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Lot Essay
In 1950 and 1951 Magritte painted twenty pictures in which the major components are petrified stone, a metamorphosis that completed earlier, less permanent changes to wood. In the stone pictures, the process of transformation is complete. The images may have been inspired in part by engravings showing rock-strewn landscapes that Magritte admired in Jules Verne novels.
Magritte painted Les verres fums in 1951, basing its imagery on two earlier works, Les morceaux choisis from 1950 (Sylvester, no. 734; Collection Arlette Magritte) and Le sourire from 1943 (Sylvester, no. 532; private collection). Les morceaux choisis similarly depicts a horse attached to an apple, but there the forms are organic rather than petrified and are not set on a pedestal. Le sourire was the first of several of Magritte's works to depict a monument or pedestal with the date "An[no] 192370."
All monuments are public declarations of who should be remembered after death, and, implicitly, of the values a society holds supreme; in other words, monuments are posed on the limnus between presence and absence, permanence and transience. Scutenaire wrote about the present painting, "Rearing on its pedestal in the darkness of a little provincial square in the depths of winter, behold the granite horse on the motionless clock of eternal time" (quoted in D. Sylvester et al., op. cit., p. 178).
But while monuments typically are clear and lapidary, Magritte's imaginary monument is enigmatic and interrogative. What person or event could it be meant to celebrate, and what does the date 192,370 A.D.--inconceivably in the future--mean? Magritte thereby ironically problematizes the idea of the monument.
Magritte painted Les verres fums in 1951, basing its imagery on two earlier works, Les morceaux choisis from 1950 (Sylvester, no. 734; Collection Arlette Magritte) and Le sourire from 1943 (Sylvester, no. 532; private collection). Les morceaux choisis similarly depicts a horse attached to an apple, but there the forms are organic rather than petrified and are not set on a pedestal. Le sourire was the first of several of Magritte's works to depict a monument or pedestal with the date "An[no] 192370."
All monuments are public declarations of who should be remembered after death, and, implicitly, of the values a society holds supreme; in other words, monuments are posed on the limnus between presence and absence, permanence and transience. Scutenaire wrote about the present painting, "Rearing on its pedestal in the darkness of a little provincial square in the depths of winter, behold the granite horse on the motionless clock of eternal time" (quoted in D. Sylvester et al., op. cit., p. 178).
But while monuments typically are clear and lapidary, Magritte's imaginary monument is enigmatic and interrogative. What person or event could it be meant to celebrate, and what does the date 192,370 A.D.--inconceivably in the future--mean? Magritte thereby ironically problematizes the idea of the monument.