Untitled

Untitled encapsulates the radical aesthetic shift that René Magritte’s practice underwent during the mid-1920s. Although previously interested in abstraction and cubism, by the end of the decade, the artist would be fully enmeshed within Surrealist circles, a theoretical and visual transition captured in in Untitled. Magritte’s collages were derived from the Cubist technique of papier collé, which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had begun experimenting with in 1912. He incorporated snippets of photographs and advertisements as well as small drawings into his collages, but the most consistent feature was the inclusion of sheet music, which is found in all but three of the papiers collés from this period. Siegfried Gohr has suggested a relationship between the composer of music and the composer of collages, writing, ‘In both cases, the actual work consists neither of the notes nor of the pieces of paper – but emerges only in a performance, which ultimately takes place in the mind of the listener or viewer’ (S. Gohr, Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, p. 72). Indeed, in Untitled, the music stages the dream world and the uncanny interplay between subconscious and reality.
Magritte began his papier collés in 1925, heralding the start of a highly prolific period. In 1927, he had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels, in which this work was shown; the exhibition was his launchpad into the avant-garde. In August of that same year, Magritte and his wife moved to Le Perreux-sur-Marne outside of Paris, and once in France, he befriended members of the Surrealist group including André Breton and Paul Éluard. His art, as such, underwent a dramatic transformation and his three years in Paris were revelatory during which he became an important yet independent artist within the Surrealist movement.