Painted in 1926, just a year before Magritte left Brussels for Paris, Le Monde poétique presents an epitomal work from the earliest years of his Surrealist oeuvre. Combined in the present painting are two of the most quintessential motifs of Magritte’s body of work, namely the disjointed human form and the stark, otherworldly landscape.
The fragmentation of the human body and depiction of isolated parts is not only an important theme in the works of René Magritte, but also one that expresses the essence of Surrealism. Among the favored games of the Surrealists was an exercise called Cadavre exquise. Invented by Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp in 1925, this game tapped into the subconscious automatism of each artist. In turn, each player would draw part of a figure on a piece of paper, then fold the drawing to conceal the subject and pass along to the next artist for continuation, ultimately resulting in unexpectedly comical, grotesque and even elegant figures. This game later evolved into more elaborate collaborative collages which present a higher degree of finish and subtlety (see fig. 1).
The corporeal division in compositions like Le Monde poétique and the Cadavre exquis works contain two concepts central to Surrealist art: that of desire/fetishism, as seen in the works of Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró, among others, and that of threat/violence, such as in the early sculptures of Alberto Giacometti (see fig. 2 & 3).
Magritte’s use of such imagery and body parts, however, is rarely violent. Rather than evoking destruction or mutilation, he uses the fragments of the human form in the same way he would isolate an element of a landscape or an object, and place it in an unusual, foreign environment. In the present work, a sense of mystery and ambiguity is created by the placement of the serpentine, detached eye within a quiet, unidentifiable landscape. The composition is framed by gathered curtains and vaguely menacing pyramidal shapes, two objects that are seemingly unrelated and yet are united within the pictorial space of the painting. Magritte's penchant for unifying the unrelated in a single image can be seen in previous compositions, but his approach here makes the arrangement all the more enigmatic.
Although he returned to the individual elements of this motif several t.mes s in other compositions, the composition in Le Monde poétique supplies a pervading sense of mystery and ambiguity that is heightened by the inexplicably shredded and ragged background. By re-contextualizing these objects in this unorthodox manner Magritte challenges our idea of the visible world and of the nature of pictorial representation itself.
Vision and perception also played a monumental role in Magritte’s work throughout his career, both formally and conceptually. Painted three years later, The False Mirror recalls the eye within the present composition, though instead of it existing against a backdrop of a cloudy blue sky, the eye itself contains the multitudes (see fig. 4).
An excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 publication on the collects ion applies almost as well to the present work, stating: “[The False Mirror] places the viewer on the spot, caught between looking through and being watched by an eye that proves to be empty. It opens onto a void that, for all its radiant, cumulus-cloud-filled beauty, seems to deny the possibility of human existence” (MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019, excerpt accessed online).
The present work is the original Surrealist composition from 1926. Upon seeing the painting at the London Gallery’s 1937 exhibition Pictures by Young Belgian Artists exhibition, curated by E.L.T. Mesens, the visionary patron and collects or Edward James commissioned his own version. As a collects or James often participated in artistic projects and commissioned works directly from the artists he befriended. In early 1937, at James’ invitation, Magritte stayed for five weeks at his patron's London home. It was during this t.mes that Magritte initiated a series of works for James including two portraits, La Reproduction interdite and La Principe du Plaisir (see fig. 6); the second version of Le Monde poétique was likely completed at the same t.mes , as an image of the artist’s studio asserts (see fig. 5).
An exceptional encapsulation of the Surrealist impetus with provenance dating back to the artist’s leading patron and dealer E.L.T. Mesens, Le Monde poétique comes to auction for the first t.mes in more than 30 years.
Motifs from Le Monde poétique seen throughout Magritte’s Oeuvre
