René Magritte

Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1955)
Mme Conrad Schlumberger, Paris (acquired from the above)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Paris, Galerie 'Cahiers d'Art', Exposition de peintures et gouaches de René Magritte, 1955-56, no. 2 or 3

Letter from Magritte to Iolas, 16th December 1955
Letter from Magritte to Iolas, 19th December 1955
David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1994, vol. IV, no. 1388, illustrated p. 173

Executed on a strong sheet of cream wove paper, not laid down, T-hinged to the mount on the reverse of the top two corners. The medium is fresh and unfaded and the work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairlly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the sky has a slightly softer blue tonality, and the greys are richer and more detailed in the original.
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In 1948 Magritte first embarked on the subject titled L'Empire des lumières, which would become one of the most iconic images of his art (fig. 1). According to the catalogue raisonné of Magritte's work, the present work was probably executed in November 1955, for an exhibition at Zervos's gallery Cahiers d'Art, organised by Magritte's dealer Alexandre Iolas (fig. 2). In a television programme recorded in April 1956, Magritte provided his commentary on this image: '... what is represented in the picture 'The dominion of light' are the things I thought of, to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a skyscape such as can be seen in broad daylight. The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry' (quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., vol. III, p. 145).

 

It is this poetic and mysterious quality that makes L'Empire des lumières one of Magritte's most popular and celebrated images. The subject is not unsettling in the way that so many of Magritte's images are, yet it does challenge the natural order of things and may even be one of the most deliberate surrealist statements of his late years. The evocation of night and day is precisely the sort of reconciliation of opposites prized by the Surrealists, as in, for example, the opening line of Breton's poem L'Aigrette: 'Si seulement il faisait du soleil cette nuit' ('If only the sun were to come out tonight'). But it is also a visual paradox typical of Magritte's art. He used this image to make the point that a painting does not express ideas but the power to create them. 'After I had painted L'Empire des lumières', he told a friend, 'I got the idea that night and day exist together, that they are one. This is reasonable, or at the very least it's in keeping with our knowledge: in the world, night always exists at the same time as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same time as happiness in others)' (quoted in Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, note to no. 111).

 

The lower part of the present composition is dominated by the night-time view of an empty street, devoid of human presence, faintly illuminated by the street lamp. The upper section is occupied by the bright blue day-time sky. The division of the composition into two separate parts is typical of the change that appeared in Magritte's painting around the mid-1950s. With a greater simplicity came a greater monumentality, and during the final decade of his career Magritte chose to expand on one of his favourite images, the sky. As he once told a reporter, 'the sky is a form of curtain because it hides something from us. We are surrounded by curtains' (ibid., note to no. 120). In other words, although the sight of a blue sky with drifting white clouds may seem benign, it alerts us to the ways in which we are unable to see or comprehend ultimate truths.

 

The title L'Empire des lumières was proposed by the Belgian poet and Magritte's friend Paul Nougé. The word 'empire' in the title can be translated as either 'territory' or 'dominance', a double meaning that is intentional but which, as Nougé pointed out, refers to the way a vivid day sky dominates a city street obscured by night. The importance of Magritte's titles, usually invented by his writer friends, was underlined by David Sylvester when he wrote: 'Magritte shared the belief held by virtually all surrealist painters and sculptors that a work of his was not complete without a title – "a poetic title", meaning a title that was not directly descriptive but relevant obliquely and irrationally, a title that might be arrived at by free association. What is special about the poetry of Magritte's titles is that, as in his paintings, the language is not ornate or arcane: it is banal, neutral, plain' (D. Sylvester, Magritte, London, 1992, p. 233).

 

 

 

Fig. 1, René Magritte, L'Empire des lumières, 1950, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fig. 2, René Magritte, the artist's dealer Alexandre Iolas and Georgette Magritte