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Lot Essay
Painted in 1926, La lumière du pôle emerged during one of the most productive and innovative periods of René Magritte’s early career, as he boldly embraced Surrealism and began to develop a unique visual aesthetic that would propel him to the forefront of the European avant-garde. Formerly in the collection of the legendary Italian actress Sophia Loren and her husband, producer Carlo Ponti, this painting is a powerful illustration of the strange, unsettling nature of Magritte’s dream-like compositions of the late 1920s, which revel in the unexpected juxtapositions that emerged between familiar objects arranged in strange configurations and situations.
Discussing this period of his career, the artist explained the intentions which underpinned his earliest forays into Surrealism: ‘The pictures painted […] from 1926 to 1936 were… the result of a systematic search for a disturbing poetic effect which, produced by the deployment of objects taken from reality, would give the real world from which they were borrowed a disturbing poetic meaning through a quite natural interchange’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 284). La lumière du pôle is a captivating example on a large scale of this quest for a ‘disturbing poetic meaning’ in Magritte’s work during these years, highlighting the different themes, subjects and concerns which fuelled his mysterious, creative vision at this time.
Magritte’s fascination with the surreal had initially been sparked by an artistic epiphany he experienced upon first encountering the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico in the summer of 1923, when he came across a reproduction of the Italian artist’s 1914 composition Le chant d’amour. Describing the impact of De Chirico’s strange, uncanny worlds, Magritte wrote: ‘This triumphant poetry replaced the stereotyped effects of traditional painting. It represented a complete break with the mental habits peculiar to artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity and all the little aesthetic specialities. It was a new vision through which the spectator might recognise his own isolation and hear the silence of the world’ (quoted in ibid., p. 71). Though it would take a full two years for the artist to process this revelatory experience, it would fundamentally re-orientate Magritte’s painterly style, instilling his work with a feverish new energy that lead him to abandon the cubo-futurist vocabulary which had hitherto dominated his painting, and instead develop the disjointed and surreal visual world that would become his artistic trademark. Throughout the rest of the 1920s, he boldly explored the limits of this new language, playing with notions of artifice, illusion and representation, to unpick and challenge our very understanding of the world.
In La lumière du pôle, De Chirico’s influence can be felt in the disquieting atmosphere Magritte conjures and the sparse, expansive, stage-like space of the scene, as a pair of cracked and partially broken fashion mannequins stand amidst a desert-like landscape of steep-sided sand dunes. Behind them, a heavy, foreboding sky holds the threat of an oncoming storm, layers of thick grey cloud rolling in waves above the two humanoid characters, whose purpose and presence within the scene remains unknown. Though warmly coloured and depicting the sinuous, curvaceous lines of the female body, the mannequins appear precariously delicate, as their extremely thin, shell-like exteriors are dramatically fragmented and shattered, creating large gaping holes that offer a glimpse into dark interiors. While the deconstruction of the human figure, and in particular the female nude, was a chief preoccupation within Magritte’s oeuvre during this period, here the artist uses the fragmented bodies to explore the play between artifice and reality, as the deceptively realistic three-dimensional figure is revealed to be nothing more than a hollow, empty shell.
To the right of the two mannequins, a strange, amorphous object hovers above the undulating dunes, its form filled by overlapping layers of fur that subtly shift in tone and texture as they fall in rippling waves. Offering an intriguing textural counterpoint to the smoothness of the humanoid objects it is paired with, this strange, rippling stream of fur recalls the illustrations Magritte created for a catalogue of the furrier S. Samuel et Cie in 1926, which showcased the company’s latest designs. Featuring images of fashionable women sporting coats and elegant stoles, the catalogue offered pithy texts alongside Magritte’s illustrations, many of which seemed to parody contemporary advertisements. Attributed to Camille Goemans, these humorous statements cast Magritte’s otherwise typical fashion imagery in a surreal light, infusing the scenes with an enigmatic quality.
The project had an important impact on Magritte’s creative imagination through the following years, both in technique and subject matter, as numerous elements from these commercial illustrations began to infiltrate his painterly oeuvre. In La lumière du pôle, Magritte diligently recreates the soft, organic textures of a fur cape, divorcing it from its traditional place on a model’s lithe form and removing any details that suggest the presence of a body underneath, instead allowing it to appear to float completely unsupported in mid-air. A similar motif appears in the 1927 composition Le sens de la nuit (Sylvester, no. 136; The Menil Collection, Houston), where the addition of truncated limbs and a glimpse of undergarments suggests a human presence within its folds, accentuating the sensuous, fetishistic qualities of the material. In the present work, the upper edge of the fur element is marked by a lighter-toned layer of what appears to be gently curling human hair, presumably belonging to the figure who would typically wear the garment in a fashion illustration. By removing the model’s face here, essentially cutting her out of the picture, Magritte creates a sharp-edged beak shape, imbuing the fur with a bestial, bird-like quality that enlivens the inanimate object in an unexpected manner.
Casting no shadow, this fur element in La lumière du pôle appears to sit apart from the landscape in which it hovers, as if existing on an entirely different plane to everything else in the scene. Indeed, there is an unusual sense of perspective at play across the entire image, that appears to shift and change as the eye moves through the composition. In certain places, objects appear to float on top of one another in flat, overlapping planes, as if cut from another image and pasted into place. As such, La lumière du pôle appears to mimic the style and effects of papiers collés, a technique Magritte had been experimenting with intensely since the end of 1925, largely inspired by the ground-breaking works of Max Ernst. For Magritte, Ernst’s bold experiments in collage represented a radical shift in the act of art making, breaking through the traditional parameters by which an artist was judged: as he explained, ‘scissors, paste, images and genius in effect superseded brushes, paints, models, styles, sensibility and that famous sincerity demanded of artists’ (quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., London, 1992, p. 260).
Liberating the artist’s creativity, papiers collés became an integral aspect of Magritte’s practice, and over the course of the following two years he produced approximately thirty works using this technique. Alongside this, a number of paintings from this period adopted a similar stylistic aesthetic to these collages, most notably in their sharply delineated forms and the juxtaposition of various elements and objects in unexpected groupings and orientations. However, the link between the two techniques ran much deeper than just visual similarities, with some paintings directly quoting elements and motifs from the papiers collés Magritte was working on concurrently. Indeed, both the distinctive shape of the fur element and the fragmentation of the female mannequins in the present work can be directly linked to an untitled papier collé of the same year (Sylvester no. 1618; Private collection). In the painting, Magritte develops the idea further, creating an altogether more unsettling image through the application of rich colour, and the placement of the objects within this barren, dark landscape.
Shortly after completing La lumière du pôle, Magritte was commissioned once again to design a follow-up to his fur catalogue, for the company now known as Maison ch. Müller, S. Samuel & Cie, successeurs. Drawing on the example of his recent experiments in papiers collés and painting, the artist’s illustrations displayed a new formal freedom, as Magritte extended his Surrealist research in novel directions. Playing with concepts of concealment, the stock imagery of the fashion plates were transported to increasingly unusual settings, and began to incorporate a number of diverse, collaged elements. In one instance, the head of a model is supplanted by the body of an automobile, while in another a cut-out landscape fills a small wooden frame in the background of the image. In some of the illustrations, the female models disappear entirely and are replaced by bilboquets, birds or jigsaw pieces, while in one image a cut-out photograph of Magritte’s own face floats freely towards the bottom of the page.
Paul Nougé contributed commentary for the catalogue in the form of a prologue and epilogue, as well as a series of aphorisms and maxims that were paired with Magritte’s illustrations: ‘Here the last likeness is discarded’ reads one, ‘Her dreams protect her, as well as her coat’ proclaims another, while in the final spread, the dream-like imagery is accompanied by the statement ‘There are no longer any ordinary things’ (quoted in A. Umland, ed., Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013, p. 36). As Anne Umland has noted, the project masqueraded ‘as a commercial production whose sole purpose was to promote the Maison Samuel’s winter 1928 fur collection, [but] is in fact an insidiously subtle Surrealist manifesto, in which the worlds of fashion, fine arts, poetry and publicity collide…’ (quoted in ibid., p. 35). Indeed, the Samuels catalogues became an important calling card for Magritte when he arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1927, reaffirming his Surrealist credentials and showcasing the potential of his unique aesthetic to the host of new acquaintances and friends he made within the movement.
La lumière du pôle was featured in Magritte’s first one-man show, held at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels during the spring of 1927. Comprised of 49 recent paintings and 12 papiers collés, this was the first opportunity for Magritte to reveal his new Surrealist aesthetic to the public and proved to be a seminal moment in his early career, announcing the artist as an important talent within the European avant-garde. Indeed, Magritte later proclaimed that the event was ‘my first exhibition that truly represented what I consider valuable… in my work’ (quoted in ibid., p. 232). The critical response, however, was less than enthusiastic: ‘The sense of freedom [my pictures] revealed naturally outraged the critics, from whom I had expected nothing anyway,’ the artist later recalled. ‘I was accused of everything. I was faulted for the absence of certain things and for the presence of others’ (in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, p. 215). In spite of the negativity from the press, the exhibition earned Magritte a loyal group of followers and supporters, who deemed him the first great Belgian Surrealist.
One such early supporter was the poet, musician, editor, gallerist and collector E.L.T. Mesens, who had met the artist while he was still a youth. Turning to art dealing in 1924, Mesens played a central role in the promotion of Surrealism in Belgium, running the Galerie L’Epoque in Brussels, and later Britain, where he ran the London Gallery alongside Roland Penrose. His support for Magritte remained constant throughout the 1930s, leading him to organise a number of exhibitions dedicated to the artist’s work, as well as purchasing paintings directly from him in times of financial hardship. At its height, Mesens’s collection included a number of seminal early masterpieces by Magritte, including L’assassin menacé (Sylvester, no. 137; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Les jours gigantesques (Sylvester, no. 225; Private collection) and Le chambre du devin (Sylvester, no. 88; The Hilti Foundation), to which La lumière du pôle was added in 1932.
Discussing this period of his career, the artist explained the intentions which underpinned his earliest forays into Surrealism: ‘The pictures painted […] from 1926 to 1936 were… the result of a systematic search for a disturbing poetic effect which, produced by the deployment of objects taken from reality, would give the real world from which they were borrowed a disturbing poetic meaning through a quite natural interchange’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 284). La lumière du pôle is a captivating example on a large scale of this quest for a ‘disturbing poetic meaning’ in Magritte’s work during these years, highlighting the different themes, subjects and concerns which fuelled his mysterious, creative vision at this time.
Magritte’s fascination with the surreal had initially been sparked by an artistic epiphany he experienced upon first encountering the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico in the summer of 1923, when he came across a reproduction of the Italian artist’s 1914 composition Le chant d’amour. Describing the impact of De Chirico’s strange, uncanny worlds, Magritte wrote: ‘This triumphant poetry replaced the stereotyped effects of traditional painting. It represented a complete break with the mental habits peculiar to artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity and all the little aesthetic specialities. It was a new vision through which the spectator might recognise his own isolation and hear the silence of the world’ (quoted in ibid., p. 71). Though it would take a full two years for the artist to process this revelatory experience, it would fundamentally re-orientate Magritte’s painterly style, instilling his work with a feverish new energy that lead him to abandon the cubo-futurist vocabulary which had hitherto dominated his painting, and instead develop the disjointed and surreal visual world that would become his artistic trademark. Throughout the rest of the 1920s, he boldly explored the limits of this new language, playing with notions of artifice, illusion and representation, to unpick and challenge our very understanding of the world.
In La lumière du pôle, De Chirico’s influence can be felt in the disquieting atmosphere Magritte conjures and the sparse, expansive, stage-like space of the scene, as a pair of cracked and partially broken fashion mannequins stand amidst a desert-like landscape of steep-sided sand dunes. Behind them, a heavy, foreboding sky holds the threat of an oncoming storm, layers of thick grey cloud rolling in waves above the two humanoid characters, whose purpose and presence within the scene remains unknown. Though warmly coloured and depicting the sinuous, curvaceous lines of the female body, the mannequins appear precariously delicate, as their extremely thin, shell-like exteriors are dramatically fragmented and shattered, creating large gaping holes that offer a glimpse into dark interiors. While the deconstruction of the human figure, and in particular the female nude, was a chief preoccupation within Magritte’s oeuvre during this period, here the artist uses the fragmented bodies to explore the play between artifice and reality, as the deceptively realistic three-dimensional figure is revealed to be nothing more than a hollow, empty shell.
To the right of the two mannequins, a strange, amorphous object hovers above the undulating dunes, its form filled by overlapping layers of fur that subtly shift in tone and texture as they fall in rippling waves. Offering an intriguing textural counterpoint to the smoothness of the humanoid objects it is paired with, this strange, rippling stream of fur recalls the illustrations Magritte created for a catalogue of the furrier S. Samuel et Cie in 1926, which showcased the company’s latest designs. Featuring images of fashionable women sporting coats and elegant stoles, the catalogue offered pithy texts alongside Magritte’s illustrations, many of which seemed to parody contemporary advertisements. Attributed to Camille Goemans, these humorous statements cast Magritte’s otherwise typical fashion imagery in a surreal light, infusing the scenes with an enigmatic quality.
The project had an important impact on Magritte’s creative imagination through the following years, both in technique and subject matter, as numerous elements from these commercial illustrations began to infiltrate his painterly oeuvre. In La lumière du pôle, Magritte diligently recreates the soft, organic textures of a fur cape, divorcing it from its traditional place on a model’s lithe form and removing any details that suggest the presence of a body underneath, instead allowing it to appear to float completely unsupported in mid-air. A similar motif appears in the 1927 composition Le sens de la nuit (Sylvester, no. 136; The Menil Collection, Houston), where the addition of truncated limbs and a glimpse of undergarments suggests a human presence within its folds, accentuating the sensuous, fetishistic qualities of the material. In the present work, the upper edge of the fur element is marked by a lighter-toned layer of what appears to be gently curling human hair, presumably belonging to the figure who would typically wear the garment in a fashion illustration. By removing the model’s face here, essentially cutting her out of the picture, Magritte creates a sharp-edged beak shape, imbuing the fur with a bestial, bird-like quality that enlivens the inanimate object in an unexpected manner.
Casting no shadow, this fur element in La lumière du pôle appears to sit apart from the landscape in which it hovers, as if existing on an entirely different plane to everything else in the scene. Indeed, there is an unusual sense of perspective at play across the entire image, that appears to shift and change as the eye moves through the composition. In certain places, objects appear to float on top of one another in flat, overlapping planes, as if cut from another image and pasted into place. As such, La lumière du pôle appears to mimic the style and effects of papiers collés, a technique Magritte had been experimenting with intensely since the end of 1925, largely inspired by the ground-breaking works of Max Ernst. For Magritte, Ernst’s bold experiments in collage represented a radical shift in the act of art making, breaking through the traditional parameters by which an artist was judged: as he explained, ‘scissors, paste, images and genius in effect superseded brushes, paints, models, styles, sensibility and that famous sincerity demanded of artists’ (quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., London, 1992, p. 260).
Liberating the artist’s creativity, papiers collés became an integral aspect of Magritte’s practice, and over the course of the following two years he produced approximately thirty works using this technique. Alongside this, a number of paintings from this period adopted a similar stylistic aesthetic to these collages, most notably in their sharply delineated forms and the juxtaposition of various elements and objects in unexpected groupings and orientations. However, the link between the two techniques ran much deeper than just visual similarities, with some paintings directly quoting elements and motifs from the papiers collés Magritte was working on concurrently. Indeed, both the distinctive shape of the fur element and the fragmentation of the female mannequins in the present work can be directly linked to an untitled papier collé of the same year (Sylvester no. 1618; Private collection). In the painting, Magritte develops the idea further, creating an altogether more unsettling image through the application of rich colour, and the placement of the objects within this barren, dark landscape.
Shortly after completing La lumière du pôle, Magritte was commissioned once again to design a follow-up to his fur catalogue, for the company now known as Maison ch. Müller, S. Samuel & Cie, successeurs. Drawing on the example of his recent experiments in papiers collés and painting, the artist’s illustrations displayed a new formal freedom, as Magritte extended his Surrealist research in novel directions. Playing with concepts of concealment, the stock imagery of the fashion plates were transported to increasingly unusual settings, and began to incorporate a number of diverse, collaged elements. In one instance, the head of a model is supplanted by the body of an automobile, while in another a cut-out landscape fills a small wooden frame in the background of the image. In some of the illustrations, the female models disappear entirely and are replaced by bilboquets, birds or jigsaw pieces, while in one image a cut-out photograph of Magritte’s own face floats freely towards the bottom of the page.
Paul Nougé contributed commentary for the catalogue in the form of a prologue and epilogue, as well as a series of aphorisms and maxims that were paired with Magritte’s illustrations: ‘Here the last likeness is discarded’ reads one, ‘Her dreams protect her, as well as her coat’ proclaims another, while in the final spread, the dream-like imagery is accompanied by the statement ‘There are no longer any ordinary things’ (quoted in A. Umland, ed., Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013, p. 36). As Anne Umland has noted, the project masqueraded ‘as a commercial production whose sole purpose was to promote the Maison Samuel’s winter 1928 fur collection, [but] is in fact an insidiously subtle Surrealist manifesto, in which the worlds of fashion, fine arts, poetry and publicity collide…’ (quoted in ibid., p. 35). Indeed, the Samuels catalogues became an important calling card for Magritte when he arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1927, reaffirming his Surrealist credentials and showcasing the potential of his unique aesthetic to the host of new acquaintances and friends he made within the movement.
La lumière du pôle was featured in Magritte’s first one-man show, held at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels during the spring of 1927. Comprised of 49 recent paintings and 12 papiers collés, this was the first opportunity for Magritte to reveal his new Surrealist aesthetic to the public and proved to be a seminal moment in his early career, announcing the artist as an important talent within the European avant-garde. Indeed, Magritte later proclaimed that the event was ‘my first exhibition that truly represented what I consider valuable… in my work’ (quoted in ibid., p. 232). The critical response, however, was less than enthusiastic: ‘The sense of freedom [my pictures] revealed naturally outraged the critics, from whom I had expected nothing anyway,’ the artist later recalled. ‘I was accused of everything. I was faulted for the absence of certain things and for the presence of others’ (in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, p. 215). In spite of the negativity from the press, the exhibition earned Magritte a loyal group of followers and supporters, who deemed him the first great Belgian Surrealist.
One such early supporter was the poet, musician, editor, gallerist and collector E.L.T. Mesens, who had met the artist while he was still a youth. Turning to art dealing in 1924, Mesens played a central role in the promotion of Surrealism in Belgium, running the Galerie L’Epoque in Brussels, and later Britain, where he ran the London Gallery alongside Roland Penrose. His support for Magritte remained constant throughout the 1930s, leading him to organise a number of exhibitions dedicated to the artist’s work, as well as purchasing paintings directly from him in times of financial hardship. At its height, Mesens’s collection included a number of seminal early masterpieces by Magritte, including L’assassin menacé (Sylvester, no. 137; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Les jours gigantesques (Sylvester, no. 225; Private collection) and Le chambre du devin (Sylvester, no. 88; The Hilti Foundation), to which La lumière du pôle was added in 1932.