René Magritte

Galerie Isy Brachot, Brussels
Acquired from the above in 1971

Milan, Alberto Schubert, Magritte, 1970, no. 5
Knokke, Galerie Isy Brachot, Magritte, 1971, no. 15

David Sylvester, ed., Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. IV, London, 1994, no. 1449a, illustrated p. 210

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down. There are remnants of tape from previous mounting along the reverse of the edges. This work is in very good condition. Colors: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly stronger in the original.
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Depicting a brick wall with enigmatic windows against the silhouette of a city sky, Le Génie bonhomme is close in its imagery to the series of gouaches that Magritte executed in 1958 titled L'Etat de veille. The image was inspired by an experience related to Magritte by his friend Jacques Wergifosse, who saw a mirage-like image of windows floating in the void in the city of Liège. While in the other works on this subject rows of identical windows seem to be suspended in the sky as if the building itself had, in Magritte's words, "melted into the sky," in the present composition the windows have been reunited with the brick facade. The surprise element or enigmatic displacement in this work therefore does not come from the windows floating in the sky, as in other works on this subject, but from the image of a leaf which appears in the central window.

The leaf is one of the recurring objects in Magritte's iconography, and in the present composition its size is exaggerated, filling almost the entire window opening. Always questioning the meaning we attribute to everyday objects and occurrences, here the artist juxtaposes the earth-bound monumentality and heaviness of the building and the light and perishable nature of the leaf. As Siegfried Gohr writes, "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), Kunstvorum, Vienna & Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2005, pp. 23-24).