Lot 48 : René Magritte (1898-1967)

Rene Magritte - 1898-1967

Auction Location: United States of America - 2006
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Artist or Maker:

René Magritte (1898-1967)

Title:

Les idées claires

Description:

Les idées claires
signed 'Magritte' (lower right); signed again, titled and dated 'LES IDÉES CLAIRES 1955 Magritte' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
19 1/2 x 23 in. (50 x 60 cm.)
Painted in 1955

Provenance:

Staempfli Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist, circa 1958).
Rex Evans Gallery, Los Angeles (acquired from the above, 1961).
Ruth Porter Brooke, USA. Galerie Isy Brachot, Paris/Brussels.
Acquired by the present owner, 1979

Exhibited:

Dallas, Museum for Contemporary Arts; and Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, René Magritte in America, December 1960-January 1961, p. 19, no. 52 (iilustrated).
Paris, Galerie Isy Brachot, Magritte 1868-1967, 1979, no. 20 (illustrated in color).
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Surrealismus, Traum des Jahrhunderts, 1995-1996, no. 63.
Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, René Magritte, Die Kunst der Konversation, 1996-1997, p. 164, no. 2 (illustrated).
Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, René Magritte 1898-1967, Rétrospective commémorative de son centenaire, 1998, p. 198, no. 200 (illustrated).
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, René Magritte: The Key to Dream, August-November 2005, pp. 156-157, no. 82 (illustrated in color).

Published:

D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1993, vol. III, no. 885 (illustrated, p. 298).
R. Hughes, The Portable Magritte, Amsterdam, 2001, pp. 347 and 426 (illustrated, p. 347).

Notes:

The dynamic nature of Magritte's oeuvre may be found in the artist's playful exploitation of human schemas regarding the possibilities and impossibilities of the natural world. Painting in an academic, linear, and matter-of-fact style, Magritte sought in his work to overthrow the viewer's sense of the familiar through the juxtaposition of paradoxical images. Les idées claires epitomizes the artist's unique desire to stage a permanent revolt against the ordinary.

Filled with whimsy, Magritte's paintings attempt to lend visibility to our subconscious thought, but the artist was adamant that he did not seek to convey any hidden symbolism in his work: "To equate my painting with symbolism, conscious or unconscious," Magritte insisted, "is to ignore its true nature. By asking, 'what does this mean?' they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things" (in "Les Mots et les images," La Révolution Surréaliste, 15 December 1929; quoted in S. Gablik, Magritte, New York, 1985, p. 11).

Sarah Whitfield writes: "A boulder is a form suspended between the abstract and the figurative, the general and the specific: that is its mystery...it is an effective agent of silence, a quality often remarked upon in Magritte's work and one which he himself had recognized in de Chirico's" (in Magritte, exh. cat., South Bank Centre, London, 1992, no. 105). The present work clearly manifests the artist's constant desire to invoke paradox within the confines of a single composition. Refusing to deal with single, static identities, Magritte instead creates an image of duality and contradiction. In the present work, the laws of gravity have been entirely undermined as a heavy boulder, without fixed or final location, levitates before our very eyes.

Les idées claires is dated 1955, although David Sylvester speculates that it was painted in 1958 and deliberately misdated by the artist to evade terms of a contract with his dealer Alexander Iolas. It is closely related to several other works from the later year (S. 873, 884, 886, 894) which also reference this unsettling image of gravitational void. "Space, time, and matter are dramatized here in suspended animation," writes Harry Torczyner. "The force of gravity, which we dismiss as commonplace in our daily lives, becomes powerful and awesome here" (in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, p. 154). Indeed, the boulder in this composition acquires an uncanny monumentality when released from the laws of physics we have come to accept as scientific fact.

"What happens in Magritte's paintings," writes Suzi Gablik, "is, roughly, speaking, the opposite of what the trained mind is accustomed to expect. His pictures disturb the elaborate compromise that exists between the mind and life" (in Magritte, New York, 1985, pp. 113-114).