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Lot Essay
Executed in 1961, L’esprit et la forme dates to a period when Magritte turned once more to the collage format that he had used to great effect during the early stages of his career. His first papiers collés had emerged towards the end of 1925, around the same time as he was beginning to explore surrealist imagery in his paintings, and were largely inspired by the ground-breaking collages of Max Ernst. Recalling the revelation that the German artist’s example had provided, Magritte explained that these bold experiments in collage represented a radical shift in the act of art making, breaking through the traditional parameters by which an artist was judged: ‘Max Ernst superbly demonstrated, through the shattering effect of collages made from old magazine illustrations, that one could easily dispense with everything that had given traditional painting its prestige. Scissors, paste, images, and some genius effectively replaced the brushes, colours, model, style, sensibility and the divine afflatus of artists’ (quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, p. 214). Liberating the artist in this way, 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.
However, it was not until the closing months of 1959 that Magritte felt compelled to experiment with the papier collé technique once again, prompted by a commission to design the cover of a ballet programme for a ‘Gala de la Section Bruxelloise de l’Association Générale de la Presse Belge,’ which would count amongst its attendees the King of Belgium. The resulting work, Untitled (Sylvester, no. 1629), represented a return to the format after thirty years and featured a single, towering bilboquet silhouetted against a theatrical curtain, behind which a deserted landscape stretched all the way to the horizon line. Sparking the artist’s creative imagination once again, the medium became an important creative outlet for Magritte through the early 1960s, alongside his paintings in oil and gouache, and playful three-dimensional objects.
The most striking feature of these works lies in the whimsical use of music sheets cut into the shape of some of the most recognisable motifs of the artist’s oeuvre, from perfectly spherical apples, to floating pipes, bowler-hatted men and open doorways leading to mysterious realms. Whereas the collages from the 1920s had all used clippings from a single musical score, the later works incorporate disparate fragments from a variety of sources, from Carl Maria von Weber’s arias, to piano reductions of Beethoven’s symphonies, along with popular numbers from the music halls. Playing 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. He also frequently added accents of colour and subtle shadows with pencil or charcoal to the sheets, granting these flat sections of paper a new sense of three-dimensionality and character. In L’esprit et la forme, Magritte superimposes a cut-out piece of score which has been shaped into a curtain, adding strokes of graphite to indicate the heavy folds and ripples of the fabric, which he then lays over another pencil drawing of a curtain, creating a strange doubling effect.
Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the composition however, is the intriguing variation on Magritte’s famous bilboquet motif. A frequent protagonist in the artist’s compositions, this object took inspiration from a popular handheld game of the same name, known in many cultures throughout the world. In a test of dexterity, players were required to toss a ball upward and try to catch it on a spike affixed to the top of the wooden handle it was attached to. In Magritte’s interpretations of this familiar form, the wooden baton took on numerous different roles, becoming characters in the artist’s strange, mystery-laden scenes, with the artist referring to them as his ‘wooden figures.’ Here, Magritte deviates from his typical use of sheet music for the collage elements, and cuts the bilboquet silhouette from a photograph of a suited male figure. Looking straight out at the viewer, he appears to have been caught in the act of speaking, in a clever twist that underscores the explicit anthropomorphic associations of the object.
However, it was not until the closing months of 1959 that Magritte felt compelled to experiment with the papier collé technique once again, prompted by a commission to design the cover of a ballet programme for a ‘Gala de la Section Bruxelloise de l’Association Générale de la Presse Belge,’ which would count amongst its attendees the King of Belgium. The resulting work, Untitled (Sylvester, no. 1629), represented a return to the format after thirty years and featured a single, towering bilboquet silhouetted against a theatrical curtain, behind which a deserted landscape stretched all the way to the horizon line. Sparking the artist’s creative imagination once again, the medium became an important creative outlet for Magritte through the early 1960s, alongside his paintings in oil and gouache, and playful three-dimensional objects.
The most striking feature of these works lies in the whimsical use of music sheets cut into the shape of some of the most recognisable motifs of the artist’s oeuvre, from perfectly spherical apples, to floating pipes, bowler-hatted men and open doorways leading to mysterious realms. Whereas the collages from the 1920s had all used clippings from a single musical score, the later works incorporate disparate fragments from a variety of sources, from Carl Maria von Weber’s arias, to piano reductions of Beethoven’s symphonies, along with popular numbers from the music halls. Playing 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. He also frequently added accents of colour and subtle shadows with pencil or charcoal to the sheets, granting these flat sections of paper a new sense of three-dimensionality and character. In L’esprit et la forme, Magritte superimposes a cut-out piece of score which has been shaped into a curtain, adding strokes of graphite to indicate the heavy folds and ripples of the fabric, which he then lays over another pencil drawing of a curtain, creating a strange doubling effect.
Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the composition however, is the intriguing variation on Magritte’s famous bilboquet motif. A frequent protagonist in the artist’s compositions, this object took inspiration from a popular handheld game of the same name, known in many cultures throughout the world. In a test of dexterity, players were required to toss a ball upward and try to catch it on a spike affixed to the top of the wooden handle it was attached to. In Magritte’s interpretations of this familiar form, the wooden baton took on numerous different roles, becoming characters in the artist’s strange, mystery-laden scenes, with the artist referring to them as his ‘wooden figures.’ Here, Magritte deviates from his typical use of sheet music for the collage elements, and cuts the bilboquet silhouette from a photograph of a suited male figure. Looking straight out at the viewer, he appears to have been caught in the act of speaking, in a clever twist that underscores the explicit anthropomorphic associations of the object.