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拍品专文
‘I live in a very disagreeable world, and my work is meant as a counter-offensive.’——René Magritte
Painted during the final months of 1943, Le Préméditation is one of the earliest in a series known as Le Surréalisme en plein soleil (Surrealism in sunshine), created by Belgian Surrealist René Magritte during the turbulent years of the Second World War in the hope of re-enchanting daily life. A radiant bouquet of springtime flowers all improbably sprouting from the same plant, Le Préméditation captures a magnificent vision of optimism and hope. Living in the shadow of the German Occupation of Belgium, Magritte felt that a new visual idiom was needed to adequately respond to the horrors of war, and thus began to experiment with a distinctly impressionistic painting style that calls to mind the late period of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. ‘Before the war, my paintings expressed anxiety,’ Magritte explained, ‘but the experiences of war have taught me that what matters in art is to express charm. I live in a very disagreeable world, and my work is meant as a counter-offensive’ (R. Magritte, quoted in René Magritte: The Fifth Season, exh. cat. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018, p. 39). Featured as the cover of the exhibition catalogue for Magritte/Renoir: Le surréalisme en plein soleil at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, the present work reveals various influences that shaped Magritte’s creative vision during these turbulent times.
Rendering his composition in light, colourful, and feathered brushwork, Magritte sought to ‘bring a fresh wind’ to his painting as he explained in a letter to his friend Paul Éluard in 1941, ‘In my pictures, an enormous magic has now replaced the uncanny poetry whose effect I used so much to strive for. On the whole, pleasure now supplants a whole series of essential interests that I wish increasingly to leave out of account. The power of these pictures is to make one acutely aware of the imperfections of everyday life’. (Letter to Paul Éluard, December 1941; quoted in S. Gohr, Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, p. 191). In its overall effect, what Le Préméditation captured is far more than pure joy and pleasure aroused by the luscious, bouquet-like tree—there in between the vibrant complimentary pigments of azure and pink, vermillion and green, the ‘tree’ as if morphing into a human being full of dynamic. It is through infusing a hint of mystery into the pleasant scene that the artist mindfully unfolds the inherent chaos of the world using his humorous Magrittian idioms.
The tree, either alone as a subject or in a group, is a frequent pictorial element in Magritte’s works. Not only does it represent the artist’s belief in nature as an essential theme in his perception of reality, but also his poetic, transcendent vision of worldly existence. ‘Pushing up from the earth toward the sun,’ Magritte expressed in an undated statement, ‘a tree is an image of a certain happiness. To perceive this image, we must be still, like a tree. When we are in motion, it is the tree that becomes the spectator’ (R. Magritte, quoted in K. Rooney and E. Plattner (eds.), René Magritte: Selected Writings, Minneapolis, 2010, p. 234). In Le Préméditation, the indirect presence of a tree, though disguised in a Renoir-style bouquet filled with roses, tulips, pansies, carnations and daffodils, befitting what the artist was looking for in his pictures: the tension that arose between the familiarity of the objects he depicted, and the impossible, fantastical Surreal scenario they suggested.
Magritte’s reimagination of one of Renoir’s subjects in the present work is nearly citational. Such approach resonates with the superficial undercurrent emanated from Picabia’s appropriation of glamour commercial photographs from magazines where the painter disrupts the concept of painting and Modernity by blurring the boundary between canonical art and popular culture. As the art historian Cécile Debray observes, ‘through these paintings that Magritte reifies Renoir by means of signifying attributes—the nude, eroticism, the colourful, tapering brushstrokes, flowers—in slightly offbeat, sometimes zany compositions that induce an ironic, deconstructed reading of the Impressionist’ (C. Debray, ‘La postérité malaisée de Renoir’, in Magritte/ Renoir: Le Surréalism en plein soleil, exh. cat, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris 2021, p. 23). By employing a process similar to appropriation, one that would be embraced by Pop Artists working a few decades later, Magritte confounded many of his supporters. Yet it was precisely this shock and controversy that proved Magritte’s success: he had managed to surprise even his supporters by giving them something entirely unexpected. Magritte saw this as the fundamental essence and aim of his art. Using an established subject matter and rendering it in what had become a classical style, in Le Préméditation, Magritte created a work that was both original, and surreal—and above all amusing.
Painted during the final months of 1943, Le Préméditation is one of the earliest in a series known as Le Surréalisme en plein soleil (Surrealism in sunshine), created by Belgian Surrealist René Magritte during the turbulent years of the Second World War in the hope of re-enchanting daily life. A radiant bouquet of springtime flowers all improbably sprouting from the same plant, Le Préméditation captures a magnificent vision of optimism and hope. Living in the shadow of the German Occupation of Belgium, Magritte felt that a new visual idiom was needed to adequately respond to the horrors of war, and thus began to experiment with a distinctly impressionistic painting style that calls to mind the late period of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. ‘Before the war, my paintings expressed anxiety,’ Magritte explained, ‘but the experiences of war have taught me that what matters in art is to express charm. I live in a very disagreeable world, and my work is meant as a counter-offensive’ (R. Magritte, quoted in René Magritte: The Fifth Season, exh. cat. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018, p. 39). Featured as the cover of the exhibition catalogue for Magritte/Renoir: Le surréalisme en plein soleil at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, the present work reveals various influences that shaped Magritte’s creative vision during these turbulent times.
Rendering his composition in light, colourful, and feathered brushwork, Magritte sought to ‘bring a fresh wind’ to his painting as he explained in a letter to his friend Paul Éluard in 1941, ‘In my pictures, an enormous magic has now replaced the uncanny poetry whose effect I used so much to strive for. On the whole, pleasure now supplants a whole series of essential interests that I wish increasingly to leave out of account. The power of these pictures is to make one acutely aware of the imperfections of everyday life’. (Letter to Paul Éluard, December 1941; quoted in S. Gohr, Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, p. 191). In its overall effect, what Le Préméditation captured is far more than pure joy and pleasure aroused by the luscious, bouquet-like tree—there in between the vibrant complimentary pigments of azure and pink, vermillion and green, the ‘tree’ as if morphing into a human being full of dynamic. It is through infusing a hint of mystery into the pleasant scene that the artist mindfully unfolds the inherent chaos of the world using his humorous Magrittian idioms.
The tree, either alone as a subject or in a group, is a frequent pictorial element in Magritte’s works. Not only does it represent the artist’s belief in nature as an essential theme in his perception of reality, but also his poetic, transcendent vision of worldly existence. ‘Pushing up from the earth toward the sun,’ Magritte expressed in an undated statement, ‘a tree is an image of a certain happiness. To perceive this image, we must be still, like a tree. When we are in motion, it is the tree that becomes the spectator’ (R. Magritte, quoted in K. Rooney and E. Plattner (eds.), René Magritte: Selected Writings, Minneapolis, 2010, p. 234). In Le Préméditation, the indirect presence of a tree, though disguised in a Renoir-style bouquet filled with roses, tulips, pansies, carnations and daffodils, befitting what the artist was looking for in his pictures: the tension that arose between the familiarity of the objects he depicted, and the impossible, fantastical Surreal scenario they suggested.
Magritte’s reimagination of one of Renoir’s subjects in the present work is nearly citational. Such approach resonates with the superficial undercurrent emanated from Picabia’s appropriation of glamour commercial photographs from magazines where the painter disrupts the concept of painting and Modernity by blurring the boundary between canonical art and popular culture. As the art historian Cécile Debray observes, ‘through these paintings that Magritte reifies Renoir by means of signifying attributes—the nude, eroticism, the colourful, tapering brushstrokes, flowers—in slightly offbeat, sometimes zany compositions that induce an ironic, deconstructed reading of the Impressionist’ (C. Debray, ‘La postérité malaisée de Renoir’, in Magritte/ Renoir: Le Surréalism en plein soleil, exh. cat, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris 2021, p. 23). By employing a process similar to appropriation, one that would be embraced by Pop Artists working a few decades later, Magritte confounded many of his supporters. Yet it was precisely this shock and controversy that proved Magritte’s success: he had managed to surprise even his supporters by giving them something entirely unexpected. Magritte saw this as the fundamental essence and aim of his art. Using an established subject matter and rendering it in what had become a classical style, in Le Préméditation, Magritte created a work that was both original, and surreal—and above all amusing.