La fin du temps

細節

René Magritte (1898-1967)
La fin du temps
signed 'Magritte' (upper right); titled '"La fin du temps"' (on the stretcher)
oil on canvas
28½ x 21¼ in. (72.5 x 54 cm.)
Painted in October/November 1927

來源

Galerie L'Epoque, Brussels (no. GS 321), by 1928.
Galerie Le Centaure (P.G. van Hecke), Brussels, by whom acquired from the above in January 1929.
E.L.T. Mesens, Brussels, by whom acquired in 1932 at the liquidation of the above.
René Withofs, Brussels, by whom acquired from the above, probably in the late 1950s.
Acquired from the above in 1962 by the present owner.

出版

R. Magritte, letter to Paul Nougé, November 1927, in Lettres surréalistes, no. 112.
C. Goemans, letter to Janlet, 13 January 1928.
D. Sylvester (ed.), René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, Oil Paintings: 1916-1930, London, 1992, no. 179 (illustrated p. 243).
R. Hughes (ed.), Les essentiels de l'art, Magritte, Paris, 2001, p. 48 (illustrated).

展覽

Brussels, Galerie L'Epoque, René Magritte, January 1928, no. 12.
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Exposition René Magritte, May - June 1933, no. 37.

注意事項

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

拍品專文

Painted in 1927, La fin du temps is an exciting early painting dating from the all-important period in which Magritte was consolidating his unique visual idiom. The presence of this work only a few months after it was painted in Magritte's important one man exhibition at the Galerie L'Epoque reflects the artist's own appreciation of its importance within his oeuvre. There, it was placed above a fireplace, adding to the domestic feel of the exhibition and the painting, yet at the same time resulting in a surreal subversion of the normal appearance of a Belgian interior. With its simple re-imagining of a domestic mirror, La fin du temps dates from the period in which Magritte was rigorously attacking the common perception of everyday reality. He was trying to provoke a Pauline epiphany, to jolt us out of our lazy and complacent understanding of the universe by providing us with his images, which are cues, new perspectives, keys to a new poetic understanding of reality. Magritte is urging us not to rely on our eyes and our learnt values, but instead to look with wonder on the world, to see things in their full glory and splendour. In a lecture a decade later, he explained that the paintings from this early period of his full-blown Magrittean Surrealism were 'the result of a systematic search for an overwhelming poetic effect through the arrangement of objects borrowed from reality, which would give the real world from which those objects had been borrowed an overwhelming poetic meaning by a natural process of exchange' (Magritte in 1938, quoted in in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. Richard Miller, New York, 1977, pp. 215-16).

In La fin du temps, Magritte has done this by creating a strange and surreal mirror, reminiscent of lacework in the intricate and impossible pattern that is emblazoned across it. He adds to the disorientating effect of the painting by distorting the perspective, making the mirror's base tilt at a rakish angle while the faux wood underneath provides, to our all-too-rational eyes, no real physical support. This strange yet simple combination of elements and effects results in the mirror, and La fin du temps itself, appearing as a portal to our new understanding of the world and its strange and surreal symmetries. The strange cut-away surface of the glass implies that the world of Lewis Carrol is not as far away as we think, is not even beyond the looking-glass before us.