Le grand style

Executed in 1952, Le grand style showcases René Magritte’s ongoing fascination with questions of perception and illusion, presenting a puzzling, enigmatic image that confounds viewers’ expectations. In this delicate gouache the artist depicts a strange view of Earth, in which the planet appears to sit atop the slender stem of a plant, occupying the traditional place of a flower. However, whether or not this is a clever trick of the eye, an optical illusion or somehow a magical dislocation, remains a mystery. Taking inspiration from an oil painting the artist had completed the previous year (Sylvester, no. 763; The Menil Collection, Houston) – whose title and subject were reportedly suggested by the Surrealist poet Marcel Mariën – the gouache was donated by Magritte to a charity sale organised by the Dutch newspaper De Tijd in 1954. To mark the occasion, which was held to benefit children living in poverty, the artist wrote a brief letter to De Tijd, in which he proclaimed ‘I would like gold to make much less noise in the world’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. IV, Gouaches, Temperas, Watercolours and Papier Collés 1918-1967, London, 1994, p. 153).
The surreal quality of Le grand style is accentuated by the knowledge that at the time of its execution, such a view of Earth would have seemed impossible – photographs of the planet from this perspective would not appear for at least another decade, as space exploration transformed our vision of Earth through the 1960s. Unimpeded by the swirling white cloud cover that usually fills the atmosphere in images taken by astronauts in orbit, the planet in Le grand style instead appears to have been modelled using a traditional cartographic globe, or perhaps illustrations from the novels of Jules Verne, such as Hector Servadac or De la Terre à la Lune, of which Magritte was an avid reader. A similar vision of Earth is featured in another suite of paintings from this period, titled L’autre son de cloche (Sylvester, nos. 771 & 1344), in which an ordinary green apple is seen floating mysteriously alongside the planet. The incongruity of this pairing is heightened by the disparities in scale between the two spherical objects: either the apple is colossal in its dimensions, or conversely Earth has shrunk to a Lilliputian scale.
In each iteration of Le grand style and L’autre son de cloche, Magritte positions the globe so that it reveals the full expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, framed on one side by Western Europe and North Africa, while on the other the elongated profile of the East Coast of North America stretches southwards in a sinuous line to South America, suggesting he used the same source for his imagery. In the present gouache, there is a strange play of reflections across the surface of the globe, as if the Earth is rotating, like a flower, towards the sun. This adds another layer of intrigue to the inherent contradiction within the motif – the planet, which we expect to float freely in the sky, is now rooted to the ground by its stem and leaves, yet its movements remain intrinsically tied to the star it orbits. With these strange juxtapositions and impossible combinations, Magritte intended to jolt his viewers out of a complacent understanding of the world around them, forcing them to question the perceived, inherited or conventional visual rules that govern their everyday understanding of reality.