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Lot Essay
Magritte understood that the collages that Max Ernst made during the early 1920s stood for a rupture with all of the traditional means of painting. "Scissors, paste, images and genius" he wrote, "in effect superseded brushes, paints, models, style, sensibility and that famous sincerity demanded of artists" (from 'La ligne de vie', in L. Scutenaire, Avec Magritte, Brussels, 1977, p. 74).
This example encouraged Magritte to execute his first papiers collés in 1925 at about the same time that he painted his first surreal compositions. He completed about thirty works of this kind (including the present lot) before travelling to Paris in September 1927 to meet the French Surrealists.
All but three of these papiers collés contain fragments of sheet music which were cut out from a piano score of a popular English musical comedy, The girls of Gottenborg by George Grossmith, Jr. and L.E. Berman. Magritte probably received these sheets from his brother Paul, who was a musician. The configuration of the cut music paper 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 sign in musical notation.
Magritte has managed with very little means to create a surreal landscape where these strange shapes come to life and participate in some kind of fantastical ballet on a wooden stage with a sunset in the background. The music shape which casts a shadow like the manikin next to it seems to be capable of self-perambulation, and appears to be engaging in some sort of flirting or converstaion with the manikin under the surveillance of a bird-kite while a horse struggles on his back like a beetle on the horizon.
This example encouraged Magritte to execute his first papiers collés in 1925 at about the same time that he painted his first surreal compositions. He completed about thirty works of this kind (including the present lot) before travelling to Paris in September 1927 to meet the French Surrealists.
All but three of these papiers collés contain fragments of sheet music which were cut out from a piano score of a popular English musical comedy, The girls of Gottenborg by George Grossmith, Jr. and L.E. Berman. Magritte probably received these sheets from his brother Paul, who was a musician. The configuration of the cut music paper 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 sign in musical notation.
Magritte has managed with very little means to create a surreal landscape where these strange shapes come to life and participate in some kind of fantastical ballet on a wooden stage with a sunset in the background. The music shape which casts a shadow like the manikin next to it seems to be capable of self-perambulation, and appears to be engaging in some sort of flirting or converstaion with the manikin under the surveillance of a bird-kite while a horse struggles on his back like a beetle on the horizon.