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Lot Essay
At the heart of René Magritte’s vividly painted gouache L’invitée lies a strange, impossible occurrence: next to the cropped image of a seemingly ordinary house, a single window floats in the middle of a cloudy, star-filled night sky, its form disconnected from the neighbouring building. This apparition is made all the more bizarre due to the fact that the lit window is of exactly the same format as those within the house itself, from its slate-grey frame, to the soft pink drapes glimpsed behind the glass. The viewer is left to wonder whether this window has floated off the wall, or perhaps that the building it belongs to has been rendered invisible, or painted with the image of the surrounding landscape. This playful, enigmatic gouache perfectly encapsulates the overarching themes and preoccupations of Magritte’s unique form of Surrealism, revealing the mystery that lies just beneath the surface of our everyday world.
The idea for this floating window first appeared in a sketch that Magritte included in a letter to Mirabelle Dors and Maurice Rapin, dated 30 December 1955. In quick, rapid strokes of black ink the artist delineated the concept that was percolating in his mind, depicting a more expansive view of the scene in which the entire house is visible to the viewer, set within a thick copse of trees and shrubbery. In L’invitée, Magritte opts for a close-up view of the eerie phenomenon, zooming in on the upper left corner of the house and emphasising the close proximity of the floating window to the structure. In this way, he accentuates the startling effect of the scene, allowing the viewer to detect the perfect alignment of the window in mid-air with those inset into the façade of the house. With its quiet, seemingly ordinary domestic setting, L’invitée also relates to the conventional street scenes of Magritte’s famous L’empire des lumières series, which pivoted on the unexpected juxtaposition between a house bathed in nighttime shadows, set against a blue, sunlit sky. A similar concept underpins L’invitée, the dislocation of a single window rendering the entire scene strange and otherworldly, transforming the banal, familiar house into something extraordinary and poetic.
In 1958, Magritte returned to the motif of the window floating in mid-air in a series of gouaches under the new title L’état de veille (Sylvester, nos. 1446-1449). The resurgence of the idea is said to have been prompted by a strange vision that writer Jacques Wergifosse had encountered and subsequently recounted to Magritte. Wergifosse explained: ‘On my way to spend a day with Magritte in Brussels, for once I walked to the station. I was going along the boulevard Avroz (in Liège) when I came to a wide opening (it no longer exists) with a view of the Meuse. I looked into the distance. Suddenly, on the other side of the river, I saw a series of windows appear high up in the sky. The grey walls of the large buildings in the Place d’Italie had melted into the sky. On arriving at Magritte’s house, I told him what had happened. This gave him an idea for several gouaches, three of which were called “The waking state”…’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. IV, Antwerp, 1994, p. 208). In these new iterations of the subject, Magritte shifted the view from night to day, and played with the number of windows floating in the sky, in one case even adding a front door below.
Shortly after its creation, L’invitée was gifted by Magritte to his friend and fellow Surrealist artist and photographer, Raoul Ubac. Born in Malmédy in eastern Belgium, Ubac had moved to Paris in 1930 and was quickly immersed in the city’s Surrealist circles, his bold, experimental photographs featuring in the Exposition surréaliste in 1935, as well as in several issues of the periodical Minotaure. After returning to Brussels in the autumn of 1939, Ubac renewed his connections with the city’s leading protagonists of the avant-garde, including Magritte. By December of that year, Magritte and Ubac were listed among the co-founders of the bimonthly Belgian Surrealist review L’Invention collective, which intended to preserve and foster the Surrealist spirit in the face of oppression and censorship across Europe. The pair shared administrative duties for the publication, though only two issues were published before the German army invaded Belgium in May 1940. Ubac and Magritte fled Brussels together following the outbreak of war, along with Ubac’s wife Agui, Louis Scutenaire and Irène Hamoir, and later rented a house together in Carcassonne. The quintet returned to Brussels after a few months in France, and remained in Belgium for the rest of the conflict. Ubac and Magritte continued to visit one another regularly through these years, and stayed close over the ensuing decades, even after Ubac had abandoned Surrealism in favour of abstract sculpture and paintings.
The idea for this floating window first appeared in a sketch that Magritte included in a letter to Mirabelle Dors and Maurice Rapin, dated 30 December 1955. In quick, rapid strokes of black ink the artist delineated the concept that was percolating in his mind, depicting a more expansive view of the scene in which the entire house is visible to the viewer, set within a thick copse of trees and shrubbery. In L’invitée, Magritte opts for a close-up view of the eerie phenomenon, zooming in on the upper left corner of the house and emphasising the close proximity of the floating window to the structure. In this way, he accentuates the startling effect of the scene, allowing the viewer to detect the perfect alignment of the window in mid-air with those inset into the façade of the house. With its quiet, seemingly ordinary domestic setting, L’invitée also relates to the conventional street scenes of Magritte’s famous L’empire des lumières series, which pivoted on the unexpected juxtaposition between a house bathed in nighttime shadows, set against a blue, sunlit sky. A similar concept underpins L’invitée, the dislocation of a single window rendering the entire scene strange and otherworldly, transforming the banal, familiar house into something extraordinary and poetic.
In 1958, Magritte returned to the motif of the window floating in mid-air in a series of gouaches under the new title L’état de veille (Sylvester, nos. 1446-1449). The resurgence of the idea is said to have been prompted by a strange vision that writer Jacques Wergifosse had encountered and subsequently recounted to Magritte. Wergifosse explained: ‘On my way to spend a day with Magritte in Brussels, for once I walked to the station. I was going along the boulevard Avroz (in Liège) when I came to a wide opening (it no longer exists) with a view of the Meuse. I looked into the distance. Suddenly, on the other side of the river, I saw a series of windows appear high up in the sky. The grey walls of the large buildings in the Place d’Italie had melted into the sky. On arriving at Magritte’s house, I told him what had happened. This gave him an idea for several gouaches, three of which were called “The waking state”…’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. IV, Antwerp, 1994, p. 208). In these new iterations of the subject, Magritte shifted the view from night to day, and played with the number of windows floating in the sky, in one case even adding a front door below.
Shortly after its creation, L’invitée was gifted by Magritte to his friend and fellow Surrealist artist and photographer, Raoul Ubac. Born in Malmédy in eastern Belgium, Ubac had moved to Paris in 1930 and was quickly immersed in the city’s Surrealist circles, his bold, experimental photographs featuring in the Exposition surréaliste in 1935, as well as in several issues of the periodical Minotaure. After returning to Brussels in the autumn of 1939, Ubac renewed his connections with the city’s leading protagonists of the avant-garde, including Magritte. By December of that year, Magritte and Ubac were listed among the co-founders of the bimonthly Belgian Surrealist review L’Invention collective, which intended to preserve and foster the Surrealist spirit in the face of oppression and censorship across Europe. The pair shared administrative duties for the publication, though only two issues were published before the German army invaded Belgium in May 1940. Ubac and Magritte fled Brussels together following the outbreak of war, along with Ubac’s wife Agui, Louis Scutenaire and Irène Hamoir, and later rented a house together in Carcassonne. The quintet returned to Brussels after a few months in France, and remained in Belgium for the rest of the conflict. Ubac and Magritte continued to visit one another regularly through these years, and stayed close over the ensuing decades, even after Ubac had abandoned Surrealism in favour of abstract sculpture and paintings.