René Magritte

Iolas Gallery, New York
Hanover Gallery, London
Erica Brausen, London
Acquired from the estate of the above by the present owner

London, Hanover Gallery, René Magritte, 1964, no. 24 (as dating from 1963)

The image of the bowler-hatted man is the single most iconic motif of Magritte’s œuvre. It first appeared in his painting of 1926 titled Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Sylvester, no. 124), in which the man is seen from the back, against a dark evening landscape. The present important gouache depicts multiple renderings of the bowler-hatted man, the idea first developed as early as 1927, in Le Sens de la nuit (fig. 2), that culminated in the celebrated Golconde of 1953 (fig. 3). Used in a number of paintings and gouaches throughout the artist’s career, the bowler-hatted man appears in various guises. He is sometimes depicted from the back, sometimes from the front, his face obscured by an object placed in front of it, as a dark contour faintly visible against the night sky, or fossilised into a block of stone. Often he is no more than a silhouette, providing a frame in which another subject is depicted. What is common to all of them is the fact that the man remains impersonal, an individual transformed into a universal object. As Suzi Gablik described him: ‘Magritte’s bowler-hatted man is more like a figure in a book than a human being, but a figure with all the inessential elements left out… 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, as if expressing a universal disinclination, for which there exists no complementary inclination’ (S. Gablik, Magritte, London, 1991, p. 162).

In the present work, we see three images of a bowler-hatted man, depicted from different viewpoints: from the back, in a quarter-profile, and in full-profile. The question the viewer is facing is whether what we see is one man rendered from different angles, or three identical figures. Whatever the answer to this enigma is, it is certain that Magritte has chosen neither to represent a particular human being, nor three individuals. Two of the men are represented in such a way that their faces are fully or partially hidden; the face of the man in profile, although clearly visible, is an impersonal, characterless object rather than a face of a particular man.

The motif of the present work, depicting three bowler-hatted men with crescent moons hanging in the sky above them, first appeared in Magritte’s oil painting of the same title, executed in 1955 (fig. 4). Referring to this painting, the artist wrote in a letter to Gaston Puel on 26^th February 1955: ‘There is a project for a new card in connection with a new picture called quite simply ‘The masterpiece’! Here is a sketch [fig. 1] which will show you how three men are seen in the dark, each with his moon above his bowler hat’ (quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., vol. III, p. 239). Magritte himself undoubtedly held this image in high esteem, for in another letter to Puel of 3^rd March he wrote: ‘I am certain of the value of certain images, such as ‘The schoolmaster’ or ‘The masterpiece’ for instance, because, while they may be of little interest to aesthetes, as poetic images they are the best to be found in the world’ (quoted in ibid., p. 239).

The image of the moon occurs numerous times in Magritte’s oils and gouaches, sometimes accompanying the figures, as a sort of a halo, sometimes as a distant feature in an empty sky, or filling in a man’s silhouette, replacing his facial features. In the present work, a moon appears as if pasted low onto the sky above each man, acting as his personal attribute, the existence of three crescents further confusing the enigma of multiple figures. In an interview published in 1966, Magritte discussed the paradox of the moon: ‘For instance, when a man thinks about the moon, he has his own idea of it, it becomes his moon. So I did a painting showing three men, each with his own moon over his head. Yet we know there is really only one moon. This is a philosophical problem – how to divide the unity. The world is a unity and yet this unity can be divided. This paradox is so prodigious that it is a masterpiece, so I call my picture The Masterpiece or The Mysteries of the Horizon’ (quoted in ibid., p. 239). Adding to the mysterious character of this image, the men are depicted against a generic, undefined landscape which further emphasises the powerfully existential, timeless quality of this remarkable work.

Fig. 1, René Magritte, Drawings in a letter to Gaston Puel, 26^th February 1955
Fig. 2, René Magritte, Le Sens de la nuit, 1927, oil on canvas, The Menil Collection, Houston
Fig. 3, René Magritte, Golconde, 1953, oil on canvas, The Menil Collection, Houston
Fig. 4, René Magritte, Le Chef d’œuvre ou les mystères de l’horizon, 1955, oil on canvas, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles
Fig. 5, René Magritte, 1965