Le jouer secret is one of Magritte's most important early paintings. Along with L'assassin menacé (Sylvester no. 137) in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, it is actually one of the largest pictures he ever painted. Both pictures were exhibited in 1927 at Magritte's first one man show at Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels. L'assassin menacé, which is very close to the present painting in style, color and size, has often been regarded as a companion piece. Both pictures hung for many years on either side of the main staircase at the Casino in Knokke Le Zoute, Belgium.

Magritte's first one man show was comprised of forty-nine oils and twelve papier collés and was in general poorly received by the critics. The Belgian public had yet to allow general critical acceptance to Surrealism. One of the most bitter notices was written by Magritte's fellow painter Pierre Flouquet, who felt that Magritte had defected from a proper aesthetic approach.

Decadence also has its poetry; but a regressive
negative parasitical, destructive poetry, releasing
nothing but an ever more exacerbated, more distorting,
more inhuman desire for excitement. Thus the current
work of Magritte, in its need for specious poetry,
divorced from nature, illustrates these propositions.
Painted in "garum", it contains as well as the
snobbery of corruption, the unease induced by the
idea of a void, brilliance but insufficient scepticism.
(D. Sylvester, op. cit., p. 68)

History has of course come to revise this opinion and we now appreciate Magritte's paintings of the 1920s as a highly serious contribution to the overall surrealist movement.

The subject matter of Le jouer secret is not easy to comprehend at first sight. The background setting and the use of bilboquets is drawn from the earlier work Le jockey perdu (Sylvester no. 81) although it remained a constant theme throughout Magritte's work. The turtle had already appeared in a work of 1926 titled La robe de l'aventure (Sylvester no. 101). It is no creature of fantasy, despite the absence of a head, but an accurate representation of the species Dermochelys coriacea and may well, as Sylvester suggests, have been copied from an engraving in a Larousse encyclopedia.

This is perhaps the first clear instance of Magritte's
frequent strategy of taking the stage set of an
existing work and replacing its protagonists from
another work. The figures look as though they come
from advertisements in fashion magazines or trade
catalogues. For example, at this period Vogue
carried an advertisement by Clarks in the rue
Vivienne, Paris, for chin straps very similar to
those worn by the woman here. (Ibid., p. 210)

Other elements in the setting of the painting are also strongly reminiscent of Le jockey perdu. The trunks of the trees have been replaced by giant balusters similar to those used to support a banister rail on a staircase or landing. These small pillars are a recurrent motif in Magritte's work; they appear in both paintings and collages throughout his career. Sometimes they even become anthropomorphic and have all-seeing eyes. They are omnipresent but inexplicable. Max Ernst once referred to their presence as a "phallustrade," that is, "an alchemical product, composed of... the autostrade, the balustrade and a certain quantity of phallus" (S. Gablik, op. cit., p. 26).

Obviously the baluster (or bilboquet as Magritte
called it) represents, on however an unconscious level,
a complex set of thoughts interconnected by affective
links, none of which can be explained simply. Magritte's
composition would appear to have taken shape in an
obscure area of consciousness, occupying an intermediary
position between conscious and unconscious, an element
which common sense denounces as unreal but which is
psychologically true. Since it corresponds to a state
of mind, its polyvalent meanings cannot easily be
translated into words. (Ibid., p. 26)

Magritte had a long obsession with reproducing standardized manufactured objects in his work, be they pipes, candles, bread or bilboquets. The bilboquets remain, however, the most ubiquitous and the most puzzling. It is possible that these anthropomorphic balusters were inspired by the almost dehumanized wooden mannequins in the work of de Chirico. Whatever their source, they were to develop into quintessential Magrittian objects.

The overall inspiration for the present work is difficult to ascertain. In general he claimed to have been chiefly inspired by sources in popular art, posters and magazines. But it has been suggested by David Sylvester in the catalogue to the large Magritte retrospective in Brussels and Paris in 1978 and 1979 that the forest-like background of Le jouer secret and Le jockey perdu may well be inspired by Paolo Uccello's (1397-1475) The Hunt (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). In Le Manifeste sur Surréalisme published in 1924 André Breton cited Uccello as the only real surrealist before surrealism amongst the old masters. It is an intriguing even if unprovable theory.

Despite the above analysis of the subject matter of Le jouer secret it is difficult to arrive at an understanding of the painting's true meaning. This is probably the wrong approach. As Jacques Meuris wrote "these objects and things are primordially visual and do not require interpretation." (J. Meuris, op. cit., p. 38)

This painting and Le jockey perdu are the key works to the development of Magritte's entire oeuvre.

In hardly one year, between the 1926 versions of
Le jockey perdu, the manner fortifies itself
considerably: the realism, this time authenticated,
is permitted to transgress the possibility to
attain the unforseen. All the rest, practically,
springs from this until 1967. (Ibid., p. 38).