雷內∙馬格利特 | 《美麗的俘虜》

估價

700,000 - 1,000,000 GBP

招標截止

描述

雷內·馬格利特
《美麗的俘虜》
款識：畫家簽名Magritte（左下）；畫家簽名Magritte、書題目並紀年1946（背面）
水粉紙本
49.5 x 36公分
19 1/2 x 14 1/8英寸
1946年作

來源

亞歷克斯·薩爾金，布魯塞爾（1946購自藝術家）
昂內絲·勒福爾畫廊，蒙特利爾
私人收藏（1968年11月購自上述畫廊；拍賣：紐約佳士得，2011年5月5日，拍品編號187）
現藏家購自上述拍賣

展覽

紐約，雨果畫廊，〈雷內·馬格利特〉，1947年，品號25

出版

馬格利特致皮耶·安德里厄的信函，1946年秋

馬格利特致亞歷克斯·薩爾金的信函，1947年1月2日

愛德華·奧爾登·朱厄爾，〈梅什特羅維奇作品，大都會藝術博物館收藏的南斯拉夫雕塑：夏加爾、馬格利特及其他〉，載於《紐約時報》，1947年4月13日，10頁

大衛·史維斯塔（編），莎拉·惠特菲爾德、邁克爾·雷伯恩，《雷內·馬格利特專題目錄》，安特衛普及倫敦，1994年，第IV冊，附錄141，收錄於326頁

莎拉·惠特菲爾德（編），《雷內·馬格利特：最新發現作品，專題目錄》，布魯塞爾，2012年，第VI冊，品號15，31頁載彩圖，6頁載局部彩圖

拍品資料及來源

La belle captive 'was included in the Hugo Gallery show, where it caught the attention of the reviewer for the New York Times, who described it as an outstanding work in which "a painting of the sea becomes one with the sea itself."'
Sarah Whitfield (ed.), René Magritte. Newly Discovered Works, Catalogue Raisonné, Brussels, 2012, vol. VI, p. 326

Making use of one of Magritte’s best-known painterly devices, La belle captive exemplifies the artist’s enigmatic and compelling compositions. The title first appears in relation to an oil of 1931 which shows a landscape of a small hamlet on a country road with a painting in the foreground depicting this same scene. As David Sylvester’s catalogue raisonné of the artist records: ‘The image is a classic case of an operation which always obsessed Magritte – the concealment of one thing by another. Here this is given a twist by the fact that the agent of concealment is a canvas which reveals – or so we are led to suppose – that which it conceals’ (D. Sylvester (ed.), René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 176). This arrangement may have been inspired by illustrations from Armand Cassagne’s book on perspective that was used by teachers at the Académie in Brussels where Magritte studied and which indicate scale by depicting paintings in front of their subjects.

Magritte continued to develop this motif and the present work relates closely to a later oil version of the subject painted in 1948 (D. Sylvester, op. cit., no. 641). In both works he changes the subject from a landscape to a seascape creating a considerably more complex interaction between the revealed and the concealed. Featureless seashores appear frequently in Magritte’s work; devoid of all reference they allowed him to distance himself from one of the traditional tenets of landscape painting – namely a given time and place. In employing one in this context, Magritte emphasises the artificiality of the composition (and indeed of art itself), not least because we know that the sea is in constant motion and so what is shown in the painting cannot be the same as what it conceals.

This theme evidently intrigued Magritte as it appears again in the related series La condition humaine where an easel is placed front of a window looking out onto a landscape beyond. Discussing a painting from this series, Magritte explained how he saw the device as integral to an examination of human existence: ‘the tree represented in the painting hid from view the real tree situated behind it, outside the room. It existed for the spectator, as it were, simultaneously in his mind, as both inside the room in the painting, and outside in the real landscape. Which is how we see the world: we see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves. In the same way, we sometimes situate in the past a thing which is happening in the present. Time and space thus lose their crude meaning, which is the only one they have in everyday experience’ (quoted in Magritte (exhibition catalogue), The Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, n.p.).