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Lot Essay
Painted in 1965, L’endroit du décor offers a captivating example of René Magritte’s unique approach to portraiture, illustrating his ability to infuse the familiar genre with the striking, magical idiom of Surrealism. While still offering a clearly legible likeness of his sitter, painted with the artist’s usual degree of finesse and accuracy, Magritte’s portraits transport the figure into his Surreal universe, offering unexpected visions in which the subject becomes a player in the artist’s mysterious scenarios, most often in combination with a series of recognisable leitmotifs from his oeuvre. In the present work, the sitter – one Marianne Tagnon (née Coessens) – appears to merge with the stage curtain against which she is set, the contours of her body matching the rippling edges of the fabric, most noticeably as it brushes against the floor. Capturing her as her lips tilt upwards at the corner with a wry twist, Magritte imbues the portrait with a sense of character and humour, suggesting through her direct gaze not only a certain familiarity between artist and sitter, but also an unerring eye as she critiques his work.
While Magritte had sporadically explored portraiture during the 1920s and 30s, most often depicting his wife Georgette or members of his close-knit circle of Surrealist friends and patrons in paintings that played with and subverted the tropes of the genre, it was not until the 1950s that he began to consider systematically accepting commissions. His portrait of Anne Marie Crowet, known as La fée ignorante (Sylvester, no. 832; Private Collection), appears to have initially sparked the artist’s imagination, prompting him to write to Alexander Iolas in the spring of 1956 to ask him to test interest levels amongst his clients. Seeing in La fée ignorante a model for future commissions, Magritte claimed he only required a good photograph of the sitter, along with a precise description of their colouring, to achieve a successful depiction.
In L’endroit du décor, Magritte transforms the traditional portrait into a highly theatrical composition, one which plays with an Escher-like, impossible sense of perspective to confound the viewer’s expectations. Only a partial segment of the sitter is visible, the left-hand portion of her face and shoulder cut off from view, offering a playful twist on Magritte’s familiar explorations of the tension between something visible and something hidden. As our gaze moves across the canvas, the planes of the scene appear to shift, changing their relation to one another. For example, the curtain initially appears to sit behind the blue sky in the upper portion of the canvas, only to gradually move as it travels towards the lower edge, where it clearly now stands in front of the sea-scape. Challenging any sense of single-point perspective in this way, Magritte recalls the complex compositional structuring of two of his most famous paintings of the 1960s – Le lieu commun (Sylvester, no. 994; Private collection) and Le blanc-seing (Sylvester, no. 1017; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) – a similarity further enhanced by the artist’s fragmentation of the human form in the present work.
Little is known about Marianne Tagnon, other than that she owned several examples of Magritte’s work from the 1960s. In a preliminary drawing for L’endroit du décor, which Magritte dedicated to the sitter, it is clear that the artist settled quite quickly on the idea of the curtain and the figure merging, though he initially heightened the theatricality of the scene by replacing the fabric on the right with a flat, free-standing element that appears like a piece of stage scenery. A familiar motif from Magritte’s compositions of this period (Sylvester, nos. 922, 931, 943, 944, 947 and 948), this element echoes the shape of the drapery, but is filled with clouds floating through a blue sky, introducing an impossible slice of another world to the scene. In the finished portrait, this element disappears entirely, and a more subtle, ambiguous atmosphere emerges. Here, the view opens on to a moonlit seascape, while a single rose appears in the foreground, as if tossed by an unseen admirer to Marianne. As such, the mystery of L’endroit du décor hinges not only on the merging of figure and object in the curtain, but also in the way Magritte plays with concepts of illusion, perception, and association to confound and compel the viewer in equal measure.
While Magritte had sporadically explored portraiture during the 1920s and 30s, most often depicting his wife Georgette or members of his close-knit circle of Surrealist friends and patrons in paintings that played with and subverted the tropes of the genre, it was not until the 1950s that he began to consider systematically accepting commissions. His portrait of Anne Marie Crowet, known as La fée ignorante (Sylvester, no. 832; Private Collection), appears to have initially sparked the artist’s imagination, prompting him to write to Alexander Iolas in the spring of 1956 to ask him to test interest levels amongst his clients. Seeing in La fée ignorante a model for future commissions, Magritte claimed he only required a good photograph of the sitter, along with a precise description of their colouring, to achieve a successful depiction.
In L’endroit du décor, Magritte transforms the traditional portrait into a highly theatrical composition, one which plays with an Escher-like, impossible sense of perspective to confound the viewer’s expectations. Only a partial segment of the sitter is visible, the left-hand portion of her face and shoulder cut off from view, offering a playful twist on Magritte’s familiar explorations of the tension between something visible and something hidden. As our gaze moves across the canvas, the planes of the scene appear to shift, changing their relation to one another. For example, the curtain initially appears to sit behind the blue sky in the upper portion of the canvas, only to gradually move as it travels towards the lower edge, where it clearly now stands in front of the sea-scape. Challenging any sense of single-point perspective in this way, Magritte recalls the complex compositional structuring of two of his most famous paintings of the 1960s – Le lieu commun (Sylvester, no. 994; Private collection) and Le blanc-seing (Sylvester, no. 1017; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) – a similarity further enhanced by the artist’s fragmentation of the human form in the present work.
Little is known about Marianne Tagnon, other than that she owned several examples of Magritte’s work from the 1960s. In a preliminary drawing for L’endroit du décor, which Magritte dedicated to the sitter, it is clear that the artist settled quite quickly on the idea of the curtain and the figure merging, though he initially heightened the theatricality of the scene by replacing the fabric on the right with a flat, free-standing element that appears like a piece of stage scenery. A familiar motif from Magritte’s compositions of this period (Sylvester, nos. 922, 931, 943, 944, 947 and 948), this element echoes the shape of the drapery, but is filled with clouds floating through a blue sky, introducing an impossible slice of another world to the scene. In the finished portrait, this element disappears entirely, and a more subtle, ambiguous atmosphere emerges. Here, the view opens on to a moonlit seascape, while a single rose appears in the foreground, as if tossed by an unseen admirer to Marianne. As such, the mystery of L’endroit du décor hinges not only on the merging of figure and object in the curtain, but also in the way Magritte plays with concepts of illusion, perception, and association to confound and compel the viewer in equal measure.