René Magritte

Alexandre Iolas, Paris (acquired from the artist in June 1957)

Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne (acquired from the above by 1965)

Acquired by the father of the present owner in the 1960s

Tournai, Halle au Draps, Ve salon triennal des Beaux-Arts du Hainaut, 1957, no. 69

Paris, Galerie Cahiers d'Art, René Magritte, 1958, no. 8

New York, Iolas Gallery, René Magritte,  1959

Dallas, Museum for Contemporary Arts & Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, René Magritte in America, 1960-61, no. 62

Knokke, Casino Communal, XVe festival belge d'été: L'Œuvre de René Magritte, 1962, no. 92

Milan, Galleria Schwarz, Magritte, 1962

Rome, L'Attico, Magritte, 1963

Geneva, Galerie Alexander Iolas, Magritte, 1963

London, Hanover Gallery, René Magritte, 1964, no. 7, illustrated in the catalogue

Paris, Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Magritte: le sens propre, 1964, no. 6

Cologne, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, 1965

Maurice Rapin, tract 'Nature et mystère', Paris, January 22, 1958

Letter from Magritte to Rapin, 26 May 1957, in Magritte 82 Lettres Scutenaire, 1961, p. 2418

Harry Torczyner, Magritte, Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, no. 455, illustrated p. 206

David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes 1949-1967, vol. III, London, 1993, no. 854, illustrated p. 269

Original canvas. No retouching visible under UV light. This work is in excellent condition. Colors: The colours are more subtle, particularly in the sky which has a more blue-gray tonality in the original.
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Fortune faite is an enigmatic variation on the theme of a large, monumental stone with a bird's head. Framed by houses to the right and a mysterious wooden container in front of trees to the left edge of the picture plane, the large stone encapsulates the recondite, timeless quality that defines Magritte's art.

Discussing Fortune faite David Sylvester wrote: "It is a variation on an idea first realized in Le bain de jouvence, a gouache of 1956" (David Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., p. 269). The first mention of this subject is found in a letter Magritte wrote to André Bosmans in April 1959: "For the development of La fontaine de jouvence (see fig. 2), I can say that it began about 1933-34; I was trying to paint a mountain and thought of giving it a bird's shape and calling this image Le domaine d'Arnheim (see fig. 1), the title of one of Poe's stories. Poe would have liked seeing this mountain (he shows us landscapes and mountains in his story). Fortune faite (...) and La fontaine de jouvence are stones bearing such inscriptions as 'Coblenz', 'Roseau' or 'à boire', 'à manger'. These stones can be seen as a little piece of Le domaine d'Arnheim" (quoted in Harry Torczyner, op. cit., p. 205). At the same time, the present work is a development of the idea that had been worked out in various versions of Le sourire (fig. 3), first realized in 1943.

Between 1955 and 1958, Magritte and his friend Maurice Rapin, who was associated with the Surrealist group, corresponded regularly. On 26 May 1957 Magritte sent Rapin a sketch of the present work saying: "I have just started on 'Having made good', it's an old stone with an inscription in a street under a starry sky. Scutenaire and Colinet are ill with pleasure about it" (quoted in David Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., p. 269). Scutenaire later wrote about the image: ''A boire, à manger (something to drink, something to eat)', thus does a street cry out, for streets cry' (quoted in ibid.).

As evident in the present work, birds often appear in Magritte's work and, due to their association with flight and escape, they appealed to the artist's interest in the symbolism of dreams, the basis of much of his work. Magritte's choice of a stone in the shape of a bird's head stresses on the one hand the heaviness of the material but on the other hand it gives the image the appearance of weightlessness, invoking a poetic dimension in contrast to the physical dimension charted by science. As he wrote to André Bosmans in 1961: "It is heaviness that is suggested and not its laws; it is suggested without physics" (quoted in Jacques Meuris, Magritte, London, 1988, p. 96).

The realistic vocabulary of Fortune faite, a challenge to the dominant shift towards abstraction in the arts of the period, serves to reinforce the artist's curious vision. As Siegfried Gohr wrote: "The crisis of vision prompted again and again by Magritte cannot be reduced to the sense that the world has gone off the rails; rather, it evokes a world that has become questionable, in the truest sense of the word, to its core. Magritte demonstrates this not by means of abstract experiments but by investigating concrete properties of objects, sensed in quite individual terms" (Siegfried Gohr, 'The Charming Provocateur', in René Magritte: The Key to Dreams (exhibition catalogue), Vienna, 2005, pp. 23-24).