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Lot Essay
This work will be sold with a certificate of authenticity from the Comité Magritte dated 24 January 2002.
L'embellie is a remarkable discovery. It was commissioned from René Magritte by its first owner in 1962 and remained in that collection for forty years until last year. It has never been exhibited or published until now. Its discovery is even more exciting from the art historical point of view as it reveals yet another step or rather solution in Magritte's everlasting search for 'answers' to the 'problems' that were posed by the cognitive recognition and perception of simple objects that one comes across in everyday life. Just like the window, the shoes or the day and night lights, the door was one of those simple things that fascinated the artist in his search for the truth and the poetic representation of reality through painting. L'embellie is an approach to the problem of the door that was so far completely unknown.
The choice of the door may have been prompted initially by Magritte's discovery of Marcel Duchamp's famous 1927 ready made Door (fig. 2). Magritte, through several paintings, questioned our common perception of the door as a threshold between exterior and interior, day and artificial light (or darkness), as a point of access to the reality of the outside world, as the only point of passage to enter an interior from which the outside world is otherwise concealed. The central paradox of L'embellie is summed up in Paul Nougé's aphorism: 'nothing makes the reality of space so uncertain as the painting of reality'. And the door is not just a threshold between interior and exterior reality; it is also perhaps a metaphor for one's eyes, a threshold between the real world and our perception and understanding of it.
Magritte plays wonderfully here with those problems, possible solutions and paradoxes to a point where he dazzles the viewer completely and confuses his accepted notions of reality and its accepted representation without abandoning a realistic (or photorealistic) style of painting. If the door separates the room from the landscape why then is the landscape visible right and left of the door? Is it just craftily painted as a decor inside the room? Conversely, if the door is just simply planted into the sand of a beach and there is no room, why then does the day light come only through the door leaving a shadow elsewhere? Why does the perspective of the door not follow the floor or ground at the bottom? Is that reality impossible? Is it all just a confusing trompe l'oeil that reminds us that it is only a painting?
Just as with La lunette d'approche (fig. 1) the mystery remains and the problem of the door brings more questions than definitive answers. In that it is a metaphor for the ways in which, according to Magritte, truth and meaning remain concealed. As he said himself 'visible things always hide other visible things' (ex. letter from Magritte to Felix Fabrizio, 3 Sept. 1966).
L'embellie is a remarkable discovery. It was commissioned from René Magritte by its first owner in 1962 and remained in that collection for forty years until last year. It has never been exhibited or published until now. Its discovery is even more exciting from the art historical point of view as it reveals yet another step or rather solution in Magritte's everlasting search for 'answers' to the 'problems' that were posed by the cognitive recognition and perception of simple objects that one comes across in everyday life. Just like the window, the shoes or the day and night lights, the door was one of those simple things that fascinated the artist in his search for the truth and the poetic representation of reality through painting. L'embellie is an approach to the problem of the door that was so far completely unknown.
The choice of the door may have been prompted initially by Magritte's discovery of Marcel Duchamp's famous 1927 ready made Door (fig. 2). Magritte, through several paintings, questioned our common perception of the door as a threshold between exterior and interior, day and artificial light (or darkness), as a point of access to the reality of the outside world, as the only point of passage to enter an interior from which the outside world is otherwise concealed. The central paradox of L'embellie is summed up in Paul Nougé's aphorism: 'nothing makes the reality of space so uncertain as the painting of reality'. And the door is not just a threshold between interior and exterior reality; it is also perhaps a metaphor for one's eyes, a threshold between the real world and our perception and understanding of it.
Magritte plays wonderfully here with those problems, possible solutions and paradoxes to a point where he dazzles the viewer completely and confuses his accepted notions of reality and its accepted representation without abandoning a realistic (or photorealistic) style of painting. If the door separates the room from the landscape why then is the landscape visible right and left of the door? Is it just craftily painted as a decor inside the room? Conversely, if the door is just simply planted into the sand of a beach and there is no room, why then does the day light come only through the door leaving a shadow elsewhere? Why does the perspective of the door not follow the floor or ground at the bottom? Is that reality impossible? Is it all just a confusing trompe l'oeil that reminds us that it is only a painting?
Just as with La lunette d'approche (fig. 1) the mystery remains and the problem of the door brings more questions than definitive answers. In that it is a metaphor for the ways in which, according to Magritte, truth and meaning remain concealed. As he said himself 'visible things always hide other visible things' (ex. letter from Magritte to Felix Fabrizio, 3 Sept. 1966).