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Lot Essay
A tree is an image of a certain happiness. To perceive this image, we must be still, like a tree. ——René Magritte
Painted circa 1962, this exquisitely rendered gouache features one of René Magritte’s most enduring motifs: the “arbre-feuille” or “leaf tree.” Against a crepuscular backdrop, this stately natural form stands next to a tree, appearing as a strange and surreal hybrid object, its branches in fact forming the shape of a large, single leaf. The monumental leaf had been the result of one of Magritte’s great moments of Surreal inspiration: it conflated the macro and the micro, the organism as a whole and its constituent, fragmentary parts, introducing a new understanding of the character of the tree. In this way, Magritte melded these two highly recognisable elements into one image, moving on from the juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated objects that had featured in his earlier works and instead focusing on the “elective affinities” between aspects of existence. Portrayed amid the dusky light, La clairvoyance creates a feeling of poetic enigma that defines the finest of the artist’s works.
The idea of the “leaf-tree” first entered Magritte’s art in La Géante of 1935 (Sylvester, no. 362), in which a sturdy tree trunk set within a verdant landscape is adorned not with a multitude of leaves, but with one single, over-sized leaf. At the time that he painted this oil, Magritte was in the midst of one of the most important periods of his career, during which he had embarked upon an artistic exploration to seek “solutions” to particular pictorial “problems” posed by various objects. In seeking, and subsequently revealing, the “elective affinities” that lay hidden between related objects, Magritte was able to render the most banal and ubiquitous elements in an extraordinary way. In July 1934, Magritte wrote to André Breton, “I am trying at the moment to discover what it is in a tree that belongs to it specifically but which would run counter to our concept of a tree” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. II, p. 194). The answer he found was brilliant in its sheer simplicity—it was of course, the leaf. As he later explained in his lecture of 1938, “The tree, as the subject of a problem, became a large leaf the stem of which was a trunk directly planted in the ground” (“La Ligne de vie,” in G. Ollinger-Zinque and F. Leen, eds., René Magritte 1898-1967, exh. cat., Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 1998, p. 47).
It is a reflection of the enduring strength and purity of this leaf-tree motif that Magritte would return to in later years. The notion of this combination of different types of tree within a single composition had already occurred in the 1957 painting Le concert du matin (Sylvester, no. 848). In that picture, a horseman was seen riding through a forest of leaf-trees which also sported a single “normal” tree. While this marked the genesis of the idea explored in La clairvoyance, the subject may have suggested itself to Magritte in the early 1960s as he had created a painting called Les barricades mystérieuses (Sylvester, no. 932) which featured similar motifs. This was intended as the design for a larger work, an important monumental mural decorating the Palais des Congrès in Brussels, which Magritte had agreed to provide a few years earlier and which is still there to this day.
Painted circa 1962, this exquisitely rendered gouache features one of René Magritte’s most enduring motifs: the “arbre-feuille” or “leaf tree.” Against a crepuscular backdrop, this stately natural form stands next to a tree, appearing as a strange and surreal hybrid object, its branches in fact forming the shape of a large, single leaf. The monumental leaf had been the result of one of Magritte’s great moments of Surreal inspiration: it conflated the macro and the micro, the organism as a whole and its constituent, fragmentary parts, introducing a new understanding of the character of the tree. In this way, Magritte melded these two highly recognisable elements into one image, moving on from the juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated objects that had featured in his earlier works and instead focusing on the “elective affinities” between aspects of existence. Portrayed amid the dusky light, La clairvoyance creates a feeling of poetic enigma that defines the finest of the artist’s works.
The idea of the “leaf-tree” first entered Magritte’s art in La Géante of 1935 (Sylvester, no. 362), in which a sturdy tree trunk set within a verdant landscape is adorned not with a multitude of leaves, but with one single, over-sized leaf. At the time that he painted this oil, Magritte was in the midst of one of the most important periods of his career, during which he had embarked upon an artistic exploration to seek “solutions” to particular pictorial “problems” posed by various objects. In seeking, and subsequently revealing, the “elective affinities” that lay hidden between related objects, Magritte was able to render the most banal and ubiquitous elements in an extraordinary way. In July 1934, Magritte wrote to André Breton, “I am trying at the moment to discover what it is in a tree that belongs to it specifically but which would run counter to our concept of a tree” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. II, p. 194). The answer he found was brilliant in its sheer simplicity—it was of course, the leaf. As he later explained in his lecture of 1938, “The tree, as the subject of a problem, became a large leaf the stem of which was a trunk directly planted in the ground” (“La Ligne de vie,” in G. Ollinger-Zinque and F. Leen, eds., René Magritte 1898-1967, exh. cat., Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 1998, p. 47).
It is a reflection of the enduring strength and purity of this leaf-tree motif that Magritte would return to in later years. The notion of this combination of different types of tree within a single composition had already occurred in the 1957 painting Le concert du matin (Sylvester, no. 848). In that picture, a horseman was seen riding through a forest of leaf-trees which also sported a single “normal” tree. While this marked the genesis of the idea explored in La clairvoyance, the subject may have suggested itself to Magritte in the early 1960s as he had created a painting called Les barricades mystérieuses (Sylvester, no. 932) which featured similar motifs. This was intended as the design for a larger work, an important monumental mural decorating the Palais des Congrès in Brussels, which Magritte had agreed to provide a few years earlier and which is still there to this day.