the artificiality of the scene that we can, which now appears like a flat stage-set behind which another reality lies. The following year, Magritte revisited the theme again in oil, painting Le baiser (Sylvester, no. 769; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) for his dealer, Alexander Iolas, and he continued to investigate the oiseau de ciel concept sporadically over the following years, allowing the motif to evolve, occasionally inverting the play between the different skyscapes, with night replacing day in the body of the bird.
Of course, the idea of flight was one which was bound to appeal to Magritte. From 1926, he had been engaged in an almost comprehensive programme of investigation into the essential properties of a range of subjects taken from the ‘everyday’ world. Absorbing the fundamental characteristics of these objects and themes, the artist would then reconfigure them through a variety of scenarios and concepts, in an effort to jolt the viewer out of their implicit acceptance of the world as they perceive it. As the artist explained, these pictures had been ‘the result of a systematic search for an overwhelming poetic effect through the arrangement of objects borrowed from reality, which would give the real world from which those objects had been borrowed an overwhelming poetic meaning by a natural process of exchange’ (R. Magritte in 1938, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, pp. 215-16).
It is through such a ‘process of exchange’ that the bird in Le retour is transformed into an object of wonder, its shape and pose so familiar, and yet its form so unexpected and improbable, that the assumptions and associations of the viewer are upended. Over the course of his artistic career, Magritte became increasingly adept at converting his vision of the mysteries of the world into pictures that, through their icon-like simplicity, conveyed their messages all the more strikingly. Where some of his earlier Surreal pictures boasted a wealth of details and juxtapositions, from the 1930s onwards he pared back the individual elements retained within his compositions and in so doing, created more impactful images that through their very simplicity, became all the more puzzling. In Le retour, Magritte distils the motif down to a single fundamental interplay between the bird and its surroundings, inserting the seemingly impossible into the otherwise ordinary, banal scene. Like a nesting doll, we are faced with a number of uncertainties by its presence and materiality, each one leading us to more questions rather than answers.
There is a logic, albeit one skewed through the prism of Magritte’s meandering explorations of his subjects, in the idea of a bird being shown as made of air. The artist himself explained that the elements that comprise his works are not stand-ins for other meanings, nor products of the worlds of dream and the subconscious that had so fascinated other painters associated with the surreal. ‘In the images I paint, there is no question of either dream, escape or symbolism,’ Magritte explained. ‘My images are not substitutes for either sleeping or waking dreams. They do not give us the illusion of escaping from reality… I conceive painting as the art of juxtaposing colours in such a way that their effective aspect disappears and allows a poetic image to become visible. This image is the total description of a thought that unites – in a poetic order – familiar figures of the visible: skies, people, trees, mountains, furniture, stars, solids, inscriptions, etc.’ (R. Magritte, quoted in ibid., p. 224). As such, Magritte appears to be applying some pataphysical notion of gravity and the nature of flight to this subject, genuinely exploring the possibility of the oiseau de ciel and how such a thing might look.
This line of thought would resurface in a pair of paintings from 1965, in which the bird in flight is subjected to different transformations and metamorphoses. For example, in L’idole (Sylvester, no. 1015; Private collection) Magritte uses the same silhouette as the oiseau de ciel paintings to explore the theme of petrification, the bird’s stone body defying gravity to soar through the air above a rocky seashore. Similarly, in Le printemps (Sylvester, no. 1016; Private collection) the bird appears to be made entirely of foliage, the shape of its internal leaves matching those of the hedge below. While the addition of the nest of eggs harks back to the original Le retour composition of 1940, here Magritte further emphasises the collage-like nature of the scene, allowing the bird to appear as if it has been directly cut-out from the hedge and pasted into the sky. In both these paintings, the materiality of the bird visually links it to elements that typically remain rooted to the earth, and yet they appear to fly, weightless, above the scene in defiance of our expectations. While these variations on the central motif allowed Magritte to expand upon his initial concept, it is the enigmatic slippage between space and time of the oiseau de ciel, its suggestion of another world beyond that of the canvas, or two time periods existing concurrently in the same space, that imbues works such as Le retour with such an intriguing sense of mystery.
The oiseau de ciel would go on to become one of the most iconic motifs within Magritte’s oeuvre, gaining international recognition largely through its adoption by the Belgian national air carrier, Sabena. The artist had been commissioned by the company in 1965 to create a painting which could subsequently be used to market the airline. In the resulting work, entitled L’oiseau de ciel (Sylvester, no. 1034; Private collection), the silhouette of the bird is shown filled with a cloudy, day-lit sky against a dark background, while below the ground is subtly illuminated by the lights of a runway, waiting to safely guide a plane to land. The sky-bird became the centre of Sabena’s publicity and marketing campaigns through much of the late 1960s and 1970s, appearing on advertisements, posters, menus, matchbooks, and stickers as well as the company’s fleet of planes. As Xavier Canonne has noted, Magritte’s imagery was perfectly suited to the new direction sweeping through the advertising industry at the time: ‘the power of his images, their effectiveness, their poetic dimension, the use of displaced or altered objects, corresponded to a new approach to publicity, arresting the gaze indirectly instead of faithfully representing the product being advertised’ (X. Canonne, ‘Magritte and Advertising,’ in Magritte – A Lab of Ideas: Works on Paper, exh. cat., The Nordic Watercolour Museum, Skärhamn, 2022, p. 182). As such, the oiseau de ciel became synonymous with Magritte, and it remains one of the most well-known and iconic leitmotifs of the artist’s career.
The motif of the oiseau de ciel had first appeared in Magritte’s oeuvre in the composition Le retour, painted in December 1940 and now in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Writing to Claude Spaak in late November of that year, Magritte outlined several ideas that were percolating in his imagination as he prepared for an exhibition at the Galerie Dietrich in Brussels. The letter contained a trio of sketches, including one the artist described as a ‘blue bird with clouds against a starry sky, foreground: nest with eggs’ (R. Magritte, quoted in in D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield and M. Raeburn, René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, London, 1993, p. 285). Le retour appears to have evolved from this initial concept, the silhouette of the bird changing to appear mid-flight rather than about to land on the parapet. While Magritte played with the silhouette of a bird in his 1942 gouache Le repos de l’esprit (Sylvester, no. 1182; Private collection), it was not until the early 1950s that the oiseau de ciel reappeared in Magritte’s art, forming the central focus of La promesse (Sylvester, no. 719; Private collection). Here, the sky-filled bird now hovers above a rolling seascape that deliberately echoes Wartan Mahokian’s painting La vague, a postcard of which the artist kept in his collection and which he drew on repeatedly for inspiration.
The present gouache appears to have emerged around this time, as Magritte returned to the motif of the oiseau de ciel and ruminated on the potential expansion of the theme. It echoes in form and style La promesse very closely, the sky-bird soaring above the empty beach while the waves gently lap the shoreline below. The play between night and daylight, seen through the precise contours of the bird’s silhouette, suggests not only a world beyond that which we can see, but also the artificiality of the scene that we can, which now appears like a flat stage-set behind which another reality lies. The following year, Magritte revisited the theme again in oil, painting Le baiser (Sylvester, no. 769; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) for his dealer, Alexander Iolas, and he continued to investigate the oiseau de ciel concept sporadically over the following years, allowing the motif to evolve, occasionally inverting the play between the different skyscapes, with night replacing day in the body of the bird.
Of course, the idea of flight was one which was bound to appeal to Magritte. From 1926, he had been engaged in an almost comprehensive programme of investigation into the essential properties of a range of subjects taken from the ‘everyday’ world. Absorbing the fundamental characteristics of these objects and themes, the artist would then reconfigure them through a variety of scenarios and concepts, in an effort to jolt the viewer out of their implicit acceptance of the world as they perceive it. As the artist explained, these pictures had been ‘the result of a systematic search for an overwhelming poetic effect through the arrangement of objects borrowed from reality, which would give the real world from which those objects had been borrowed an overwhelming poetic meaning by a natural process of exchange’ (R. Magritte in 1938, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, pp. 215-16).
It is through such a ‘process of exchange’ that the bird in Le retour is transformed into an object of wonder, its shape and pose so familiar, and yet its form so unexpected and improbable, that the assumptions and associations of the viewer are upended. Over the course of his artistic career, Magritte became increasingly adept at converting his vision of the mysteries of the world into pictures that, through their icon-like simplicity, conveyed their messages all the more strikingly. Where some of his earlier Surreal pictures boasted a wealth of details and juxtapositions, from the 1930s onwards he pared back the individual elements retained within his compositions and in so doing, created more impactful images that through their very simplicity, became all the more puzzling. In Le retour, Magritte distils the motif down to a single fundamental interplay between the bird and its surroundings, inserting the seemingly impossible into the otherwise ordinary, banal scene. Like a nesting doll, we are faced with a number of uncertainties by its presence and materiality, each one leading us to more questions rather than answers.
There is a logic, albeit one skewed through the prism of Magritte’s meandering explorations of his subjects, in the idea of a bird being shown as made of air. The artist himself explained that the elements that comprise his works are not stand-ins for other meanings, nor products of the worlds of dream and the subconscious that had so fascinated other painters associated with the surreal. ‘In the images I paint, there is no question of either dream, escape or symbolism,’ Magritte explained. ‘My images are not substitutes for either sleeping or waking dreams. They do not give us the illusion of escaping from reality… I conceive painting as the art of juxtaposing colours in such a way that their effective aspect disappears and allows a poetic image to become visible. This image is the total description of a thought that unites – in a poetic order – familiar figures of the visible: skies, people, trees, mountains, furniture, stars, solids, inscriptions, etc.’ (R. Magritte, quoted in ibid., p. 224). As such, Magritte appears to be applying some pataphysical notion of gravity and the nature of flight to this subject, genuinely exploring the possibility of the oiseau de ciel and how such a thing might look.
This line of thought would resurface in a pair of paintings from 1965, in which the bird in flight is subjected to different transformations and metamorphoses. For example, in L’idole (Sylvester, no. 1015; Private collection) Magritte uses the same silhouette as the oiseau de ciel paintings to explore the theme of petrification, the bird’s stone body defying gravity to soar through the air above a rocky seashore. Similarly, in Le printemps (Sylvester, no. 1016; Private collection) the bird appears to be made entirely of foliage, the shape of its internal leaves matching those of the hedge below. While the addition of the nest of eggs harks back to the original Le retour composition of 1940, here Magritte further emphasises the collage-like nature of the scene, allowing the bird to appear as if it has been directly cut-out from the hedge and pasted into the sky. In both these paintings, the materiality of the bird visually links it to elements that typically remain rooted to the earth, and yet they appear to fly, weightless, above the scene in defiance of our expectations. While these variations on the central motif allowed Magritte to expand upon his initial concept, it is the enigmatic slippage between space and time of the oiseau de ciel, its suggestion of another world beyond that of the canvas, or two time periods existing concurrently in the same space, that imbues works such as Le retour with such an intriguing sense of mystery.
The oiseau de ciel would go on to become one of the most iconic motifs within Magritte’s oeuvre, gaining international recognition largely through its adoption by the Belgian national air carrier, Sabena. The artist had been commissioned by the company in 1965 to create a painting which could subsequently be used to market the airline. In the resulting work, entitled L’oiseau de ciel (Sylvester, no. 1034; Private collection), the silhouette of the bird is shown filled with a cloudy, day-lit sky against a dark background, while below the ground is subtly illuminated by the lights of a runway, waiting to safely guide a plane to land. The sky-bird became the centre of Sabena’s publicity and marketing campaigns through much of the late 1960s and 1970s, appearing on advertisements, posters, menus, matchbooks, and stickers as well as the company’s fleet of planes. As Xavier Canonne has noted, Magritte’s imagery was perfectly suited to the new direction sweeping through the advertising industry at the time: ‘the power of his images, their effectiveness, their poetic dimension, the use of displaced or altered objects, corresponded to a new approach to publicity, arresting the gaze indirectly instead of faithfully representing the product being advertised’ (X. Canonne, ‘Magritte and Advertising,’ in Magritte – A Lab of Ideas: Works on Paper, exh. cat., The Nordic Watercolour Museum, Skärhamn, 2022, p. 182). As such, the oiseau de ciel became synonymous with Magritte, and it remains one of the most well-known and iconic leitmotifs of the artist’s career.