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Lot Essay
Dominating its Impressionist landscape is an Impressionist bowl of flowers, dwarfing its passers-by and the horse and cart... Two traditional images have been superimposed on one canvas, creating a finished result that has little to do with tradition at all. In La main de gloire, Magritte's unique vision is combined with his sense of humour and his iconoclastic desire to assault the sensibilities of his viewers, to shock them into a renewed appreciation of the world. Painted in 1943, this is one of several pictures that Magritte painted in the so-called Renoir style, although he had adopted it merely to capture a sense of decorative art, a chocolate-box sentimentality. In doing so, he managed to cause havoc amongst many people for his assault on taste, while his friends and fans considered it an affront to their loyalty. This type of image, they argued, was not a real Magritte. And yet it was precisely to prevent them taking his art for granted, and to inject some wit into the dark years of the Second World War, that Magritte had embarked on these mock-Impressionist pictures, as well as his faux-Fauve works, the so-called Vache paintings. Because people had expectations of what a Magritte picture should look like, he adopted this new, retrograde and yet revolutionary style, keeping fans and foes alike on their toes.
By placing the colossal bowl of flowers in the middle of the landscape, Magritte is laying siege not only to the prettiness of the Impressionists, but also to the artistic traditions of the Low Countries, famous for centuries for their landscapes and their flower paintings. Magritte, always appearing respectable, was a constant iconoclast and revolutionary, providing the much-needed jolts to the system that people needed in order to let the scales drop from their eyes and view the world with surreal freshness and wonder. In La main de gloire, Magritte has supplemented this sense of wonder with a sense of wit, inviting his viewers to join him as he laughed at the absurdities of the world around him.
By placing the colossal bowl of flowers in the middle of the landscape, Magritte is laying siege not only to the prettiness of the Impressionists, but also to the artistic traditions of the Low Countries, famous for centuries for their landscapes and their flower paintings. Magritte, always appearing respectable, was a constant iconoclast and revolutionary, providing the much-needed jolts to the system that people needed in order to let the scales drop from their eyes and view the world with surreal freshness and wonder. In La main de gloire, Magritte has supplemented this sense of wonder with a sense of wit, inviting his viewers to join him as he laughed at the absurdities of the world around him.