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Descriptif du lot
René Magritte’s Sans titre is one of the artist’s painted assemblage objects, a rare group of works within his oeuvre. Comprising a shaped panel with a stone near its centre, this is the embodiment of the ‘Surreal Object,’ redolent with Magritte’s unique vision. Sans titre belonged to Magritte’s friend Ernst Moerman and is an exciting rediscovery. Moerman was a significant figure within Belgian Surrealist circles, a lawyer, poet, playwright and also the director of Monsieur Fantômas, a short 1937 film which followed the eponymous master-criminal on a quest for his beloved, through a series of oneiric vignettes which often resembled Magritte’s pictures. Indeed, towards the end of the film a painter is shown in front of Magritte’s painting Le viol (Sylvester, no. 356).
Sans titre is one of a small group of Surrealist objects that Magritte created during the 1930s, exploring his ideas in three-dimensions, and is closely related to Le fait primitif of 1936 (Sylvester, no. 680), a similar work comprising a stone embedded within a shaped panel (the existence of a third possible variant entitled La terre promise is suggested by D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield and M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, App. 91, p. 454). In these works, the panel is painted with clouds and the blue of the sky, allowing the stone to appear as though it is floating in the heavens. As such, it appears to prefigure Magritte’s iconic later painting, Le Château des Pyrénées (Sylvester, no. 902) with its floating fortress, as the artist plays with our interpretations of weight and air. The very fabric of our understanding of the stuff of life, of gravity and of space, is challenged through Magritte’s transgressive transformations.
Magritte played with the notion of the sky in other painted objects from the same period. In several entitled L’avenir des statues, he painted clouds onto plaster casts of Napoleon’s death mask; Tate, London holds an example from 1937 (Sylvester, no. 687). Using these formats, Magritte was able to take the sky and subvert it, bending it, or cutting it into mysterious shapes as in Sans titre, and stretching our appreciation of its depth, its infiniteness and its light. He was eking out poetic contrasts that pushed past the flatness of his paintings into the three-dimensional world of his viewers. The Dada objet trouvé is here repurposed, enshrined against its ethereal backdrop, and given the chance to be surreally provocative. The contrast between the painted sky and the emphatic objecthood of the rock forces viewers to reflect upon the ‘treachery of images.’ That, after all, was the title of one of Magritte’s most iconic works, comprising a painting of a pipe underneath is written the challenging statement: ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’
The link between Dada, Surrealism and Magritte may be all the more enshrined in Sans titre thanks to its shape. After all, this resembles some of the items within the compositions of Magritte’s fellow artist Jean Arp. In the late 1920s, Magritte and Arp both had contracts with the Belgian lawyer-turned-art dealer Camille Goemans, whose Parisian gallery showed both artists. Magritte was friendly with Arp and familiar with his works. Indeed his wife Georgette sewed some of Arp’s string reliefs (see A. Danchev, Magritte: A Life, with S. Whitfield, London, 2023, p. 127). Arp had a long association with the Belgian Surrealist circles, and indeed had taken part in an exhibition in 1928 showing his reliefs, such as his 1922 work La planche à oeufs, which had been owned by Paul-Gustave van Hecke. Magritte may well have seen this work in the flesh, with its relief elements of organically curving edges, seeming to prefigure the outline of Sans titre.
Moerman, who apparently received Sans titre as a gift from Magritte, owned several other works by his friend including a 1932 painting, L’univers démasqué (Sylvester, no. 344). That work featured in the background of one of Moerman’s plays, Tristan and Isolde. A contemporary recalled a provocative scene addressing the avant-garde nature of Magritte’s works, which is equally pertinent to Sans titre. In it, the king entered Isolde’s room: ‘He explodes in front of the Magritte: “And to begin with, what on earth can you see in this picture?...” And Isolde replies, “I see in it the fact that you don’t understand it…”’ (C. de Radzitsky, quoted in Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, p. 178).
Sans titre is one of a small group of Surrealist objects that Magritte created during the 1930s, exploring his ideas in three-dimensions, and is closely related to Le fait primitif of 1936 (Sylvester, no. 680), a similar work comprising a stone embedded within a shaped panel (the existence of a third possible variant entitled La terre promise is suggested by D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield and M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, App. 91, p. 454). In these works, the panel is painted with clouds and the blue of the sky, allowing the stone to appear as though it is floating in the heavens. As such, it appears to prefigure Magritte’s iconic later painting, Le Château des Pyrénées (Sylvester, no. 902) with its floating fortress, as the artist plays with our interpretations of weight and air. The very fabric of our understanding of the stuff of life, of gravity and of space, is challenged through Magritte’s transgressive transformations.
Magritte played with the notion of the sky in other painted objects from the same period. In several entitled L’avenir des statues, he painted clouds onto plaster casts of Napoleon’s death mask; Tate, London holds an example from 1937 (Sylvester, no. 687). Using these formats, Magritte was able to take the sky and subvert it, bending it, or cutting it into mysterious shapes as in Sans titre, and stretching our appreciation of its depth, its infiniteness and its light. He was eking out poetic contrasts that pushed past the flatness of his paintings into the three-dimensional world of his viewers. The Dada objet trouvé is here repurposed, enshrined against its ethereal backdrop, and given the chance to be surreally provocative. The contrast between the painted sky and the emphatic objecthood of the rock forces viewers to reflect upon the ‘treachery of images.’ That, after all, was the title of one of Magritte’s most iconic works, comprising a painting of a pipe underneath is written the challenging statement: ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’
The link between Dada, Surrealism and Magritte may be all the more enshrined in Sans titre thanks to its shape. After all, this resembles some of the items within the compositions of Magritte’s fellow artist Jean Arp. In the late 1920s, Magritte and Arp both had contracts with the Belgian lawyer-turned-art dealer Camille Goemans, whose Parisian gallery showed both artists. Magritte was friendly with Arp and familiar with his works. Indeed his wife Georgette sewed some of Arp’s string reliefs (see A. Danchev, Magritte: A Life, with S. Whitfield, London, 2023, p. 127). Arp had a long association with the Belgian Surrealist circles, and indeed had taken part in an exhibition in 1928 showing his reliefs, such as his 1922 work La planche à oeufs, which had been owned by Paul-Gustave van Hecke. Magritte may well have seen this work in the flesh, with its relief elements of organically curving edges, seeming to prefigure the outline of Sans titre.
Moerman, who apparently received Sans titre as a gift from Magritte, owned several other works by his friend including a 1932 painting, L’univers démasqué (Sylvester, no. 344). That work featured in the background of one of Moerman’s plays, Tristan and Isolde. A contemporary recalled a provocative scene addressing the avant-garde nature of Magritte’s works, which is equally pertinent to Sans titre. In it, the king entered Isolde’s room: ‘He explodes in front of the Magritte: “And to begin with, what on earth can you see in this picture?...” And Isolde replies, “I see in it the fact that you don’t understand it…”’ (C. de Radzitsky, quoted in Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, p. 178).