Lot Essay
Magritte first used the motif of the bowler-hatted man in his painting Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire of 1926 (S. 124). The image soon became one of his most celebrated themes.
"Magritte's bowler-hatted men came to be equated with himself, an equation he would seem to have endorsed, if not inspired, through photographs he posed for from the 1930s onwards. For himself, the bowler would have been the key item in his disguise as small shopkeeper of clerk in his Sunday best. Mesens has told me how Magritte made a point of never buying himself a stylish bowler, one that would best suit his face, but always a standardised, indifferent product, allowing no intervention of preference or taste.
At that time especially [the 1920s], the bowler was a badge of comedy as much as of conformity. Stan Laurel remarked 'the bowler hat to me has always seemed to be a part of comic make-up as far back as I can remember. I'm sure that's why Charlie [Chaplin] wore one. Most of the comics we saw as boys wore them.' There are some early drawings and collages with specifically Chaplinesque figures. And it does seem possible that the landscape - prototype of several later images - could have been suggested by Chaplin's usual signing off shot." (D. Sylvester, Magritte, exh. cat., London, 1969, p. 14).
La Belle Societé appears on the schedule of works which Magritte compiled in mid-1967, arranged according to collector. Sylvester suggests that the painting is a combination of two images realized by Magritte in gouache: La Belle Promenade (S. 1579) of 1965, where the figure is made of sky (fig. 2) and L'Homme et la Forêt (S. 1582) of around 1965, where the figure is composed of tree foliage. The image of two cut-out figures together also appears in La Décalcomanie (S. 1054) of 1966.
Magritte often used the head or the whole body of the bowler-hatted man as a frame in which to depict another subject, an object or landscape. The face is rarely depicted. In an interview with Jean Neyens in 1965 Magritte explained "each thing we see hides another, we always want to see what is being hidden by what we see. There is an interest in what is hidden and what the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a fairly intense feeling, a kind of contest I could say between the hidden visible and apparent visible."
La Belle Société was acquired by the present owner directly from Magritte and the painting was not seen in public until the work was illustrated in Paris Match in 1979 (op. cit.). It was not until 1988 that La Belle Société was publicly exhibited when it appeared in the retrospective exhibition at Galerie Isy Brachot in Brussels. The present painting was recently chosen for inclusion in the major Magritte exhibition mounted at the Montreal Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1996.
"Magritte's bowler-hatted men came to be equated with himself, an equation he would seem to have endorsed, if not inspired, through photographs he posed for from the 1930s onwards. For himself, the bowler would have been the key item in his disguise as small shopkeeper of clerk in his Sunday best. Mesens has told me how Magritte made a point of never buying himself a stylish bowler, one that would best suit his face, but always a standardised, indifferent product, allowing no intervention of preference or taste.
At that time especially [the 1920s], the bowler was a badge of comedy as much as of conformity. Stan Laurel remarked 'the bowler hat to me has always seemed to be a part of comic make-up as far back as I can remember. I'm sure that's why Charlie [Chaplin] wore one. Most of the comics we saw as boys wore them.' There are some early drawings and collages with specifically Chaplinesque figures. And it does seem possible that the landscape - prototype of several later images - could have been suggested by Chaplin's usual signing off shot." (D. Sylvester, Magritte, exh. cat., London, 1969, p. 14).
La Belle Societé appears on the schedule of works which Magritte compiled in mid-1967, arranged according to collector. Sylvester suggests that the painting is a combination of two images realized by Magritte in gouache: La Belle Promenade (S. 1579) of 1965, where the figure is made of sky (fig. 2) and L'Homme et la Forêt (S. 1582) of around 1965, where the figure is composed of tree foliage. The image of two cut-out figures together also appears in La Décalcomanie (S. 1054) of 1966.
Magritte often used the head or the whole body of the bowler-hatted man as a frame in which to depict another subject, an object or landscape. The face is rarely depicted. In an interview with Jean Neyens in 1965 Magritte explained "each thing we see hides another, we always want to see what is being hidden by what we see. There is an interest in what is hidden and what the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a fairly intense feeling, a kind of contest I could say between the hidden visible and apparent visible."
La Belle Société was acquired by the present owner directly from Magritte and the painting was not seen in public until the work was illustrated in Paris Match in 1979 (op. cit.). It was not until 1988 that La Belle Société was publicly exhibited when it appeared in the retrospective exhibition at Galerie Isy Brachot in Brussels. The present painting was recently chosen for inclusion in the major Magritte exhibition mounted at the Montreal Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1996.