René Magritte

Jean Bourjou, Brussels (acquired directly from the artist circa 1946)
Sale : Sotheby's, London, 31st March 1987, lot 63

Brussels, Galerie Dietrich, Magritte, 1946, no. 6
Vervier, Société Royale des Beaux-Arts, Magritte, 1947, no. 33
Antwerp, Salle Artes, Le Nu dans l'Art Belge Contemporain, 1947, no. 18
Brussels, Galerie Isy Brachot, Exposition Magritte, 1968, no. 72
London, Hayward Gallery, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 1978, no. 16.14
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts & Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Rétrospective Magritte, 1978-79, no. 135
London, Hayward Gallery, Magritte, 1992-93, no. 90

David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, London, 1993, vol. II, no. 607, illustrated p. 371

The canvas is unlined. The canvas is slightly buckled in the upper left corner. There is no evidence of retouching visible under ultra-violet light. Apart from some very minor abrasions to the upper framing edge, this work is in very good, original condition.
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During the latter years of the Second World War Magritte’s painting underwent a dramatic stylistic change as he abandoned the darker, cryptic imagery that had characterised his pre-war œuvre in a favour of new, ‘lighter’ subject matter rendered in an impressionist style. This new approach, which initially appears in paintings of 1943 and remained his predominant style until 1947, was first alluded to by Magritte as early as 1941 when he wrote to Paul Eluard about his desire to create "paintings in which ‘the bright side’ of life would be the area to be exploited. By this I mean the whole traditional range of charming things, women, flowers, birds, trees, the atmosphere of happiness… And if I have managed to bring fresh air into my painting, it is through the fairly powerful charm which is now substituted in my paintings for the disturbing poetry that I once struggled to achieve" (the artist quoted in D. Sylvester (ed)., René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 91).

L’âge du plaisir was painted at the height of this ‘en plein-soleil’ period and includes many of the motifs that characterise these works. The warm, golden tones and soft handling of the female figure so reminiscent of Renoir’s portraits are combined here with a fairy-tale grotto, set against a mystical landscape of colour and light. However, whereas some works of this period wholeheartedly embrace this fairy-tale aesthetic, L’âge du plaisir also seems to return to the weighted symbolism that defined Magritte’s earlier work. He embellishes upon the familiar trope of a fairy-tale princess with the addition of a larger-than-life bilboquet and a toad clinging to the girl’s hair. Sarah Whitfield discusses the significance of the bilboquet that the young girl embraces, writing: "Although Magritte, like other members of the Brussels surrealist group, never shared the enthusiasm of their Paris counterparts for tribal art nor for Freudian interpretations, he sometimes allows his totemic figure of the bilboquet to assume both a fetishistic importance and a blatantly phallic significance. Here… the carved wooden post is cast in the role of a silent and immobile sexual partner" (S. Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., 1992-1993).

Just as the bilboquet introduces an erotic subtext, so the toad could be seen as another cypher for the male figure in its implicit allusion to Grimm’s fairy-tales and the story of the Frog-Prince. However, the visual juxtaposition of the beautiful girl and the toad also has an unsettling quality. In the catalogue raisonné entry for the present work David Sylvester suggests that the toad – which also appears the 1945 Le Brasier (Sylvester 599) – might have another literary source. He details a prose poem by Paul Nougé that describes a procession of men all carrying a heavy weight that eventually reveals itself as a monstrous beast and notes that, curiously, none of the men seem perturbed by this monster, in much the same way that the girl seems untroubled by the toad.

This combination of the beautiful with the grotesque might also have been suggested to Magritte by a postcard showing a young woman, very similar to the figure in the present work, embracing a statue of a satyr. Magritte was evidently intrigued by the possibilities of combining such unlikely objects; in his 1946 text Titres Magritte offered a commentary on the titles of a number of works, writing of the present painting, "A keener pleasure occurs when the most contradictory objects (the toad, the bilboquet, the woman, the grotto, the landscape) contribute to its heightening" (quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., p. 371).