La reconnaissance infinie: mysterious fruit of the friendship between René Magritte and the poet Paul Colinet

In 1930, René Magritte quit Paris for Brussels, ending a three-year stay in the French capital. Artistically, he had thrived there, making a name for himself at the heart of the Surrealist movement and producing enigmatic masterpieces such The Lovers (today part of MoMA’s collection in New York).

On a personal level, though, he had struggled to integrate. He didn’t share the taste of many of Paris’s Surrealists, for example, for alcohol and mind-expanding drugs. On returning to their homeland, he and his wife Georgette moved into a modest house in the quiet suburb of Jette in north-west Brussels.

Here Magritte would live a life of happy conformity, devoting his attention chiefly to painting and to walking his Pomeranian dogs. In the case of the former, he disliked studios, preferring to work in the comfort of his own dining room. It’s said that he never let a single drop of paint fall on the carpet.

Far from leaving Surrealism behind in 1930, he reconnected with figures from the Brussels branch of the movement: the likes of E.L.T. Mesens, Marcel Lecomte, Paul Nougé and Louis Scutenaire, with whom he had associated before moving to Paris.

In 1932, Lecomte introduced a new member to the group, the poet Paul Colinet, somebody Scutenaire came to dub ‘the Don Juan of words’.

Magritte’s relationship with Colinet would become one of the most intriguing of his career. It would also inspire the painting La reconnaissance infinie, which is being offered in The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale on 5 March 2025 at Christie’s.

According to the British art historian and Magritte expert David Sylvester, the artist wanted the mystery of his pictures ‘to be confronted, not interpreted’. What confronts us in La reconnaissance infinie is a large white orb floating mysteriously above a mountain landscape. A tiny man stands on top of it, looking somewhat bemused and straining his eyes to see what lies in the distance.

Playing with perspective and the viewer’s perceptual expectations, the artist has painted a section of ceiling, wall and window ledge — along the top, down the right, and along the bottom of the picture. The implication is that we’re seeing this scene through a window in front of us. This hint of the domestic is deliberately at odds with the vast landscape.

Another surreal touch is the figure’s dress: though aerially traversing a steep mountain pass, he has less the look of an adventurer than of an ordinary gentleman, clean-shaven and wearing a grey suit.

In May 1933, a solo exhibition devoted to Magritte opened at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. It featured more than 50 paintings, most of which he had created in the late 1920s. Many works had never been shown publicly before, and, as such, the show represented an overview of the artist’s burgeoning Surrealist vision.

Among the keenest visitors was Colinet, who by now was starting to forge a close friendship with Magritte. The pair had been born in the same year — 1898 — and shared what the artist called ‘a warm, disquieting humour’.

On visiting the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Colinet was struck by the recurring motif of a mysterious orb. Defying gravity and boasting a smooth white surface, this motif appeared in a number of Magritte’s recent paintings, perhaps most strikingly 1928’s La vie secrète (today part of the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich).

Inspired by what he saw, the poet put pen to paper and drew an imaginary scene in which a small man is glimpsed floating on an orb through a mountain landscape. He gave this rapidly executed sketch to Magritte, who used it as the germ of the idea for a new composition: La reconnaissance infinie, created after the Palais des Beaux-Arts show closed.

The man in the painting gazes away from us, his view trained on something beyond our vision. This adds a further layer of mystery to the scene — what can have caught his eye? It’s a question picked up by the painting’s title. In French, reconnaissance has two meanings: one is ‘recognition’; the other (like in English) is in the military sense of information-gathering about a given place.

The latter meaning is apt for a scene such as this, with the figure trying to navigate an unusual route. There’s a chance, however, that he might be attaining reconnaissance in the former sense, too — that is, recognition or understanding of what’s around him, through intense looking. (Infinie, incidentally, means ‘infinite’ or ‘without limit’.)

Magritte never actually enjoyed giving titles to his works, and often asked poet friends to take on the task for him. He requested only that they pick a name compatible with what they experienced when looking at a painting.

Over the years, Colinet provided titles for many works (though it’s not known whether La reconnaissance infinie was among them). The poet also became a regular sounding board for his friend’s ideas, even helping him develop concepts such as the portrait manqué: a type of portrait in which the sitter’s face is invisible. A notable example is La reproduction interdite (1937), depicting the artist’s English patron, Edward James.

Collaboration wasn’t just one way, either. Magritte, for instance, provided the cover illustration for the publication of Marie trombone chapeau buse in 1936. This was a poem by Colinet which had been set to music by Paul Magritte, the artist’s brother.

Everything changed at the end of the 1930s, however, when the pair’s creative bond — and friendship — came to an abrupt halt. Magritte at that time was engaged in an extramarital relationship with the British performance artist Sheila Legge. But that didn’t lessen his sense of outrage when he learned that Colinet was having an affair with Georgette. Feeling betrayed, he banned the poet from his home indefinitely, and the men barely spoke to one another for a dozen years.

The rift seemed unresolvable. The relationship did heal eventually, however, and on the occasion of a major Magritte retrospective in Brussels in 1954, the two men even took to the airwaves together. The poet spoke glowingly to a Belgian radio reporter of the artist’s ‘unique and fascinating pictures’, adding that one ‘can never see them enough’.

Colinet passed away three years later, aged 59. Infidelities notwithstanding, Magritte and Georgette stayed together until the artist’s death in 1967.

La reconnaissance infinie’s first owner was the Belgian playwright Claude Spaak, who purchased it directly from the artist. He knew Magritte well and became a solid supporter of his in the 1930s, providing him with a stipend and collecting many of his pictures.

Soon after acquiring it, Spaak loaned La reconnaissance infinie to an important group exhibition called Minotaure at Brussels’s Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1934. Organised by the French publishers of the eponymous cultural magazine, the show featured work by a host of avant-garde figures. Predominantly Surrealists, though not exclusively so, these included Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Constantin Brancusi.

Magritte is an artist whose work asks many questions but resists easy answers. ‘I put men where you don’t expect to see them,’ he said. In the case of La reconnaissance infinie, that was atop a large sphere in the sky. Are we as viewers thus being invited to rethink our understanding of our place in the universe?

If so, this painting can be deemed partly a metaphysical enquiry and partly a testament to one of the most creatively fulfilling relationships of Magritte’s life.

Led by the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal on 5 March 2025, Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online from 26 February to 20 March. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales