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拍品專文
Executed circa 1961 and held in the same private collection for the last five decades, Sans titre is an exquisitely worked mixed-media composition from the final years of René Magritte’s career. At this time, the internationally-renowned artist was re-examining works from his early oeuvre, searching for motifs and subjects that could be translated or reinterpreted in different media, in order to unleash his creativity in new directions. Combining delicate washes of gouache with collage elements, pencil drawing, passages of watercolor and charcoal, Magritte conjures a mysterious scene, in which a pair of flat pieces of free-standing stage scenery appear to patiently wait for a performance to begin, the two heavy curtains flanking them lending the composition an inherent theatricality.
Magritte’s first papiers collés had emerged towards the end of 1925, around the same time he was beginning to explore surrealist imagery in his paintings. For the Belgian artist, Max Ernst’s recent experiments in collage represented a radical shift in the act of art making, “scissors, paste, images and genius in effect superseded brushes, paints, models, styles, sensibility and that famous sincerity demanded of artists,” Magritte explained (quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, p. 260). Liberating his imagination, papiers collés became an integral aspect of Magritte’s oeuvre, and over the course of the following two years he produced approximately thirty works in the medium. While he incorporated small drawings and snippets of photographs and advertising material in some of these works, the most consistent feature of the collages were the fragments of sheet music, cut from the piano score of a popular Edwardian musical comedy, The Girls of Gottenburg by George Grossmith Jr. and L.E. Berman.
Magritte’s experiments with the papier collé technique re-emerged during the closing months of 1959, following a commission he received to design the cover of a ballet program for a “Gala de la Section Bruxelloise de l’Association Générale de la Presse Belge,” which would count among its attendees the King of Belgium. The resulting work, Sans titre (Sylvester, no. 1629; Private collection), featured a single, towering bilboquet silhouetted against a theatrical curtain. Sparking the artist’s creative imagination anew, collage became an important creative outlet for Magritte, alongside his paintings in oil and gouache. Once again, the most striking feature of these papiers collés lay in the whimsical use of sheet music cut into the shape of some of the most recognizable motifs of the artist’s oeuvre, from perfectly spherical apples, to floating pipes, bowler-hatted men and open doorways leading to mysterious realms.
Whereas the collages from the 1920s had all used clippings from the same score, the later works incorporated disparate fragments from a variety of musical sources, from piano reductions of Beethoven’s symphonies to popular contemporary numbers from the music halls. In Sans titre Magritte incorporates pages from the score for Carl Maria von Weber’s romantic aria “Ozean, du Ungeheuer!” (“Ocean, thou mighty monster!”), taken from his last opera Oberon, which premiered in London in 1826. Playing with the legibility of these sheets, Magritte cut the paper so that the play of notes appear at a slightly tilted angle, allowing them to slip into semi-abstract, monochrome patterns. He then added subtle passages of gouache and pencil to their forms, enhancing the physical presence of these ambiguously shaped elements within the stage-like space, allowing them to be read simultaneously as three-dimensional and flat.
Magritte’s first papiers collés had emerged towards the end of 1925, around the same time he was beginning to explore surrealist imagery in his paintings. For the Belgian artist, Max Ernst’s recent experiments in collage represented a radical shift in the act of art making, “scissors, paste, images and genius in effect superseded brushes, paints, models, styles, sensibility and that famous sincerity demanded of artists,” Magritte explained (quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, p. 260). Liberating his imagination, papiers collés became an integral aspect of Magritte’s oeuvre, and over the course of the following two years he produced approximately thirty works in the medium. While he incorporated small drawings and snippets of photographs and advertising material in some of these works, the most consistent feature of the collages were the fragments of sheet music, cut from the piano score of a popular Edwardian musical comedy, The Girls of Gottenburg by George Grossmith Jr. and L.E. Berman.
Magritte’s experiments with the papier collé technique re-emerged during the closing months of 1959, following a commission he received to design the cover of a ballet program for a “Gala de la Section Bruxelloise de l’Association Générale de la Presse Belge,” which would count among its attendees the King of Belgium. The resulting work, Sans titre (Sylvester, no. 1629; Private collection), featured a single, towering bilboquet silhouetted against a theatrical curtain. Sparking the artist’s creative imagination anew, collage became an important creative outlet for Magritte, alongside his paintings in oil and gouache. Once again, the most striking feature of these papiers collés lay in the whimsical use of sheet music cut into the shape of some of the most recognizable motifs of the artist’s oeuvre, from perfectly spherical apples, to floating pipes, bowler-hatted men and open doorways leading to mysterious realms.
Whereas the collages from the 1920s had all used clippings from the same score, the later works incorporated disparate fragments from a variety of musical sources, from piano reductions of Beethoven’s symphonies to popular contemporary numbers from the music halls. In Sans titre Magritte incorporates pages from the score for Carl Maria von Weber’s romantic aria “Ozean, du Ungeheuer!” (“Ocean, thou mighty monster!”), taken from his last opera Oberon, which premiered in London in 1826. Playing with the legibility of these sheets, Magritte cut the paper so that the play of notes appear at a slightly tilted angle, allowing them to slip into semi-abstract, monochrome patterns. He then added subtle passages of gouache and pencil to their forms, enhancing the physical presence of these ambiguously shaped elements within the stage-like space, allowing them to be read simultaneously as three-dimensional and flat.