"Is this 'stone age' a beginning or an end? Or merely a moment’s pause, as it were, in the march of life?"
In a letter to Paul Nougé of January 1948, Magritte wrote that the solid nature of a stone has an affinity with the mental and physical makeup of a human being. Putting this idea into practice, he executed paintings including Le Droit chemin, which situates petrified forms at the fore on the composition in lieu of human figures.
The poetic allegiance between the monolith and a stone apple is Magritte's focus in this exceptional canvas from 1966. The present work is one of Magritte's examples of "elective affinities"—the idea that seemingly unrelated objects bear some fundamental commonality. While the association between the two objects in Le Droit chemin may not be evident at first, it alludes to the concept Newtonian physics; as the legend holds, it was an apple falling upon the physicist's head which played a central role in the discovery of gravity. "Now if, for example, weight can play a part in poetry, it is evoked by a stone" Magritte wrote in 1961. "What is evoked is weight, not its laws; it is evoked without physics." But in this picture, one of a series of a massive monolith in a landscape (see fig. 1), Magritte alludes to the laws of physics by incorporating Isaac Newton's emblematic apple, emphatically transformed into rock.
“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”
A masterpiece of his late oeuvre, Le Droit chemin exemplifies the claritys
of thought and execution the artist reached in his mature works. Unlike his earlier paintings and gouaches in which he combined a plethora of motifs in a single work, in his later years Magritte arrived at a compositional purity which ultimately achieved greater visual impact.At the heart of the work is another of Magritte’s iconic images, the apple.
The fruit played an increasingly prominent role in his work from 1950, from those superimposed against the face of the bowler-hatted man (see fig. 2) to those singled out and paired with his memorable text (see fig. 3). Indeed, the apple was an indicator of something other than itself. Some critics interpret the significance of the apple through the Judeo-Christian lens, with it symbolizing the original sin and fall of man—a analysis that coincides with the title of Son of Man, a reference to the figure of Jesus Christ in the New Test.mes nt. Magritte, however, denied the facile theological reading.
“Magritte behaves like God. He makes fire burn without consuming, puts boulders in the sky, pins clouds to the ground, turns men to stone, makes stone birds fly, forbids us to look upon his face…”
The stone, in contrast, served a more literal purpose in Magritte's paintings, as observed by the physicist Albert V. Baez: "The force of gravity, which we dismiss as commonplace in our daily lives, becomes powerful and awesome here. We can step on an ordinary stone any day without giving it a second thought, but the stone in the paintings is compelling. The artist has made it extraordinary. It reminds us that all stones are extraordinary." Magritte's own thoughts on the matter were more philosophical, likening the solid nature of the stone with the mental and physical constitution of the human being. For others, his paintings of the monolith were signifiers of t.mes , place and permanence.
A Surreal Market: Magritte’s Success at Auction in the Last 10 Years
While the titles of Magritte's paintings are often intentionally cryptic and occasionally random, having no obvious relationship with the painted subject, it has been posited that Le Droit chemin may have been inspired by the 1950s writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Translating to The Straight Path, this title may be seen as a reference to the Lord of the Ring’s "Straight Road," one that leaves earth's curvature and moves through sky and space.
"I know of no painting that conveys so totally the sense of a universe in suspense, a universe in which everything is waiting and nothing moves."
So iconic is Magritte’s stone imagery that contemporary artist’s have recapitulated his motifs in their own work. Executed in 1982-83, Isamu Noguchi’s Magritte’s Stone both figuratively and literally pays homage to the Modern master (see fig. 4)
Magritte gave Le Droit chemin as a gift to the Israel Museum in 1966 at the suggestion of the dealer Margaret Krebs. In April of that year, Magritte and his wife Georgette accompanied Krebs to Jerusalem upon the invitation of Amiel Najar, the Israeli Ambassador to Belgium (see fig. 5). The artist spent ten days in the country and later wrote of his experience: "It was a fine trip, we visited the north and the south of the country, which was extremely beautiful....we were delighted with everything and hope to return to Jerusalem in more leisurely circumstances" (quoted in D. Sylvester, et al., René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, vol. III, London, 1993, p. 136). It remained in the museum collects ion for 45 years.
