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拍品专文
In December 1955 René Magritte and his wife Georgette relocated to a new apartment in Brussels, moving to the ground floor of 404 Boulevard Lambermont, directly across from the peaceful Parc Josaphat. Within this quiet residential corner of the city, Magritte was delighted to find a scene that appeared to directly echo one of his favorite and most iconic recurring motifs—the L’empire des lumières. Describing his new surroundings in a letter to his dealer Alexander Iolas in early January 1956, he specifically invoked these paintings, writing, “You will see: in the evenings, it’s like being in the picture—L’empire des lumières. The villa where I live is surrounded by gardens, and the houses looking directly on to the Boulevard Lambermont stand out against a wide sky” (quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, 1949-1967, London, 1993, vol. III, p. 63). Painted shortly thereafter, the present L’empire des lumières is the largest and most exquisitely rendered of the artist’s gouaches devoted to this mysterious subject, its captivating juxtaposition of a nocturnal street-scene and a day-lit sky executed in delicate flickering brushstrokes that demonstrate Magritte’s expressive painterly approach.
The idea for L’empire des lumières had initially emerged in Magritte’s paintings in 1949, and over the course of the following decade and a half he revisited and revised the motif across a series of oil paintings and gouaches, each iteration subtly different from the next, incorporating new elements and details within the landscape, the buildings, or the sky. For Magritte, the subject represented a distillation of the powerful, lyrical nature of his Surrealist ideas, confronting the viewer with a seemingly impossible scenario in an otherwise familiar and everyday setting. “The art of painting, as I see it, makes possible the creation of visible poetic images,” he explained shortly before embarking on the present work. “They reveal the riches and details that our eyes can readily recognize: trees, skies, stones, objects, people, etc. They are meaningful when the intelligence is freed from the obsessive will to give things a meaning in order to use or master them” (quoted in La Carte d’après Nature, no. 8, January 1955, p. 6; in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, René Magritte: Selected Writings, trans. J. Levy, Richmond, 2018, p. 180).
Here, on a quiet residential street, the light of a street lamp casts a warm glow among the dark shadows of nightfall, illuminating the houses that line the thoroughfare and casting rippling reflections on the waterway in the foreground. Taking up a position on the opposite bank of the small pond or stream, the viewer is granted an uninterrupted view of a startling phenomenon that transforms the scene—above the houses and trees, rather than the star-filled vista we might expect, a bright blue sky, filled with fluffy white clouds appears. The inherent magic of Magritte’s L’empire des lumières pivots on this deceptively simple contrast between night and day, conjured through an implausible occurrence that may appear at first glance to be perfectly normal—indeed, the artist claimed that many viewers initially assumed that they had seen a starry night sky in the picture, and it was only upon further inspection that they discovered the strange incongruence.
Alongside its captivating sense of mystery, the present L’empire des lumières also showcases Magritte’s masterful technique when working in gouache during this period of his career. He had first begun to experiment with the water-based paint during his years as a commercial designer, and by the mid-1930s it had become an important aspect of his practice, offering a creative outlet to explore new concepts and visualize his ideas quickly on paper. In contrast to the smooth, almost imperceptible brushwork typical of his oil paintings, Magritte’s gouaches embrace the spontaneity and fluidity of the medium, the path of the artist’s brush remaining clearly visible to the viewer as it moves across the page. He also played repeatedly with the consistency and finish of the gouache pigments, diluting the paints to different degrees in order to create rich, variegated textures and visual effects across the page. In the present work, for example, Magritte shifts from passages of opaque, saturated pigment, seen in the trees and houses, to semi-transparent touches of color arranged in delicate layers in his description of the light cast by the lamp, its rays flickering, overlapping and changing direction in an intricate pattern of short, staccato brushstrokes.
Magritte’s depiction of the radiant halo cast by the street lamp is in some ways reminiscent of the dynamic treatment of electric illumination in Giacomo Balla’s Street Light, circa 1910-1911 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The Italian Futurists had been an important touchstone for Magritte during the early stages of his career—recalling his first encounters with Futurism in his 1938 lecture “La ligne de vie,” the artist explained the profound effect these works had on his painterly outlook: “through a trick of fate, someone handed me the illustrated catalogue of an exhibition of Futurist painting with a condescending smile, and no doubt the stupid intention of pulling my leg. I had before my eyes a powerful challenge to common sense which worried me greatly… In a state of positive intoxication I painted a whole series of futurist pictures…” (“La ligne de vie,” quoted in G. Ollinger-Zinque and F. Leen, eds., René Magritte, 1898-1967: Centenary Exhibition, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 1998, p. 45). While Magritte soon shifted away from the fragmented, clearly divided planes of color of these early Futurist-inspired paintings, the group’s approach to movement and dynamism seems to have continued to resonate within his imagination decades later. Here, the light scatters and is refracted across the façade of the house, creating a rich play of shadows that further accentuates the strange presence of the bright, daylit sky above.
The idea for L’empire des lumières had initially emerged in Magritte’s paintings in 1949, and over the course of the following decade and a half he revisited and revised the motif across a series of oil paintings and gouaches, each iteration subtly different from the next, incorporating new elements and details within the landscape, the buildings, or the sky. For Magritte, the subject represented a distillation of the powerful, lyrical nature of his Surrealist ideas, confronting the viewer with a seemingly impossible scenario in an otherwise familiar and everyday setting. “The art of painting, as I see it, makes possible the creation of visible poetic images,” he explained shortly before embarking on the present work. “They reveal the riches and details that our eyes can readily recognize: trees, skies, stones, objects, people, etc. They are meaningful when the intelligence is freed from the obsessive will to give things a meaning in order to use or master them” (quoted in La Carte d’après Nature, no. 8, January 1955, p. 6; in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, René Magritte: Selected Writings, trans. J. Levy, Richmond, 2018, p. 180).
Here, on a quiet residential street, the light of a street lamp casts a warm glow among the dark shadows of nightfall, illuminating the houses that line the thoroughfare and casting rippling reflections on the waterway in the foreground. Taking up a position on the opposite bank of the small pond or stream, the viewer is granted an uninterrupted view of a startling phenomenon that transforms the scene—above the houses and trees, rather than the star-filled vista we might expect, a bright blue sky, filled with fluffy white clouds appears. The inherent magic of Magritte’s L’empire des lumières pivots on this deceptively simple contrast between night and day, conjured through an implausible occurrence that may appear at first glance to be perfectly normal—indeed, the artist claimed that many viewers initially assumed that they had seen a starry night sky in the picture, and it was only upon further inspection that they discovered the strange incongruence.
Alongside its captivating sense of mystery, the present L’empire des lumières also showcases Magritte’s masterful technique when working in gouache during this period of his career. He had first begun to experiment with the water-based paint during his years as a commercial designer, and by the mid-1930s it had become an important aspect of his practice, offering a creative outlet to explore new concepts and visualize his ideas quickly on paper. In contrast to the smooth, almost imperceptible brushwork typical of his oil paintings, Magritte’s gouaches embrace the spontaneity and fluidity of the medium, the path of the artist’s brush remaining clearly visible to the viewer as it moves across the page. He also played repeatedly with the consistency and finish of the gouache pigments, diluting the paints to different degrees in order to create rich, variegated textures and visual effects across the page. In the present work, for example, Magritte shifts from passages of opaque, saturated pigment, seen in the trees and houses, to semi-transparent touches of color arranged in delicate layers in his description of the light cast by the lamp, its rays flickering, overlapping and changing direction in an intricate pattern of short, staccato brushstrokes.
Magritte’s depiction of the radiant halo cast by the street lamp is in some ways reminiscent of the dynamic treatment of electric illumination in Giacomo Balla’s Street Light, circa 1910-1911 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The Italian Futurists had been an important touchstone for Magritte during the early stages of his career—recalling his first encounters with Futurism in his 1938 lecture “La ligne de vie,” the artist explained the profound effect these works had on his painterly outlook: “through a trick of fate, someone handed me the illustrated catalogue of an exhibition of Futurist painting with a condescending smile, and no doubt the stupid intention of pulling my leg. I had before my eyes a powerful challenge to common sense which worried me greatly… In a state of positive intoxication I painted a whole series of futurist pictures…” (“La ligne de vie,” quoted in G. Ollinger-Zinque and F. Leen, eds., René Magritte, 1898-1967: Centenary Exhibition, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 1998, p. 45). While Magritte soon shifted away from the fragmented, clearly divided planes of color of these early Futurist-inspired paintings, the group’s approach to movement and dynamism seems to have continued to resonate within his imagination decades later. Here, the light scatters and is refracted across the façade of the house, creating a rich play of shadows that further accentuates the strange presence of the bright, daylit sky above.