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Lot Essay
A Magrittean vision of skyscrapers: they are built out of sky! In La tempête, executed in 1932, Magritte shows us gigantic blocks of sky presented within a dark landscape, surrounded by clouds. During the very early 1930s, Magritte executed a small group of works exploring the idea of geometric lumps of sky, presented as palpable matter. La tempête is marked by an outstanding simplicity: there are no extraneous features to distract us (other works included chairs made of the sky, and sky surfaces supporting other objects). Instead, with rhetorical restraint, Magritte expounds upon one sole trope, one sole idea - the nature of the sky.
By bending the immaterial into a seemingly material form, by presenting the clouds outwith the sky that they would usually inhabit, Magritte draws our attention to the nature of the world itself. He takes one of the elements that forms a part of our everyday surroundings and twists it into a new permutation.
The architectural feel with which Magritte has presented these sky-blocks in La tempête directly recalls the legacy of the great proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. These blocks and the rigidity of the landscape are reminiscent of his visions of piazzas and jumbled, Metaphysical interiors. Magritte's great epiphany, the moment at which he first gained his Surreal vision, was in viewing de Chirico's Le chant d'amour; here, in his own work, Magritte reveals not only the older master's influence, but also transforms his vision further. Magritte takes some of the foundations of de Chirico's work, some of the building blocks of his iconography, but transforms them completely, making a Surreal vision of the sky, and of the Metaphysical artist's work as well. La tempête therefore shows Magritte's early influences, shows him escaping their bounds, and likewise shows him creating a painting that in its very essence is a tribute to the earlier master who set him on his path.
By bending the immaterial into a seemingly material form, by presenting the clouds outwith the sky that they would usually inhabit, Magritte draws our attention to the nature of the world itself. He takes one of the elements that forms a part of our everyday surroundings and twists it into a new permutation.
The architectural feel with which Magritte has presented these sky-blocks in La tempête directly recalls the legacy of the great proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. These blocks and the rigidity of the landscape are reminiscent of his visions of piazzas and jumbled, Metaphysical interiors. Magritte's great epiphany, the moment at which he first gained his Surreal vision, was in viewing de Chirico's Le chant d'amour; here, in his own work, Magritte reveals not only the older master's influence, but also transforms his vision further. Magritte takes some of the foundations of de Chirico's work, some of the building blocks of his iconography, but transforms them completely, making a Surreal vision of the sky, and of the Metaphysical artist's work as well. La tempête therefore shows Magritte's early influences, shows him escaping their bounds, and likewise shows him creating a painting that in its very essence is a tribute to the earlier master who set him on his path.