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拍品专文
Le stropiat is one of the finest examples of René Magritte’s Vache paintings—a select group of startlingly inventive, garishly rendered, bold, bawdy and often hilarious, paintings that the artist made in the spring of 1948 for what was, astonishingly, his first ever one-man show in Paris. Created in a feverish burst of activity between March and April 1948, this small and now infamous series of just seventeen oils and around twenty-two gouaches not only marked a radical new departure in style for the artist, but was made with the deliberate intention of causing uproar and dissent amongst the high-brow aficionados of ‘avant-garde’ Paris: a feat in which they succeeded.
Although it was not necessarily intended as such, Magritte’s période Vache – as it has come to be known – was short-lived. It lasted, in fact, only for the duration of the artist’s Paris exhibition which opened on 11 May 1948 at the Galerie du Faubourg and closed again one month later, after much derision and scandal, and without a single work being sold. At this time, no-one, it seems, save Magritte and his poet-friend and close collaborator, Louis Scutenaire, was ready for the shock generated by these paintings. However, although widely condemned by both friends and critics alike, they are today coming to be recognised as both a significant and meaningful departure from Magritte’s signature style and as prophetic pictures, well ahead of their time. Like many of the late paintings of that other outcast from mainstream Surrealist circles in the 1940s, Francis Picabia, Magritte’s Vache pictures are thoughtful, anti-modernist creations that knowingly mock the pretensions of ‘taste.’ Full of a playful dismantling or deconstructing of many of the techniques and conventions of image-making, they are works that, as a major recent exhibition devoted to them at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt has illustrated—are now seen to prefigure and anticipate post-modernist aesthetics and many of approaches to painting that have come to the fore since the 1980s.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, writing for another recent exhibition of Magritte’s Vache paintings alongside the ‘sunlit’ Impressionist-style work that immediately preceded them, has noted that these paintings, ‘long considered aberrations in [Magritte’s] artistic career... have recently been reassessed by art historians and critics not only on their own terms but also in relation to the notion of “bad painting”… [And, because they are] two bodies of work, almost unrecognizable as “Magrittes”... [that] followed directly after the other...[during] World War II and the immediate postwar period… one should at least entertain the possibility that the war and occupation contributed, even subliminally, to the outrageousness of both bodies of work’ (‘Mad or Bad? Magritte’s Artistic Rebellion,’ in C. Haskell, ed., Rene Magritte: The Fifth Season, exh. cat., The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018, pg. 37).
Le stropiat is one of two période Vache paintings with this title made for the Faubourg exhibition. The other work is an oil painting depicting another bearded man with multiple pipes emerging from his face, now owned by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (Sylvester, no. 658). Among the best-known and most celebrated of all of Magritte’s Vache images, neither of these pictures is however listed in the catalogue of the Galerie Faubourg exhibition. David Sylvester, writing in the catalogue raisonné, has assumed therefore that both Le stropiat paintings were among the very last of the Vache pictures to be created for the exhibition and were painted after its catalogue had gone to press. All the Vache paintings, he writes, ‘were realized expressly for the Faubourg exhibition’ and also ‘with the fact very much in mind that it was a long-delayed first exhibition in Paris’ (René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 160).
In a rare manifesto that Magritte had written in 1946, he asserted: ‘We have neither the time nor the inclination to play at Surrealist art; we have an enormous task ahead of us; we need to invent enchanting objects which will awaken what is left of the pleasure instinct’ (‘Surrealism in the Sunshine: Manifesto of Amentalism,’ circa 1947; reproduced in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, Rene Magritte: Selected Writings, Richmond, 2016, p. 102). By the time, in 1948, therefore, when he was asked by the Galerie du Faubourg to host his first ever one-man show in the city, Magritte had become even more angered by the arrogance and self-centred attitude of many Parisians and by the French Surrealists in particular who, having returned to the city after the war, were now busy attempting to re-establish their own, prescribed brand of Surrealism as the dominant cultural force of the French capital once again. The term ‘vache’ (cow) which Magritte bestowed upon his deliberately provocative and decidedly unaesethetic, paintings is believed to be an ironical allusion to the term ‘Fauve’ or ‘wild beast’ that had been given to the early, exaggerated-colour paintings of André Derain and Henri Matisse, and which, to some extent, Magritte’s new pictures parodied with their bold, garish colours and almost caricatural or cartoon-like style. It is worth noting however, that, in French, ‘vache’ does not only mean ‘cow’—it can also be translated to ‘mean’ or ‘nasty,’ and ‘vacherie’ signifies a mean trick. In this way, the term ‘vache’ can also be seen to reflect the intentionally aggressive and disruptive nature of Magritte’s new pictures.
As a work such as Le stropiat, with its comic figure displaying multiple, sausage-like, tartan-patterned noses, tobacco pipes and green beard evidently shows, there is no lack of pictorial invention in Magritte’s Vache paintings. Many of them indeed play with conventions and pictorial anomalies that Magritte had already explored in earlier works. There is also, as in this work, clearly a strong element of humour, inherent to many of his Vache images. Louis Scutenaire, with whom Magritte was closely collaborating throughout this post-war period and who was responsible for giving the titles to most of these works, recalled that he had never seen Magritte as happy as he did while he was preparing the Vache works. The war had ended, Scutenaire recalled and the French Surrealists, on their return to Paris, were attempting to re-establish where they had left off in 1939 as if nothing had changed. ‘The moment had [therefore] come to strike a vital blow. Never for a minute was there any question of putting together pictures done in one or other of the styles which had won recognition…The overwhelming purpose was not to delight the Parisians but to scandalize them …The virulence of the subjects was matched by the vigour and the rapidity of the execution. As soon as the idea came to him Magritte would run to the grocer’s shop to phone a friend and jubilantly describe his plan, and then half-an-hour later he would triumphantly announce: “it’s done”’ (Avec Magritte, pp.109-13; quoted in Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, p. 160).
Spontaneity and immediacy are an important element of the Vache paintings which were all intended to look as if they had been painted, as many were, in a single burst of creative enthusiasm. As playful and inventive as any of Magritte’s works, many of these works draw on the lexicon of Magritte’s earlier imagery and reimagine them. In some ways, for example, both Le stropiat paintings can be seen as a development of ideas that Magritte first posited in the 1936 painting Le lampe philosophique (Sylvester, no. 399; Private collection). David Sylvester has also pointed out that this gouache entitled Le stropiat relates closely to another Vache gouache, called Le crime du pape (Sylvester, no. 1272; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels) which depicts a pipe-smoking figure with a large tartan-patterned nose, standing in front of a church altar. In Le stropiat this religious element of Le crime du pape is more subtly and successfully introduced by bestowing its central cartoon-like figure with a halo painted in metallic gold.
Representing both a humorous assault on the ‘highbrow’ pretensions of the Parisian avant-garde and a kind of sabotage of the accepted conventions and ideas of painting itself, pictures like Le stropiat were also, Scutenaire has suggested, inspired by the low-brow imagery and style of popular culture. In particular, Scutenaire believed, Magritte was drawing on ‘caricatures shown by Colinet, published before 1914 in magazines for children’ especially those drawn by the Belgian cartoonist Deladoës (Scutenaire quoted in ibid., p. 160).
Largely because Magritte was to abandon the style immediately after his Faubourg gallery show, the période Vache was, for a long time, regarded as a kind of joke or aberration, not to be taken too seriously. It is however clear that Magritte himself did not regard these paintings in this light and was initially, at least, keen to continue working in this vein. The complete – though anticipated – commercial failure of the Faubourg show (‘Zero results,’ Magritte noted), allied to the fact that almost everyone he knew, including his dealers and most importantly his wife, Georgette, wanted him to return to his signature style, ultimately persuaded him otherwise. As Magritte wrote to Scutenaire soon after the show closed in June 1948: ‘I would quite like to continue even more intensively with the “initiative” tried out in Paris. It’s my slow, suicidal tendency. But there’s Georgette and the disgust I experience at being “sincere.” Georgette prefers the well-executed painting of “yore,” so especially to please Georgette, in future I’ll exhibit painting from yore. I will find a way to slip in a great big incongruity from time to time. And it won’t stop publications for our amusement. It will be out-of-studio work for me as it’s out-of-office work for Scut’ (Letter to L. Scutenaire, 7 June 1948; quoted in René Magritte 1948 La Période Vache, exh. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2008 p. 137).
Although it was not necessarily intended as such, Magritte’s période Vache – as it has come to be known – was short-lived. It lasted, in fact, only for the duration of the artist’s Paris exhibition which opened on 11 May 1948 at the Galerie du Faubourg and closed again one month later, after much derision and scandal, and without a single work being sold. At this time, no-one, it seems, save Magritte and his poet-friend and close collaborator, Louis Scutenaire, was ready for the shock generated by these paintings. However, although widely condemned by both friends and critics alike, they are today coming to be recognised as both a significant and meaningful departure from Magritte’s signature style and as prophetic pictures, well ahead of their time. Like many of the late paintings of that other outcast from mainstream Surrealist circles in the 1940s, Francis Picabia, Magritte’s Vache pictures are thoughtful, anti-modernist creations that knowingly mock the pretensions of ‘taste.’ Full of a playful dismantling or deconstructing of many of the techniques and conventions of image-making, they are works that, as a major recent exhibition devoted to them at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt has illustrated—are now seen to prefigure and anticipate post-modernist aesthetics and many of approaches to painting that have come to the fore since the 1980s.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, writing for another recent exhibition of Magritte’s Vache paintings alongside the ‘sunlit’ Impressionist-style work that immediately preceded them, has noted that these paintings, ‘long considered aberrations in [Magritte’s] artistic career... have recently been reassessed by art historians and critics not only on their own terms but also in relation to the notion of “bad painting”… [And, because they are] two bodies of work, almost unrecognizable as “Magrittes”... [that] followed directly after the other...[during] World War II and the immediate postwar period… one should at least entertain the possibility that the war and occupation contributed, even subliminally, to the outrageousness of both bodies of work’ (‘Mad or Bad? Magritte’s Artistic Rebellion,’ in C. Haskell, ed., Rene Magritte: The Fifth Season, exh. cat., The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018, pg. 37).
Le stropiat is one of two période Vache paintings with this title made for the Faubourg exhibition. The other work is an oil painting depicting another bearded man with multiple pipes emerging from his face, now owned by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (Sylvester, no. 658). Among the best-known and most celebrated of all of Magritte’s Vache images, neither of these pictures is however listed in the catalogue of the Galerie Faubourg exhibition. David Sylvester, writing in the catalogue raisonné, has assumed therefore that both Le stropiat paintings were among the very last of the Vache pictures to be created for the exhibition and were painted after its catalogue had gone to press. All the Vache paintings, he writes, ‘were realized expressly for the Faubourg exhibition’ and also ‘with the fact very much in mind that it was a long-delayed first exhibition in Paris’ (René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 160).
In a rare manifesto that Magritte had written in 1946, he asserted: ‘We have neither the time nor the inclination to play at Surrealist art; we have an enormous task ahead of us; we need to invent enchanting objects which will awaken what is left of the pleasure instinct’ (‘Surrealism in the Sunshine: Manifesto of Amentalism,’ circa 1947; reproduced in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, Rene Magritte: Selected Writings, Richmond, 2016, p. 102). By the time, in 1948, therefore, when he was asked by the Galerie du Faubourg to host his first ever one-man show in the city, Magritte had become even more angered by the arrogance and self-centred attitude of many Parisians and by the French Surrealists in particular who, having returned to the city after the war, were now busy attempting to re-establish their own, prescribed brand of Surrealism as the dominant cultural force of the French capital once again. The term ‘vache’ (cow) which Magritte bestowed upon his deliberately provocative and decidedly unaesethetic, paintings is believed to be an ironical allusion to the term ‘Fauve’ or ‘wild beast’ that had been given to the early, exaggerated-colour paintings of André Derain and Henri Matisse, and which, to some extent, Magritte’s new pictures parodied with their bold, garish colours and almost caricatural or cartoon-like style. It is worth noting however, that, in French, ‘vache’ does not only mean ‘cow’—it can also be translated to ‘mean’ or ‘nasty,’ and ‘vacherie’ signifies a mean trick. In this way, the term ‘vache’ can also be seen to reflect the intentionally aggressive and disruptive nature of Magritte’s new pictures.
As a work such as Le stropiat, with its comic figure displaying multiple, sausage-like, tartan-patterned noses, tobacco pipes and green beard evidently shows, there is no lack of pictorial invention in Magritte’s Vache paintings. Many of them indeed play with conventions and pictorial anomalies that Magritte had already explored in earlier works. There is also, as in this work, clearly a strong element of humour, inherent to many of his Vache images. Louis Scutenaire, with whom Magritte was closely collaborating throughout this post-war period and who was responsible for giving the titles to most of these works, recalled that he had never seen Magritte as happy as he did while he was preparing the Vache works. The war had ended, Scutenaire recalled and the French Surrealists, on their return to Paris, were attempting to re-establish where they had left off in 1939 as if nothing had changed. ‘The moment had [therefore] come to strike a vital blow. Never for a minute was there any question of putting together pictures done in one or other of the styles which had won recognition…The overwhelming purpose was not to delight the Parisians but to scandalize them …The virulence of the subjects was matched by the vigour and the rapidity of the execution. As soon as the idea came to him Magritte would run to the grocer’s shop to phone a friend and jubilantly describe his plan, and then half-an-hour later he would triumphantly announce: “it’s done”’ (Avec Magritte, pp.109-13; quoted in Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, p. 160).
Spontaneity and immediacy are an important element of the Vache paintings which were all intended to look as if they had been painted, as many were, in a single burst of creative enthusiasm. As playful and inventive as any of Magritte’s works, many of these works draw on the lexicon of Magritte’s earlier imagery and reimagine them. In some ways, for example, both Le stropiat paintings can be seen as a development of ideas that Magritte first posited in the 1936 painting Le lampe philosophique (Sylvester, no. 399; Private collection). David Sylvester has also pointed out that this gouache entitled Le stropiat relates closely to another Vache gouache, called Le crime du pape (Sylvester, no. 1272; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels) which depicts a pipe-smoking figure with a large tartan-patterned nose, standing in front of a church altar. In Le stropiat this religious element of Le crime du pape is more subtly and successfully introduced by bestowing its central cartoon-like figure with a halo painted in metallic gold.
Representing both a humorous assault on the ‘highbrow’ pretensions of the Parisian avant-garde and a kind of sabotage of the accepted conventions and ideas of painting itself, pictures like Le stropiat were also, Scutenaire has suggested, inspired by the low-brow imagery and style of popular culture. In particular, Scutenaire believed, Magritte was drawing on ‘caricatures shown by Colinet, published before 1914 in magazines for children’ especially those drawn by the Belgian cartoonist Deladoës (Scutenaire quoted in ibid., p. 160).
Largely because Magritte was to abandon the style immediately after his Faubourg gallery show, the période Vache was, for a long time, regarded as a kind of joke or aberration, not to be taken too seriously. It is however clear that Magritte himself did not regard these paintings in this light and was initially, at least, keen to continue working in this vein. The complete – though anticipated – commercial failure of the Faubourg show (‘Zero results,’ Magritte noted), allied to the fact that almost everyone he knew, including his dealers and most importantly his wife, Georgette, wanted him to return to his signature style, ultimately persuaded him otherwise. As Magritte wrote to Scutenaire soon after the show closed in June 1948: ‘I would quite like to continue even more intensively with the “initiative” tried out in Paris. It’s my slow, suicidal tendency. But there’s Georgette and the disgust I experience at being “sincere.” Georgette prefers the well-executed painting of “yore,” so especially to please Georgette, in future I’ll exhibit painting from yore. I will find a way to slip in a great big incongruity from time to time. And it won’t stop publications for our amusement. It will be out-of-studio work for me as it’s out-of-office work for Scut’ (Letter to L. Scutenaire, 7 June 1948; quoted in René Magritte 1948 La Période Vache, exh. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2008 p. 137).