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拍品专文
An exquisite, autumnal gouache from 1960, La recherche de l'absolu shows one of René Magritte's most iconic and favoured motifs, the tree-leaf. However, where in his earlier explorations of this theme the leaf was green, standing gargantuan, absurd, magical and magnificent in its landscape, here it is denuded of 'foliage', the branches or veins the only remaining trace of its former verdant self. Nonetheless, the emphatic flatness of the leaf has been retained in this image, ensuring that Magritte's conceptual game remains in play. At the same time, appearing bare and thus allowing the pink glow of the sky to filter through its gauze of branches, La recherche de l'absolu attains a profound sense of visual lyricism that adds to the appropriateness of its title, itself taken from a celebrated novel by Balzac. It is a mark of the quality of La recherche de l'absolu that it has featured in several exhibitions including two international surveys of Magritte's work.
La recherche de l'absolu is a gouache reprisal of a theme that Magritte had first explored in 1940 in three paintings, one of which is now owned by the Ministère de la Communauté Française de Belgique, Brussels. In that work, the warm, pink crepuscular of the 1960 gouache is absent, replaced instead by a crisp, cool blue sky; of the two other versions from 1940, one shows the tree-leaf stretching towards a star-specked sky and another replaces the sun with a sphere propped on the horizon, deepening the dialogue of flatness introduced by the flat leaf surface.
Looking at the evening view from 1940 which is now in public ownership, the composition is clearly similar: in both pictures, there is a distant band of mountains crested by a reddish sun. The bareness of the 1940 version of La recherche de l'absolu may reflect the atmosphere of the time. After all, it was painted towards the end of 1940, and therefore after the Nazi invasion and occupation of Magritte's native Belgium, which had taken place in May that year. At the beginning of the Second World War, Magritte had been concerned as to how to paint, and what to paint; he would later begin to create a number of works that were often filled with light and joy, leading through to his pseudo-Impressionist pictures; this response to the conflict was considered inappropriate by some, who felt that dark times called for dark artistic expression, yet it showed an incredible strength of will, as Magritte used his pictures to invoke wit, beauty and play against the backdrop of turmoil and conflict in which Belgium, and indeed much of the world, had been plunged. In this, he was working in a tradition that, despite its Surreal slant, was parallel to Claude Monet with his Nymphéas in the First World War and Henri Matisse with his light-filled, sensual images during the Second. However, looking at La recherche de l'absolu, Magritte appears still to have been affected by the tone or anxieties of the time, as is reflected in that stark, cool image of the barren tree-leaf. It is a marked contrast to the lush opulence of the first leaf-tree, La géante, which had been painted only five years earlier. Nonetheless, Magritte's own enthusiasm for his 1940 examples of La recherche de l'absolu was palpable: in a letter to Claude Spaak written at the beginning of 1941, he described them as 'three very pure pictures' (Magritte, quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, p. 282). That self-same purity is clearly in evidence in this later gouache of La recherche de l'absolu.
By the time he revisited the theme of La recherche de l'absolu in 1960 in the present gouache, the tension of the Second World War was far in the past. Accordingly, his 1960 revisiting of the subject of La recherche de l'absolu has a romantic warmth to it that was lacking in its chillier 1940 incarnation. Indeed, the notion of the Romantic underpins this picture: it recalls some of the contemplative sunsets and sunrises captured with such poetry by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. Indeed, the contrast between the branches, or veins, of this tree-leaf against the pink sky recall his 1833 work Easter Morning, now in the Musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Deliberately invoking the visual language of Friedrich, Magritte has depicted his expansive landscape with a low horizon, leading into a meditative distance, with the single tree-leaf in the foreground acting as an anchor to the composition, serving as an analogue not for the trees of Easter Morning, but instead for the often solitary figures the German master used in the foregrounds of his pictures.
As well as looking back to the artists of the past, Magritte was clearly looking to his own past when he created this gouache. This may reflect the fact that, during most of 1960, the author Suzi Gablik lived with Magritte and his wife Georgette in Belgium while she carried out her research for a book on the artist. This would eventually be published in an extended form, several years after the artist's death, by Thames and Hudson, and remains an important and insightful survey of Magritte's works and thoughts, benefitting from Gablik's first-hand access to the artist. Perhaps this 1960 reprisal of the theme of La recherche de l'absolu was in part a result of the discussions with Gablik of the pictures that Magritte had created in decades past, and helped to bring these themes back to the forefront.
La recherche de l'absolu is a gouache reprisal of a theme that Magritte had first explored in 1940 in three paintings, one of which is now owned by the Ministère de la Communauté Française de Belgique, Brussels. In that work, the warm, pink crepuscular of the 1960 gouache is absent, replaced instead by a crisp, cool blue sky; of the two other versions from 1940, one shows the tree-leaf stretching towards a star-specked sky and another replaces the sun with a sphere propped on the horizon, deepening the dialogue of flatness introduced by the flat leaf surface.
Looking at the evening view from 1940 which is now in public ownership, the composition is clearly similar: in both pictures, there is a distant band of mountains crested by a reddish sun. The bareness of the 1940 version of La recherche de l'absolu may reflect the atmosphere of the time. After all, it was painted towards the end of 1940, and therefore after the Nazi invasion and occupation of Magritte's native Belgium, which had taken place in May that year. At the beginning of the Second World War, Magritte had been concerned as to how to paint, and what to paint; he would later begin to create a number of works that were often filled with light and joy, leading through to his pseudo-Impressionist pictures; this response to the conflict was considered inappropriate by some, who felt that dark times called for dark artistic expression, yet it showed an incredible strength of will, as Magritte used his pictures to invoke wit, beauty and play against the backdrop of turmoil and conflict in which Belgium, and indeed much of the world, had been plunged. In this, he was working in a tradition that, despite its Surreal slant, was parallel to Claude Monet with his Nymphéas in the First World War and Henri Matisse with his light-filled, sensual images during the Second. However, looking at La recherche de l'absolu, Magritte appears still to have been affected by the tone or anxieties of the time, as is reflected in that stark, cool image of the barren tree-leaf. It is a marked contrast to the lush opulence of the first leaf-tree, La géante, which had been painted only five years earlier. Nonetheless, Magritte's own enthusiasm for his 1940 examples of La recherche de l'absolu was palpable: in a letter to Claude Spaak written at the beginning of 1941, he described them as 'three very pure pictures' (Magritte, quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, p. 282). That self-same purity is clearly in evidence in this later gouache of La recherche de l'absolu.
By the time he revisited the theme of La recherche de l'absolu in 1960 in the present gouache, the tension of the Second World War was far in the past. Accordingly, his 1960 revisiting of the subject of La recherche de l'absolu has a romantic warmth to it that was lacking in its chillier 1940 incarnation. Indeed, the notion of the Romantic underpins this picture: it recalls some of the contemplative sunsets and sunrises captured with such poetry by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. Indeed, the contrast between the branches, or veins, of this tree-leaf against the pink sky recall his 1833 work Easter Morning, now in the Musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Deliberately invoking the visual language of Friedrich, Magritte has depicted his expansive landscape with a low horizon, leading into a meditative distance, with the single tree-leaf in the foreground acting as an anchor to the composition, serving as an analogue not for the trees of Easter Morning, but instead for the often solitary figures the German master used in the foregrounds of his pictures.
As well as looking back to the artists of the past, Magritte was clearly looking to his own past when he created this gouache. This may reflect the fact that, during most of 1960, the author Suzi Gablik lived with Magritte and his wife Georgette in Belgium while she carried out her research for a book on the artist. This would eventually be published in an extended form, several years after the artist's death, by Thames and Hudson, and remains an important and insightful survey of Magritte's works and thoughts, benefitting from Gablik's first-hand access to the artist. Perhaps this 1960 reprisal of the theme of La recherche de l'absolu was in part a result of the discussions with Gablik of the pictures that Magritte had created in decades past, and helped to bring these themes back to the forefront.