Lot 55 : René Magritte (1898-1967)
Auction Location: United States of America - 2005
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Artist or Maker:
René Magritte (1898-1967)
Title:
Le chant des sirènes
Description:
Le chant des sirènes
signed 'Magritte' (lower right); titled 'LE CHANT DES SIRÈNES' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
18 x 15 in. (46 x 38 cm.)
Painted in 1953
Provenance:
(possibly) Iolas Gallery, New York.
Redfern Gallery, London.
Robert Elkon Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 6 November 1963.
Exhibited:
Brussels, La Sirène, Oeuvres récentes de René Magritte, October 1953, no. 11.
New York, Finch College Museum of Art; and Connecticut, The Stamford Museum, Art from Belgium, January-February 1965, no. 6 (illustrated).
New York, Robert Elkon Gallery, Robert Elkon--Two Decades, September-November 1981.
Published:
Invoice from Magritte to Iolas, 9 May 1953.
H. Kramer, "Critic's Choices," The New York Times, 4 October 1981, p. 13 (illustrated).
S. Whitfield and M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, Belgium, 1993, vol III, p. 223, pl. 798 (illustrated).
Notes:
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE NEW YORK COLLECTION
The image of the man wearing a black bowler hat and overcoat first entered Magritte's oeuvre in several paintings of the late 1920s (see Sylvester, nos. 136, 137 and 220). However, it was not until 1951 that the well-known--indeed iconic--version of this subject, in which the part-length figure of the man is seen from behind, appeared in the artist's repertory, in La bôite de Pandore (S. 772; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven). It became the basis of a series of variants in which the artist placed the man in different settings. The man in the bowler hat, his face hidden from the viewer, was not only the artist's private persona and surrogate, but has since become acknowledged as a universal symbol of the anonymous, 20th century, bourgeois man-on-the-street. He is the public functionary, the bureaucrat, the capitalist large or small, or the ordinary salary man, who inwardly and discreetly aspires to something beyond himself, or even the visionary potential of the artist or poet. Indeed, Magritte had first tentatively titled the preceding version of this subject, painted in 1952 (S. 778), L'art poétique.
Like other members of the Surrealist circle in Brussels, Magritte chose to dress and live in a deliberately staid and bourgeois manner. The bowler hat was a key part of his conservative attire (fig. 1). David Sylvester wrote "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 of taste" (D. Sylvester, Magritte, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1969, p. 14). The artist himself explained to an interviewer from Life magazine in 1965, "The bowler is a headdress that is not original: it poses no surprise. And I wear it. I am not eager to singularize myself. I would dress for it. But I don't want to" (reprinted in R. Magritte, Ecrits complets, Paris, 1979, p. 612).
In the present work the bowler-hatted everyman stands before a vast seascape with only the immediate foreground and objects--his familiar terra firma--anchoring the composition. The candle, leaf and a glass of water, symbols of human transience, are at his back, as he gazes outward over the water to a distant horizon. The image of the man is deliberately mysterious, and there is no explanation of purpose. Without any indication of his response to this featureless environment, it is impossible to ascertain that the man in the bowler hat is actually contemplating the wide vista before him. Suzi Gablik has written:
"Magritte was the most paradoxical of all the surrealists. Where the others deliberately created scandal in life, he tried to remain outwardly inconspicuous... Magritte's reluctance to draw attention to himself is mirrored in the anonymity of the bowler-hatted man, a theme which developed mostly during his latter years, and which has since come to be identified with himself. The bowler-hatted man is rather like Ulrich in Robert Musil's long novel, The Man Without Qualities; he has given up his 'qualities' as a man might give up the world. Magritte's bowler-hatted man is more like a figure in a book than a human being, he seems to live the history of ideas rather than the history of the world.... Impassive and aloof, he fixes the world in his gaze, but often his face is turned from view, dislocated, or otherwise concealed or obliterated by objects [fig. 2], as if expressing a universal disinclination, for which there exists no complementary inclination" (in Magritte, Greenwich, 1970, pp. 154-156).
(fig. 1) The artist with his bowler hat. Photograph by Michael Cooper. BARCODE 23668096
(fig. 2) René Magritte, Le fils de l'homme, 1964. Sold, Christie's, New York, 25 November 1998, lot 310.BARCODE 23668089
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