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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection for the last twenty-five years, and formerly on long-term loan to the Musée Magritte in Brussels, Les grâces naturelles is an evocative and charming example of René Magritte’s iconic Surrealist idiom during the final, valedictory phase of his career. At this time, Magritte was looking back on his life and career with a renewed focus, revisiting certain compositions and subjects that he felt held a particular poetic power that could be further explored in new work. It was this intention that led him to return to one of his most famous and intriguing motifs within his oeuvre, the magical ‘leaf-bird,’ caught in a moment of metamorphosis and change. Investigating concepts of transformation and dislocation, theatricality and mystery, the painting is a direct challenge to our passive understanding of the very nature of reality, posing a strange visual conundrum that forces us to stop and consider anew the world around us.
The early 1960s was an important period of consolidation in Magritte’s career. As he wrote to his dealer Alexander Iolas in 1959, ‘I ought to start painting fewer pictures soon. The fact is, the paintings to come will take me longer. I have reached a point where painting poses fresh problems for me and I cannot devote myself to easy things… The new paintings will not be worth looking at unless they bring us ideas that are indispensable’ (letter to Alexander Iolas, 1959; quoted in J. Meuris, Magritte, trans. J.A. Underwood, New York, 1990, p. 170). Through the ensuing years, Magritte deliberately restricted himself to motifs and subjects that he felt were emblematic of this way of thinking, exploring ideas that were not just visually stimulating, but profoundly thought-provoking. He explored chains of images across several canvases, studying different variations and permutations of a given motif, with each successive work representing an evolution of the pictorial concept.
Executed circa 1961, Les grâces naturelles is a striking example of this shifting approach in Magritte’s painterly practice. One of only around a dozen oil paintings he completed that year, the work offers an unusual variation on the leaf-bird motif, in which these otherworldly, hybrid creatures are set against a densely packed, decorative carpet of leaves. In doing so, Magritte conjoins two different strands of pictorial thought in a single image, making a vivid connection with other paintings from his oeuvre, to create a new angle from which to consider the beauty and mystery of the natural world.
The leaf birds had first emerged in Magritte’s paintings in the early 1940s, appearing in L’île au trésor (Sylvester, no. 498; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels) and Les compagnons de la peur (Sylvester, no. 499). Dating from the same year, both of these paintings present a bushel of these magical creatures perched atop a rocky outcropping, with a backdrop of mountains in the distance. However, while there is a lightness and dynamism to L’île au trésor, the leaf birds modelled after doves that appear to jostle one another as they attempt to take flight, in Les compagnons de la peur the mood is distinctly more sombre. Here, a small flock, or parliament, of owls appear from the leaves, their forms strikingly still as their watchful eyes monitor their surroundings. The leaf birds swiftly became a recurring subject in Magritte’s compositions through the War years, on occasion moving to an indoor setting, as in L’équateur (Sylvester, no. 502) and Le trait d’union (Sylvester, no. 514), though the majority remained rooted in the outdoors, most frequently the edge of a promontory or cliff, overlooking a picturesque vista or seascape.
In one strange variation, seen in La saveur des larmes (Sylvester, nos. 664 and 665; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham), the leaf bird is consumed by a small caterpillar, the insect’s feast leaving a trail of holes that puncture the creature’s body. The leaf bird in turn appears to droop despondently at the turn of events, perhaps lamenting their inability to escape this attack, and fly through the window beyond. The importance of the leaf-bird subject was reaffirmed on a monumental scale when it became one of the motifs Magritte included in his mural programme for the Casino Communal at Knokke-Le-Zoute in 1953. Writing about the project, the poet Paul Colinet vividly described the powerful, atmospheric effect conjured by the presence of the leaf birds: ‘L’île au trésor, where the trees have no foliage other than their songs’ (“Le domaine enchanté”: Panorama Surréaliste de René Magritte, Knokke, 1953, n.p.).
In Les grâces naturelles, Magritte travels along another avenue of thought. Here, seven leaf birds are executed with clarity and precision, their forms picked out in a palette of vibrant greens, with subtle nuances in tone suggesting the play of light across their forms. Part fauna and part flora, they present a striking, seemingly impossible, incongruity that plays on the viewer’s understanding of the two separate elements of this hybrid character. The elegant doves appear primed for flight, ready to take to the air at any moment, the delicate feathers of their wings picked out in clear, linear strokes of pigment. Yet, they are essentially grounded, held firmly in place by the roots that anchor them to the land. By this stage of his career, Magritte had become adept at converting his vision of the mysteries of the world into pictures that, through their iconic simplicity, conveyed their messages all the more strikingly. It is in its simplicity that Les grâces naturelles gains its strange, distinctive, revelatory power.
The concept of metamorphosis had long fascinated Magritte. Rather than simply marrying two different elements together, however, the artist found it particularly stimulating to render his subjects in an in-between state, picturing them in a moment of transition or flux. ‘I have found a new potential inherent in things,’ the artist wrote to his friend, the poet Paul Nougé in 1927, ‘their ability to become gradually something else, an object merging into an object other than itself… This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances, and no limit’ (in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, London, 1993, vol. I, pp. 245-246). It is this type of partial transformation that gives the leaf birds their strange, surreal drama – capturing the creatures in the middle of their transformation, the artist handles the transition from vegetation to bird with extreme delicacy, allowing the green, waxy surface of the plant to gradually shift into the soft, plush plumage of the doves, emphasizing the shift in texture through light, flickering brushstrokes that convey a sense of the texture of their plumage.
Unexpectedly, the leaf birds in Les grâces naturelles are not placed in the settings typically associated with this motif. Eschewing the picturesque island vista or classical interior seen in previous works, Magritte instead chooses to position the creatures against a flat backdrop of dense foliage that he repetitively, painstakingly painted with exacting detail. In contrast to the tall, slender individual leaves of the hybrid bird-plant at the centre, the ground features layers of blue-toned, star-shaped leaves, each stem sprouting between five and seven leaflets in a pattern that suggests they originate from a horse chestnut tree. This highly detailed background, which Magritte used in several other compositions from the opening years of the 1960s including La cascade (Sylvester, no. 934), appears to have appealed to the artist not only for its decorative qualities, but also the manner in which it disrupts the sense of space within the picture.
Here, the tightly woven verdure almost threatens to subsume the leaf birds in the dense layers of foliage, framing them in such a way as to focus our attention squarely on the magical, mysterious nature of their metamorphosis. While later, Magritte would paint close-ups of a smaller group of leaf birds against a small segment of the tree’s foliage (Sylvester, no. 976), in Les grâces naturelles he presents a more expansive view, allowing the leaves to fill the entire picture plane, with small glimpses of a lavender-hued sky just visible between the leaves. The contrast between the different types of foliage adds a further note of complexity to the scene – the star-like configurations of the background, seen en masse in this way, combined with their distinctive blue hue, renders the appearance of the leaf bird all the more strange, their taller, broader leaves and waxy texture suggesting they are an alien interloper within this natural environment.
While his earliest meditations on metamorphosis had focused on nude women in the midst of turning into wood or the sky, with the leaf bird paintings Magritte presents a subtler approach to the theme, invoking the many processes within the natural world in which one thing evolves into another, such as a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. In this way, Magritte hoped to prompt his viewer to reconsider the inherent mystery and magic of everyday reality. ‘My images are not substitutes for either sleeping or waking dreams,’ he explained. ‘They do not give us the illusion of escaping from reality… I conceive painting as the art of juxtaposing colours in such a way that their effective aspect disappears and allows a poetic image to become visible. This image is the total description of a thought that unites – in a poetic order – familiar figures of the visible: skies, people, trees, mountains, furniture, stars, solids, inscriptions, etc. The poetic order evokes mystery, it responds to our natural interest in the unknown’ (quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. by R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 224).
The result was a visual language laced with duality and contradiction, rife with juxtapositions and congruences that were intended to provoke and challenge the viewer. By confronting us with such discreet interplays, contrasts and comparisons, Magritte hoped to push us towards a more awe-filled appreciation of the world around us. As Harry Torczyner eloquently explained: ‘The magic of René Magritte is lucid. A Surrealist, he is unique in his deliberate approach and enchants with reality. He is surprising and disconcerting because, to use his own words, “I see to it that I paint only images which evoke the mystery of the universe”’ (‘The Magic of Magritte,’ 1964, in The Collection of Harry Torczyner, Esq., Christie’s New York, 1998, p. 27). In the present work, the natural order of the world has seemingly been upturned. The bird stretching its wings in the foreground prompts us to consider the next moment in the scene, as the transformation continues – will the dove break free from the bounds of its plant-form, soaring through the air, or forever remain stuck, rooted to the earth and bound by gravity.
The motif of the leaf bird continued to inspire Magritte at various intervals through the remainder of the decade, captivating his imagination. At the beginning of 1967, he began an ambitious project to transform a selection of his painted motifs into three-dimensional form, creating a total of eight large bronze sculptures (Sylvester, nos. 1087-1094), each of which brought to life the illusionistically rendered images of his painting. By translating one medium to another, Magritte masterfully expanded his upon the poetic potential of his vision. Transforming his fantastical imagery from the canvas into tangible form, he made a final great leap in his artmaking. Among the most successful motifs to be translated to bronze in this way, the leaf bird attained a powerful new potency, their hybrid forms now permanently fixed in this moment of metamorphosis.
According to Marcel Mariëns, the title Les grâces naturelles, which recurred across several variations of the leaf-bird motif, including the present work, had been suggested to the artist by Paul Nougé. Magritte assigned great importance to the naming of his paintings, relying on a trusted network of friends and colleagues to suggest and debate potential titles for a finished work. In 1948, Magritte put pen to paper and across a series of handwritten manuscripts – now preserved in the Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium and collectively known as “On Titles” – compiled his thoughts and musings the various solutions that had been reached in this way. For Les grâces naturelles, Magritte wrote: ‘Everything offered to our gaze on this canvas is distinguished in the highest degree by natural grace’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., op. cit., 1993, vol. II, p. 378).
The early 1960s was an important period of consolidation in Magritte’s career. As he wrote to his dealer Alexander Iolas in 1959, ‘I ought to start painting fewer pictures soon. The fact is, the paintings to come will take me longer. I have reached a point where painting poses fresh problems for me and I cannot devote myself to easy things… The new paintings will not be worth looking at unless they bring us ideas that are indispensable’ (letter to Alexander Iolas, 1959; quoted in J. Meuris, Magritte, trans. J.A. Underwood, New York, 1990, p. 170). Through the ensuing years, Magritte deliberately restricted himself to motifs and subjects that he felt were emblematic of this way of thinking, exploring ideas that were not just visually stimulating, but profoundly thought-provoking. He explored chains of images across several canvases, studying different variations and permutations of a given motif, with each successive work representing an evolution of the pictorial concept.
Executed circa 1961, Les grâces naturelles is a striking example of this shifting approach in Magritte’s painterly practice. One of only around a dozen oil paintings he completed that year, the work offers an unusual variation on the leaf-bird motif, in which these otherworldly, hybrid creatures are set against a densely packed, decorative carpet of leaves. In doing so, Magritte conjoins two different strands of pictorial thought in a single image, making a vivid connection with other paintings from his oeuvre, to create a new angle from which to consider the beauty and mystery of the natural world.
The leaf birds had first emerged in Magritte’s paintings in the early 1940s, appearing in L’île au trésor (Sylvester, no. 498; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels) and Les compagnons de la peur (Sylvester, no. 499). Dating from the same year, both of these paintings present a bushel of these magical creatures perched atop a rocky outcropping, with a backdrop of mountains in the distance. However, while there is a lightness and dynamism to L’île au trésor, the leaf birds modelled after doves that appear to jostle one another as they attempt to take flight, in Les compagnons de la peur the mood is distinctly more sombre. Here, a small flock, or parliament, of owls appear from the leaves, their forms strikingly still as their watchful eyes monitor their surroundings. The leaf birds swiftly became a recurring subject in Magritte’s compositions through the War years, on occasion moving to an indoor setting, as in L’équateur (Sylvester, no. 502) and Le trait d’union (Sylvester, no. 514), though the majority remained rooted in the outdoors, most frequently the edge of a promontory or cliff, overlooking a picturesque vista or seascape.
In one strange variation, seen in La saveur des larmes (Sylvester, nos. 664 and 665; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham), the leaf bird is consumed by a small caterpillar, the insect’s feast leaving a trail of holes that puncture the creature’s body. The leaf bird in turn appears to droop despondently at the turn of events, perhaps lamenting their inability to escape this attack, and fly through the window beyond. The importance of the leaf-bird subject was reaffirmed on a monumental scale when it became one of the motifs Magritte included in his mural programme for the Casino Communal at Knokke-Le-Zoute in 1953. Writing about the project, the poet Paul Colinet vividly described the powerful, atmospheric effect conjured by the presence of the leaf birds: ‘L’île au trésor, where the trees have no foliage other than their songs’ (“Le domaine enchanté”: Panorama Surréaliste de René Magritte, Knokke, 1953, n.p.).
In Les grâces naturelles, Magritte travels along another avenue of thought. Here, seven leaf birds are executed with clarity and precision, their forms picked out in a palette of vibrant greens, with subtle nuances in tone suggesting the play of light across their forms. Part fauna and part flora, they present a striking, seemingly impossible, incongruity that plays on the viewer’s understanding of the two separate elements of this hybrid character. The elegant doves appear primed for flight, ready to take to the air at any moment, the delicate feathers of their wings picked out in clear, linear strokes of pigment. Yet, they are essentially grounded, held firmly in place by the roots that anchor them to the land. By this stage of his career, Magritte had become adept at converting his vision of the mysteries of the world into pictures that, through their iconic simplicity, conveyed their messages all the more strikingly. It is in its simplicity that Les grâces naturelles gains its strange, distinctive, revelatory power.
The concept of metamorphosis had long fascinated Magritte. Rather than simply marrying two different elements together, however, the artist found it particularly stimulating to render his subjects in an in-between state, picturing them in a moment of transition or flux. ‘I have found a new potential inherent in things,’ the artist wrote to his friend, the poet Paul Nougé in 1927, ‘their ability to become gradually something else, an object merging into an object other than itself… This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances, and no limit’ (in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, London, 1993, vol. I, pp. 245-246). It is this type of partial transformation that gives the leaf birds their strange, surreal drama – capturing the creatures in the middle of their transformation, the artist handles the transition from vegetation to bird with extreme delicacy, allowing the green, waxy surface of the plant to gradually shift into the soft, plush plumage of the doves, emphasizing the shift in texture through light, flickering brushstrokes that convey a sense of the texture of their plumage.
Unexpectedly, the leaf birds in Les grâces naturelles are not placed in the settings typically associated with this motif. Eschewing the picturesque island vista or classical interior seen in previous works, Magritte instead chooses to position the creatures against a flat backdrop of dense foliage that he repetitively, painstakingly painted with exacting detail. In contrast to the tall, slender individual leaves of the hybrid bird-plant at the centre, the ground features layers of blue-toned, star-shaped leaves, each stem sprouting between five and seven leaflets in a pattern that suggests they originate from a horse chestnut tree. This highly detailed background, which Magritte used in several other compositions from the opening years of the 1960s including La cascade (Sylvester, no. 934), appears to have appealed to the artist not only for its decorative qualities, but also the manner in which it disrupts the sense of space within the picture.
Here, the tightly woven verdure almost threatens to subsume the leaf birds in the dense layers of foliage, framing them in such a way as to focus our attention squarely on the magical, mysterious nature of their metamorphosis. While later, Magritte would paint close-ups of a smaller group of leaf birds against a small segment of the tree’s foliage (Sylvester, no. 976), in Les grâces naturelles he presents a more expansive view, allowing the leaves to fill the entire picture plane, with small glimpses of a lavender-hued sky just visible between the leaves. The contrast between the different types of foliage adds a further note of complexity to the scene – the star-like configurations of the background, seen en masse in this way, combined with their distinctive blue hue, renders the appearance of the leaf bird all the more strange, their taller, broader leaves and waxy texture suggesting they are an alien interloper within this natural environment.
While his earliest meditations on metamorphosis had focused on nude women in the midst of turning into wood or the sky, with the leaf bird paintings Magritte presents a subtler approach to the theme, invoking the many processes within the natural world in which one thing evolves into another, such as a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. In this way, Magritte hoped to prompt his viewer to reconsider the inherent mystery and magic of everyday reality. ‘My images are not substitutes for either sleeping or waking dreams,’ he explained. ‘They do not give us the illusion of escaping from reality… I conceive painting as the art of juxtaposing colours in such a way that their effective aspect disappears and allows a poetic image to become visible. This image is the total description of a thought that unites – in a poetic order – familiar figures of the visible: skies, people, trees, mountains, furniture, stars, solids, inscriptions, etc. The poetic order evokes mystery, it responds to our natural interest in the unknown’ (quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. by R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 224).
The result was a visual language laced with duality and contradiction, rife with juxtapositions and congruences that were intended to provoke and challenge the viewer. By confronting us with such discreet interplays, contrasts and comparisons, Magritte hoped to push us towards a more awe-filled appreciation of the world around us. As Harry Torczyner eloquently explained: ‘The magic of René Magritte is lucid. A Surrealist, he is unique in his deliberate approach and enchants with reality. He is surprising and disconcerting because, to use his own words, “I see to it that I paint only images which evoke the mystery of the universe”’ (‘The Magic of Magritte,’ 1964, in The Collection of Harry Torczyner, Esq., Christie’s New York, 1998, p. 27). In the present work, the natural order of the world has seemingly been upturned. The bird stretching its wings in the foreground prompts us to consider the next moment in the scene, as the transformation continues – will the dove break free from the bounds of its plant-form, soaring through the air, or forever remain stuck, rooted to the earth and bound by gravity.
The motif of the leaf bird continued to inspire Magritte at various intervals through the remainder of the decade, captivating his imagination. At the beginning of 1967, he began an ambitious project to transform a selection of his painted motifs into three-dimensional form, creating a total of eight large bronze sculptures (Sylvester, nos. 1087-1094), each of which brought to life the illusionistically rendered images of his painting. By translating one medium to another, Magritte masterfully expanded his upon the poetic potential of his vision. Transforming his fantastical imagery from the canvas into tangible form, he made a final great leap in his artmaking. Among the most successful motifs to be translated to bronze in this way, the leaf bird attained a powerful new potency, their hybrid forms now permanently fixed in this moment of metamorphosis.
According to Marcel Mariëns, the title Les grâces naturelles, which recurred across several variations of the leaf-bird motif, including the present work, had been suggested to the artist by Paul Nougé. Magritte assigned great importance to the naming of his paintings, relying on a trusted network of friends and colleagues to suggest and debate potential titles for a finished work. In 1948, Magritte put pen to paper and across a series of handwritten manuscripts – now preserved in the Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium and collectively known as “On Titles” – compiled his thoughts and musings the various solutions that had been reached in this way. For Les grâces naturelles, Magritte wrote: ‘Everything offered to our gaze on this canvas is distinguished in the highest degree by natural grace’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., op. cit., 1993, vol. II, p. 378).