Painted in Magritte’s quintessential Surrealist period, L’Imprudent challenges the notion of perception and gives rise to one of the most powerful devices in the artist’s oeuvre—the trope of the duplicate.

The year 1927 marked a watershed moment for Magritte, who moved from Belgium to Paris to more closely align himself with the French Surrealists at the center of the intellectual and artistic movement. The ensuing years in the French capital would prove the most prolific of his life and would define the artist’s legacy for decades to come.

Painted in this catalytic year, L’Imprudent stands among some of the artist’s most important and iconic early works to date, including L’Assassin menacé and Le Double secret which also play on the confounding dynamic of multiples. The present work features two well-attired gentlemen, seemingly identical in appearance, stance and demeanor, down to the curious sling they each bear. They stand a short distance apart on a floor which appears to hover before a blank mountainous backdrop. In the vastness of their surroundings, there is nothing to indicate the cause of the apparent injury, nor explain the juxtaposition of the elegant dress and the quasi-outdoor setting. The scene radiates with an uneasy calm, the figures almost mannequin-like with eyes which appear at once closed and open, albeit vacant.

It is precisely this feeling of disquiet which Freud discussed in relation to the concept of the “double” in his seminal 1919 essay titled “The Uncanny.” Though the term “uncanny” had existed for some time and was first explored in a psychological sense by Ernst Jentsch in 1906, it wasn’t until Freud’s essay that the notion became a more readily acknowledged phenomenon, especially in relation to aesthetics. After discussing the various employments and understandings of the “double” over time, from ancient means of both denying and transcending death, to the more modern spectacles of narcissism, Freud ultimately declares: “After having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a ‘double,’ we have to admit that none of it helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception… The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the “double” being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes” (S. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919, accessed online).

^{All art © 2022 C. Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York}

The related concept of the doppelgänger (literally “double goer”) can be traced back to German folklore, in which the meeting of one’s doppelgänger—an exact but usually unseen replica of every living creature’s spirit—portends imminent death. The dark legend became a fixture within nineteenth-century literature, including works like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double.

In addition to the literary interpretations of the doppelgänger myth, the burgeoning psychoanalytic theories promulgated most notably by Freud and Jung were keenly absorbed and discussed within Surrealist circles at the time. Led by André Breton, the artists and writers within the movement often practiced free-association exercises to mine the subconscious. Untethered from the constraints of the superego, the Surrealist impulse often resulted in hallucinatory or dreamlike paintings and poems which broke from traditional modes of representation.

Epitomized by L’Imprudent, such enigmatic compositions straddle the line between reality and fantasy, often inciting a sense of unease as the viewer’s logical mind strains to make sense of the inexplicable. Contrary to the most uninhibited Surrealist practices, however, Magritte carefully constructed his confounding compositions, aiming to provoke a conceptual reevaluation of language and perception.

Not only does the present work defy the traditional notion of portraiture—two identical figures as opposed to one—but by repeating the subject exactly in L’Imprudent, Magritte highlights the duplicative nature of the painting and reinforces the fact that the viewer is looking at a mere representation of a person and not the individual himself. The unnerving half-open, half-closed eyes of the two figures also serve as a subtle reminder of the difference between seeing and perceiving. Painted just two years later and arguably the most iconic of his works, Magritte’s Treachery of Images (see fig. 1) plays on the precise incongruity and challenge embedded in the present work.  

Painted in the same year as L’Imprudent, Magritte’s Portrait de Paul Nougé (see fig. 2) reiterates the motif of the double while capturing the likeness of his friend, the namesake poet and philosopher. Nougé too fixated on the falsehood of imagery; though he was not considered a photographer, Nougé is remembered in part for a discrete series of nineteen photographs taken from December 1929 to February 1930, titled Subversion des Images. One image from the series depicts Magritte and his wife, among others, crowding to look at a blank wall, the figures almost duplicates of each other in the way that they’re posed (see fig. 3). According to the Surrealist artist and writer Marcel Mariën, it was indeed Nougé who “found” the title for L’Imprudent.

Responding to an inquiry from Harry Sundheim, an early owner of L’Imprudent, Magritte stated: “If I had to ‘interpret’ this image, I should say (for instance) that the appearance of the figure assumes its mysterious virtue when it is accompanied by its reflection. The fact is that a figure which appears does not yield up its content of mystery when its appearance alone is in evidence. The figure (in ‘Foolhardy’), if it were alone, would be reduced to something particular: a slightly comic character. Alone, it would not evoke what it has in common with all human beings---that is to say their mystery” (quoted in D. Sylvester & S. Whitfield, René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné I: Oil Paintings 1916-1930, Antwerp, 1992, p. 211).

L’Imprudent was featured at the very first retrospective of the artist, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 where it hung beside one of the museum’s most important works by the artist, L’Assassin menacé (see fig. 4). Held in the same collection since 1975, the present work comes to auction for the first time.

“L’Imprudent” and René Magritte’s Use of Doubles and Doppelgängers

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