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Lot Essay
At the same moment that he was casting his eye towards the nascent Surrealist movement, René Magritte began to experiment with papier collé. Inspired by Max Ernst’s bold compositions, in 1925, Magritte began to cut out his first paper images, believing that collage had the potential to radically reimagine art making: ‘scissors, paste, images and genius in effect superseded brushes, paints, models, styles, sensibility and that famous sincerity demanded of artists’ (Magritte, quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., London, 1992, p. 260). These early papiers collés introduce the same witty juxtapositions that would become hallmarks of Magritte’s oeuvre, and their most consistent feature is the snippets of sheet music that the artist cut and shaped into various forms.
Following these early works, however, Magritte stopped working with papiers collé for several decades, preferring instead to bring a collage sensibility to his paintings through his use of trompe-l'œil and contradictory juxtapositions. It was not until the last months of 1959, when he was commissioned to design a cover for a ballet programme at the Gala de la Section Bruxelloise de l’Association Générale de la Presse Belge, that he returned to the technique. The project sparked Magritte’s creative imagination anew, and he once again took up papier collé. The technique would hold a key position in his practice throughout the rest of his career.
Executed in 1961, La veillée (The Vigil) is a delicate papier collé that dates from this second period of collage in the artist’s oeuvre. The still life depicts an unusual scene in which a candle formed of sheet music and several cream coloured eggs have been positioned on a stage framed by red curtains, revealing the enduring influence of de Chirico’s stage-like spaces. The score shown in the present work was included in two other contemporaneous works (Sylvester nos. 1633 and 1636). This arrangement of objects is enigmatic and gives La veillée a poetic, dreamlike atmosphere that was so central to Magritte’s practice. Whether they portray explicit transformations or rely on implication, as in the case of the present work, Magritte’s imagery invites its viewers to reconsider the visible world, a key tenet of Surrealism, which rejected wholesale rationalism in favour of allowing the subconscious to emerge.
In his examination of Magritte’s papiers collés, Siegfried Gohr has offered a parallel between the composer of music and the composer of collages, an apt comparison given the artist’s use of musical notation: ‘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’ (Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, p. 72). Seen in this light, the artist’s choice to continue to depict sheet music – as well as the bird’s nest, and curtains, two other recurrent motifs– suggest that La veillée is part of a longer conversation. Such images add to a chain of associations, linking La veillée not only to Magritte’s other compositions but also to the wider world.
Following these early works, however, Magritte stopped working with papiers collé for several decades, preferring instead to bring a collage sensibility to his paintings through his use of trompe-l'œil and contradictory juxtapositions. It was not until the last months of 1959, when he was commissioned to design a cover for a ballet programme at the Gala de la Section Bruxelloise de l’Association Générale de la Presse Belge, that he returned to the technique. The project sparked Magritte’s creative imagination anew, and he once again took up papier collé. The technique would hold a key position in his practice throughout the rest of his career.
Executed in 1961, La veillée (The Vigil) is a delicate papier collé that dates from this second period of collage in the artist’s oeuvre. The still life depicts an unusual scene in which a candle formed of sheet music and several cream coloured eggs have been positioned on a stage framed by red curtains, revealing the enduring influence of de Chirico’s stage-like spaces. The score shown in the present work was included in two other contemporaneous works (Sylvester nos. 1633 and 1636). This arrangement of objects is enigmatic and gives La veillée a poetic, dreamlike atmosphere that was so central to Magritte’s practice. Whether they portray explicit transformations or rely on implication, as in the case of the present work, Magritte’s imagery invites its viewers to reconsider the visible world, a key tenet of Surrealism, which rejected wholesale rationalism in favour of allowing the subconscious to emerge.
In his examination of Magritte’s papiers collés, Siegfried Gohr has offered a parallel between the composer of music and the composer of collages, an apt comparison given the artist’s use of musical notation: ‘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’ (Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, p. 72). Seen in this light, the artist’s choice to continue to depict sheet music – as well as the bird’s nest, and curtains, two other recurrent motifs– suggest that La veillée is part of a longer conversation. Such images add to a chain of associations, linking La veillée not only to Magritte’s other compositions but also to the wider world.