拍品專文
La Carrière de Granit was probably painted during June 1964, when Magritte was on holiday in Nice. It belongs to a series of works that he completed at this time which incorporate the silhouette of a bowler-hatted man enclosing a sky or a landscape.
Magritte first used the motif of the bowler-hatted man in his painting Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire of 1926 (Sylvester no. 124). The image soon became one of his most celebrated themes and often appeared in his oeuvre, especially between 1950 and 1965.
"Magritte's bowler-hatted men came to be equated with himself, an equation he would seem to have endorsed, if not inspired, through photographs he posed for from the 1930s onwards. For himself, the bowler would have been the key item in his disguise as small shopkeeper or clerk in his Sunday best. Mesens has told me how Magritte made a point of never buying himself a stylish bowler, one that would best suit his face, but always a standardised, indifferent product, allowing no intervention of preference, or taste.
At that time especially [the 1920s], the bowler was a badge of comedy as much as of conformity. Stan Laurel remarked 'the bowler-hat to me has always seemed to be a part of comic make-up as far back as I can remember. I'm sure that's why Charlie [Chaplin] wore one. Most of the comics we saw as boys wore them.' There are some early drawings and collages with specifically Chaplinesque figures. And it does seem possible that the landscape - prototype of several later images - could have been suggested by Chaplin's usual signing-off shot" (D. Sylvester, Magritte, exh. cat., London, 1969, p.14).
In these pictures, the face and sometimes the whole body of the bowler-hatted man is simply a frame in which to depict another subject, an object or landscape. The face is never depicted. In an interview with Jean Neyens in 1965 Magritte explained "each thing we see hides another, we always want to see what is being hidden by what we see. There is an interest in what is hidden and what the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a fairly intense feeling, a kind of contest I could say between the hidden visible and apparent visible."
Magritte first used the motif of the bowler-hatted man in his painting Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire of 1926 (Sylvester no. 124). The image soon became one of his most celebrated themes and often appeared in his oeuvre, especially between 1950 and 1965.
"Magritte's bowler-hatted men came to be equated with himself, an equation he would seem to have endorsed, if not inspired, through photographs he posed for from the 1930s onwards. For himself, the bowler would have been the key item in his disguise as small shopkeeper or clerk in his Sunday best. Mesens has told me how Magritte made a point of never buying himself a stylish bowler, one that would best suit his face, but always a standardised, indifferent product, allowing no intervention of preference, or taste.
At that time especially [the 1920s], the bowler was a badge of comedy as much as of conformity. Stan Laurel remarked 'the bowler-hat to me has always seemed to be a part of comic make-up as far back as I can remember. I'm sure that's why Charlie [Chaplin] wore one. Most of the comics we saw as boys wore them.' There are some early drawings and collages with specifically Chaplinesque figures. And it does seem possible that the landscape - prototype of several later images - could have been suggested by Chaplin's usual signing-off shot" (D. Sylvester, Magritte, exh. cat., London, 1969, p.14).
In these pictures, the face and sometimes the whole body of the bowler-hatted man is simply a frame in which to depict another subject, an object or landscape. The face is never depicted. In an interview with Jean Neyens in 1965 Magritte explained "each thing we see hides another, we always want to see what is being hidden by what we see. There is an interest in what is hidden and what the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a fairly intense feeling, a kind of contest I could say between the hidden visible and apparent visible."