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Lot Essay
René Magritte’s Le mois des vendanges, executed circa 1959, returns to one of the artist’s most enduring and enigmatic motifs: the bowler-hatted man. First introduced into Magritte’s pictorial language in the mid-1920s, this figure would recede for a time before reemerging with renewed force in the artist’s work of the 1950s and 1960s. Envisaged as a cipher of bourgeois anonymity and banality, the figure is rendered here with disquieting intensity, multiplied into a dense, seemingly endless field—a sea of frontal gazes returning that of the viewer, upending the familiar to reveal the unnerving.
The present work on paper belongs to a decisive moment in Magritte’s late practice, when he turned with new clarity toward what he described as “necessary ideas.” While the bowler-hatted man had previously appeared as a solitary presence often shown from behind, by the late 1950s Magritte began to reconsider the figure, exploring compositions presenting him frontally and in multiplicity. In Le mois des vendanges, this shift is fully realized. Here, the figure’s multiplication creates a measured, almost mechanical order, yet it is this regularity that lends a sense of unease. The figures, identical in dress and expression, confront the viewer directly, their gazes steady and unbroken. The distance between observer and image collapses, replaced by a reciprocal act of looking in which the viewer is implicated.
The composition further draws upon Magritte’s long engagement with the window, another motif central to his work from the late 1920s. Conventionally understood as an opening onto the external world, the window here operates in reverse: rather than extending space, it effectively denies it, the crowd’s obstruction of the exterior an insistent reminder of a world just beyond reach. Surrealist historian Mary-Ann Cawes registers a similar feeling: “Their gaze, directed at ours, and all the more terrible for being a multiplication of the same look, blocks our outlook and renders us a prisoner of the room, denying us even the most ordinary of landscapes” (The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception. Mannerist to Modern, Princeton, 1981, p. 100).
Executed in the same year as the celebrated painting of the same name and composition—one of the largest in the artist’s oeuvre—the present work offers a particularly direct articulation of the artist’s conceptual vision, where delicate penwork and subtle shifts of tone work in tandem to craft a scene that almost quivers with immediacy. Notably, the present work was acquired directly from the artist by the Belgian-American lawyer and collector Harry Torczyner, Magritte’s close confidant and one of his most dedicated patrons. Writing to Torczyner in a letter from 11 May, 1959, Magritte emphatically explained his own fondness for the composition, expressing to Torczyner that in the process of creating the present "study-drawing," he had put his “finger upon…what is most deserving of exceptional attention” (Letter to Harry Torczyner, 11 May 1959, quoted in S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, 1949-67, Antwerp, 1993, p. 315). Turning specifically to the larger oil, he continued: “My other pictures are interesting or charming enough, but at the moment this is the one which best reminds us how strange reality can be, if one has a “sense of reality’’ (Ibid., p. 315).
The present work on paper belongs to a decisive moment in Magritte’s late practice, when he turned with new clarity toward what he described as “necessary ideas.” While the bowler-hatted man had previously appeared as a solitary presence often shown from behind, by the late 1950s Magritte began to reconsider the figure, exploring compositions presenting him frontally and in multiplicity. In Le mois des vendanges, this shift is fully realized. Here, the figure’s multiplication creates a measured, almost mechanical order, yet it is this regularity that lends a sense of unease. The figures, identical in dress and expression, confront the viewer directly, their gazes steady and unbroken. The distance between observer and image collapses, replaced by a reciprocal act of looking in which the viewer is implicated.
The composition further draws upon Magritte’s long engagement with the window, another motif central to his work from the late 1920s. Conventionally understood as an opening onto the external world, the window here operates in reverse: rather than extending space, it effectively denies it, the crowd’s obstruction of the exterior an insistent reminder of a world just beyond reach. Surrealist historian Mary-Ann Cawes registers a similar feeling: “Their gaze, directed at ours, and all the more terrible for being a multiplication of the same look, blocks our outlook and renders us a prisoner of the room, denying us even the most ordinary of landscapes” (The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception. Mannerist to Modern, Princeton, 1981, p. 100).
Executed in the same year as the celebrated painting of the same name and composition—one of the largest in the artist’s oeuvre—the present work offers a particularly direct articulation of the artist’s conceptual vision, where delicate penwork and subtle shifts of tone work in tandem to craft a scene that almost quivers with immediacy. Notably, the present work was acquired directly from the artist by the Belgian-American lawyer and collector Harry Torczyner, Magritte’s close confidant and one of his most dedicated patrons. Writing to Torczyner in a letter from 11 May, 1959, Magritte emphatically explained his own fondness for the composition, expressing to Torczyner that in the process of creating the present "study-drawing," he had put his “finger upon…what is most deserving of exceptional attention” (Letter to Harry Torczyner, 11 May 1959, quoted in S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, 1949-67, Antwerp, 1993, p. 315). Turning specifically to the larger oil, he continued: “My other pictures are interesting or charming enough, but at the moment this is the one which best reminds us how strange reality can be, if one has a “sense of reality’’ (Ibid., p. 315).