Untitled

Magritte understood that the collages that Max Ernst made during the early 1920s stood for a rupture with all of the traditional means of painting. "Scissors, paste, images and genius", he wrote, "in effect superceded brushes, paints, models, style, sensibility and that famous sincerity demanded of artists" (from 'La ligne de vie', in L. Scutenaire, Avec Magritte, Brussels, 1977, p. 74). This example encouraged Magritte to execute his first papiers collés in 1925 at about the same time that he painted his first surreal compositions. He completed about thirty works of this kind (including the present and the following lot) before travelling to Paris in September 1927 to meet the French Surrealists. All but three of these papiers collés contain fragments of sheet music which were cut out from a piano score of a popular English musical comedy, The girls of Gottenborg by George Grossmith, Jr. and L.E. Berman. Magritte probably received these sheets from his brother Paul, who was a musician.

The composition of the present work relates closely to La lumière du pôle (fig. 2), a powerfully disturbing work that Magritte painted around the same time. One finds in both pictures the idea of a woman's silhouette that is cracked like an eggshell as well as the strange bird shape that is formed of a woman in a fur cape with her face cut away. Those eerie shapes appear to meet with the cut out sheet music shape in a surreal landscape formed of a simulated wood grain foreground and a simulated wall paper background. The whole composition suggests a surreal ballet combining figures from the inanimate, animal and human world.