Surrealist Rene Magritte’s records at Christie’s

The Surrealist World of Rosalind Gersten Jacobs and Melvin Jacobs has just set new records for Christies New York.The Rene Magritte works from this collection are a testimony to his art practice and his brilliance as an artist of surreal explorations.He sought “solutions” to particular “problems” posed by different types of objects. In the present drawing, the same method enabled him to challenge and to reconfigure the most ubiquitous elements of daily life. These problems obsessed him until he was able to conceive of an image to solve them.

Window as illusion

René Magritte’s poetic gouache, Eloge de la dialectique, was the first work to enter Rosalind Gersten’s collection. In 1954, she had met the Surrealist gallerist, patron and artist, William Copley, and his new wife, Noma, at a dinner in New York. A year later, Roz was invited to the Copleys’ country home, Longpont, just outside Paris, which had become a favorite meeting place for a coterie of artists in the post-war years, including Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Roland Penrose and Lee Miller.

Wendy Grossman has described Eloge de la dialectique, as “literally and figuratively a window onto the eerie world between illusion, dream and nightmare that was the hallmark of Surrealism. Against the dark brooding sky and impenetrable foliage of the exterior landscape, the large open window of a nondescript building invites us into a brightly lit interior. What appears initially to be a safe refuge from an ominous outside world becomes a temporal and spatial twilight zone, comprising a frame within the frame in which the edifice is replicated in miniature in an austere and ambiguous space” (quoted in op. cit., 2009, p. 3).

In its depiction of a seemingly suburban house, flanked by a copse of trees, Eloge de la dialectique is reminiscent of L’empire des lumières. Just as in this series of works, Magritte renders a banal residential street mysterious through the disquieting and impossible combination of night and day. In the present work, he has similarly distorted a domestic scene, yet has done so by playing with scale. By featuring the same house in two different sizes, Magritte leaves the viewer, as with so much of his work, to ponder what is real and what is illusion, thereby literally creating an ‘extension of the dialectic’ (a literal translation of Eloge de la dialectique).This sold for $46,20000.

Blonde haired horse

Painted in 1955, Le coeur du monde is a richly worked gouache from the fantastical mind of Magritte. Infused with his beguiling form of surrealism, the gouache presents a horse in profile with luscious blonde hair, a piercing blue eye and a tower atop its head.

The humanlike features ask the viewer to consider the very concept of portraiture and the personification of representation. The subject, the horse, simultaneously becomes both human and object.This sold for $2160,000.

Apple in India ink

Executed in delicate lines of pen and India ink against soft passages of ink wash, La chambre d’écoute is a masterful drawing in which René Magritte returns to the theme of impossible magnification, a subject which occupied his imagination repeatedly through the final years of his career.

Among the most familiar iterations of the artist’s musings on the topic, La chambre d’écoute follows a series of oil paintings of the same name and subject in which an oversized apple almost fills the entirety of a simple, ordinary room, its perfectly spherical form a monumental presence at the very center of the space. By playing with scale in this way, deliberately distorting the piece of fruit to dramatically enormous proportions, Magritte disrupts the viewer’s understanding of the scene, imbuing this very familiar, commonplace object with a strange, otherworldly quality.This sold for $945,000.

Pair of boots as drawing

Le modèle rouge is an enchanting  drawing in which René Magritte returned to one of his most renowned motifs, a leather boot morphing into a meticulously rendered foot. He first created this image in an oil painting of 1935 (Sylvester, no. 380; Moderna Museet, Stockholm).

He painted another version a few months later, this time rendering the scene with more dramatic, shadowy lighting (Sylvester, no. 382; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and a third one in 1937, commissioned by Edward James, in which he added a trompe l’oeil scrap of newspaper to the ground in the lower right, a cigarette butt and discarded matches (Sylvester, no. 428; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam). The motif was supposedly suggested to Magritte by fellow Surrealist, Max Ernst, who had seen a similar image on a shoemaker’s sign.This drawing sold for $2,100,000.

Images: Christies NY