Sans titre (L'oiseau mort)

Created circa 1926-1927, Sans titre (L’oiseau mort) is a richly layered, exquisitely rendered papier collé that illustrates the inherent power of René Magritte’s ground-breaking early forays into Surrealism. Combining carefully cut-out images from illustrated magazines, journals, advertisements and other sources with a series of hand drawn elements in a seamless collage, Magritte’s first papiers collés emerged towards the end of 1925, and were largely inspired by the innovative works of Max Ernst. For Magritte, Ernst’s bold experiments in collage represented a radical shift in the very act of art making, breaking through the traditional parameters by which an artist was judged: “scissors, paste, images and genius in effect superseded brushes, paints, models, styles, sensibility and that famous sincerity demanded of artists,” he explained (quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., The Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, p. 260). Liberating the artist’s imagination, papiers collés became an integral aspect of Magritte’s oeuvre, and over the course of the following two years he produced approximately thirty works in the medium, through which he explored and tested his rapidly evolving Surrealist vocabulary.
Adding accents of color and subtle shadows with pencil or charcoal to the disparate source images, Magritte granted these flat sections of paper a new sense of three-dimensionality and character, giving them a greater presence within the composition, whilst simultaneously denying the purpose they were created for. While he incorporated drawings and snippets of photographs and advertising material in some collages, the most consistent feature of these works were the fragments of sheet music Magritte included in all but three of the papiers collés from this period. These snippets of score were almost all cut from the orchestration of a popular Edwardian musical comedy, The Girls of Gottenburg by George Grossmith Jr. and L.E. Berman, which may have been given to Magritte by his brother Paul, who earned a living playing piano in cafés and bars. The artist played with the legibility of these sheets, often inverting the fragments or rotating them to an awkward angle, so that the notes become abstract, monochrome patterns. In many collages from this early series, including the present work, the shaping of these cut-outs from the sheet music is related to the scrolled head of a violin, with elements possibly derived from the f-holes cut into the body of the instrument or the treble clef.
In the present Sans titre (L’oiseau mort), however, it is the hand-drawn element that takes center stage—at the heart of the composition lies the softly rounded form of a small bird, its body and plumage captured in delicate flowing lines of pencil and watercolor. According to Georgette Magritte, this bird, which also appears in the oil painting L’oiseau mort (Sylvester, no. 131; The Menil Collection, Houston), was the canary that had belonged to her parents, and which she and the artist had taken care of together since their marriage in 1922. Here, it appears pinned in place by a large black hook, which upon closer inspection reveals itself to be the silhouette of a human head. The bird slots through a small gap carved down the middle of the silhouette, which in turn echoes the curvilinear contours of a bilboquet, one of the artist’s favored objects during this period. In the background, the top drawer of a filing cabinet swings open, dramatically tipping its contents outwards, perhaps due to the extreme tilt of the floor. Indeed, everything appears to have been set off balance by the angle of the stage on which they stand, as if they are in the process of gradually sliding out of the frame. This effect is accentuated by the placement of the black curtain to the left of the composition, which remains resolutely upright and immobile. While for Magritte, the curtain held the capacity to both conceal and reveal different aspects of reality, here its presence lends the scene a theatrical flavor, allowing the composition to appear almost like an absurdist stage set, upon which a mysterious drama plays out for the viewer.