René Magritte

Acquired as a gift from the artist in 1966

Torino, Palazzo Bricherasio, Il surrealismo di Paul Delvaux tra Magritte a de Chirico, 2005-06

Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, El Mundo Invisible De Rene Magritte, 2010

David Sylvester, Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, vol. III, London, 1993, no. 1039, illustrated p. 429

Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, ed., Surrealism and Beyond, The Israel Museum Jerusalem, 2007, p. 188

Excellent condition over all. Original canvas. Very mild buckling in upper left corner. Surface is in beautiful original contion. Under UV light, there are a few tiny dots of fluoresce in extreme upper right corner, in extreme lower left corner and one small dot in the lower right foreground.
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The poetic allegiance between the monolith and a stone apple is Magritte's focus in this exceptional canvas from 1966.  The present work is one of Magritte's examples of "elective affinities," or the idea that seemingly unrelated objects bear some fundamental commonality. While the association between the two objects in Le Droit chemin may not be evident at first, it becomes clear in the context of Newtonian physics: an apple falling upon the physicist's head played a central role in the discovery of gravity. "Now if, for example, weight can play a part in poetry, it is evoked by a stone" Magritte wrote in 1961. "What is evoked is weight, not its laws; it is evoked without physics."  But in this picture, one of a series of a massive monolith in a landscape, Magritte alludes to the laws of physics by incorporating Isaac Newton's emblematic apple, emphatically transformed into rock. Executed in the last years of Magritte's life, Le Droit chemin exemplifies the clarity of thought and execution the artist reached in his mature works. Unlike his earlier paintings and gouaches in which he combined various motifs in a single composition, in his later years Magritte arrived at a simplicity and purity that allowed him to focus on a single idea, thus creating a stronger impact on the viewer.

Apples had played many roles in Magritte's late paintings, from those superimposed against the face of the bowler hatted man, to those singled out and magnified such as in La Chambre d'écoute (fig. 2).  Indeed the apple was an indicator of something other than itself.  The stone, however, served a more literal purpose in Magritte's paintings (figs. 1 and 4), as observed by the physicist Albert V. Baez: "The force of gravity, which we dismiss as commonplace in our daily lives, becomes powerful and awesome here. We can step on an ordinary stone any day without giving it a second thought, but the stone in the paintings is compelling.  The artist has made it extraordinary.  It reminds us that all stones are extraordinary."  Magritte's own thoughts on the matter were more philosophical, likening the solid nature of the stone with the mental and physical constitution of the human being.  For others, his paintings of the monolith were signifiers of time, place and permanence.  "I know of no painting that conveys so totally the sense of a universe in suspense, a universe in which everything is waiting and nothing moves" (Roger Shattuck, "This is not René Magritte," Art Forum, September 1966, p. 35).

The titles of Magritte's paintings are often intentionally cryptic and had no obvious relationship with the painted subject.  In the tradition of Surrealist "automatic writing," sometimes these titles were suggested by friends, other times, they were inspired by writing and works of literature.  One possible source of the title for Le Droit chemin, or The Straight Road, may have be the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings series from the 1950s made reference to the "Straight Road" as the route that leaves earth's curvature and moves through sky and space. 

Magritte gave Le Droit chemin as a gift to the Israel Museum in 1966 at the suggestion of the dealer Margaret Krebs.  In April of that year, Magritte and his wife Georgette accompanied Krebs to Jerusalem upon the invitation of Amiel Najar, the Israeli Ambassador to Belgium (see fig. 3).   The artist spent ten days in the country and later wrote of his experience:  "It was a fine trip, we visited the north and the south of the country, which was extremely beautiful....we were delighted with everything and hope to return to Jerusalem in more leisurely circumstances" (reprinted in D. Sylvester, et al., op. cit., p. 136).