拍品專文
A fire is seen on a beach, at what seems to be the entrance of a cave, implying an ancient notion of safety and comfort... When this image is on a bottle, though, what are we to assume is inside? Perhaps the essence of a fire-lit evening. On several occasions, from the early 1940s onwards, Magritte painted images on the outside of bottles; sometimes, these were in the form of mock labels, whereas sometimes, as here, the bottle appears to have been used in part because it is such a surreal support for a picture. One imagines some viewers wondering, Should a painting not be flat? Should a painting, in fact, not be a painting? Magritte, as ever, is shown playing with our assumptions about art, about objects, and indeed about the world around us. These are the kind of questions about the nature of existence that Magritte throws into play; in showing the image of a fire at the mouth of the cave, he implies that, like the chained people in Platos allegory of the cave, we have all hithertoo been too willing to understand an all-too-simple conception of our surroundings, of the nature of things, and only through his Surreal vision can come to understand the magic reality of life and the universe. And this sense of release is accentuated by the deliberate contrast between the expanse of the seascape and the necessary containment and confinement of the bottle itself.
Feu-bouteille was created circa 1959; this is in part known by the fact that the catalogue raisonné records that, that same year, the artist placed it in a shoebox lined with paper and gave it to Harry Torczyner, an American lawyer who had become a close friend and correspondent of Magritte's and who would come to assemble one of the world's greatest collections of his works. This was in order that Torczyner could present it as a gift to the celebrated Belgian writer Baron Jan-Albert Goris (whose pseudonym was Marnix Gijsen) at a dinner being thrown in his honour for his sixtieth birthday (D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, London, 1993, p. 453). It is a tribute to the way in which this object so perfectly encapsulates Magritte's unique vision that in the early 1960s it featured in a group of exhibitions in Brussels and in the United States, where Goris lived for many years.
Feu-bouteille was created circa 1959; this is in part known by the fact that the catalogue raisonné records that, that same year, the artist placed it in a shoebox lined with paper and gave it to Harry Torczyner, an American lawyer who had become a close friend and correspondent of Magritte's and who would come to assemble one of the world's greatest collections of his works. This was in order that Torczyner could present it as a gift to the celebrated Belgian writer Baron Jan-Albert Goris (whose pseudonym was Marnix Gijsen) at a dinner being thrown in his honour for his sixtieth birthday (D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, London, 1993, p. 453). It is a tribute to the way in which this object so perfectly encapsulates Magritte's unique vision that in the early 1960s it featured in a group of exhibitions in Brussels and in the United States, where Goris lived for many years.