The works from Magritte’s L’empire des lumières ‘series’ are among the most iconic images of twentieth century art. With their luminous combination of a bright blue sky set against an inky, dark night-t.mes street, they combine immense visual impact with a profoundly conceptual approach. Alongside Magritte’s La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (fig. 1) and his bowler-hatted men, they are his most important images with an influence that stretches far beyond Surrealist circles. In them, Magritte achieves his most complex and sophisticated exploration of representation and reality. As the composition evolved through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, it would inspire and parallel developments in Conceptual and Pop Art (fig. 2) as well as becoming an archetypal image of twentieth century visual culture. Painted in 1961, the present work is among the largest and most refined iterations of the subject. It was painted by Magritte for his patron and friend Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet and has been in her collects ion ever since.

The origins of this image begin with a gouache of 1938-39 in which silhouetted buildings are overlaid with a starry night sky and crescent moon (fig. 3). However, it was not until 1948 that Magritte began to explore the subject more thoroughly, developing and refining the idea over the following decade to produce a group of seventeen oils that constitute his only real attempt to create a ‘series’ within his painting. From the very outset, Magritte had high expectations for these works. When poet Paul Colinet endeavoured to provide an explanation for the imagery, Magritte complained: ‘his attempt to explain it (only in its early stages) is depressing: it appears I am a great mystic, providing consolation (because of the luminous sky) for our miseries (the landscape of houses and black trees). The intention is no doubt good, but all this keeps us on the level of pathetic humanity’ (quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., vol. III, p. 200). In fact, Magritte’s aspirations were much less mundane; his subject was not humankind, but the very nature of reality. As he explained in a television programme recorded in April 1956: '... what is represented in the picture 'The dominion of light” are the things I thought of, to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a skyscape such as can be seen in broad daylight. The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry' (quoted in ibid., p. 145).

It is this poetic and mysterious quality that makes L'empire des lumières one of Magritte's most celebrated and compelling images. The combination of night and day seen in these works was precisely the sort of reconciliation of opposites that was prized by the Surrealists. The idea for the composition may have been inspired by André Breton’s poem L'Aigrette which had been published in 1923 and which Magritte knew well; the verse opens, 'Si seulement il faisait du soleil cette nuit' ('If only the sun were to come out tonight'). Other Surrealists, from Max Ernst to Salvador Dalí, explored similar ideas in their own paintings (figs. 4 & 5), but it is a visual paradox specifically typical of Magritte's art and one which reaches new levels of sophistication in paintings such as the present work.

As in all of Magritte’s best work, the effect is achieved by contrasting the known with the impossible. Here, the setting is typically suburban and recognisable – a quiet street in a Belgian town. In 1954 Magritte had moved to a new home near the Parc Josaphat in Brussels which he later described in specific relation to these paintings: ‘In the evenings it’s like being in the picture – the Dominion of Light. The villa where I live is surrounded by gardens and the houses looking directly onto the boulevard Lambermont stand out against a wide sky’ (A letter to Alexander Iolas, 9th January 1956, quoted in René Magritte. The Fifth Season (exhibition catalogue), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2018, pp. 45-46).

Siegfried Gohr argues that the very real nature of this scene – which in his words, provides the viewer with a sense of security – in combination with the other reality of a clouded sky, are crucial to the series' success: ‘In other words, both elements of the composition plausibly derive from the artist’s daily experience, a familiarity that has resulted in a perfectly successful translation into painting’ (S. Gohr, Magritte. Attempting the Impossible, Paris, 2009, p. 223).

Magritte is drawing on other, specifically artistic, familiarities too. Clouds first appear in his work in 1930 in the four-part oil Celestial Perfections and his treatment of clouds throughout his career alludes to the landscapes of the Dutch Golden Age (fig. 6) or later cloud studies (fig. 7). They also have a resonance within his own work. His precise reiterations of this motif, conjured in a specific tone of blue have parallels with Yves Klein’s development of IKB blue as an ‘open window to freedom’ inspired by the sky (fig. 8). As with all Magritte’s repeated motifs, the sky signals something specific in his work. As he once told a reporter, 'the sky is a form of curtain because it hides something from us. We are surrounded by curtains' (quoted in Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, note to no. 120). In other words, although the sight of a blue sky with drifting white clouds may seem benign, it alerts us to the ways in which we are unable to see or comprehend ultimate truths.

The counter-force to the vivid blue sky in the present work, is the inky darkness of the night t.mes scene below. Again, Magritte was drawing on precedent, understanding night’s inherently magical quality as the opposite of our everyday; the world of lovers, the world of shadows, the world of monsters. It has an obvious pull for a Surrealist, in the way it makes everything we know strange again, and has an important history in Magritte’s œuvre. Yet, this power has a wide appeal and is one that has been harnessed by many great artists, from Van Gogh’s nightscapes (fig. 9) to Edward Hopper’s work (fig. 10), which in some respects is a natural descendant of Magritte’s enigmatic compositions.

In combining the two the Belgian artist deliberately evokes a long painterly tradition of capturing the phenomena of light against dark that goes back as far as medieval gold ground painting (fig. 10) and was reimagined with the discovery of chiaroscuro in the Renaissance and beyond (perhaps most notably in the work of Caravaggio – fig. 11). Magritte’s skill is in realising that as well as a tension between these opposites, there also exists a profound synchronicity. As Gohr suggests, the universal appeal of the image is also rooted in the almost complete balance of strength between the opposing forces of the composition: ‘Even during the night, bourgeois order in maintained; the incredible confrontation takes place for the viewer’s eye alone, the inhabitants of the picture being oblivious to it’, so that what ultimately takes place is ‘a calm neutralisation of opposites that t.mes s the inherent clash of night and day’ (ibid., p. 225-226). That is to say, on first sight, the image seems normal and it is only when considered more closely that its inherent contradictions make themselves known.

This subtlety marks an important shift in Magritte’s work but also underpins the way this series interrogates traditions of painting. In her discussion of the L’empire des lumières, and particularly of the title these paintings share, Sandra Zalman considers the power play elucidated in the composition. Translated accurately, empire means power or dominance; it ‘can reflect nature’s dominance over humanity, humanity’s dominance over nature or the interplay of these forces as expressed by our power of perception’ (S. Zalman, ‘Otherworldly: Magritte’s L’empire des lumières’, in René Magritte. The Fifth Season (exhibition catalogue), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2018, p. 44). As she goes on to add, one way of asserting dominance over a landscape is to paint it, although this act also necessarily ‘admits that painting is a representation, secondary to nature itself’ (ibid., p. 46). This then returns us to Magritte’s sustained consideration of the nature of reality and representation in these works. From Impressionism through into the development of Cubism and Abstraction in the early twentieth century, painting had been moving away from verisimilitude towards a focus on recreating the experience of being or seeing; subject lost ground to effect. Magritte – doubtless deeply satisfied by the anachronism – moves the other way. In the present work, the subject is delineated with crystal claritys but the message is the obverse. Where other painters were saying, we have recreated exactly the experience of seeing, Magritte boldly states that cannot believe anything you see. It is a message that underpins all his work, but finds its most complex and subtle expression in the L’empire des lumières.

The importance of this group of work within the artist’s œuvre cannot be overstated. Whilst Magritte often returned to favourite motifs throughout his career, the consistent titling of the L’empire des lumières paintings marks them out as a much more deliberate attempt to work in a series. The specific imagery of these paintings was immediately popular among Magritte’s patrons and there was high demand for these pictures, indeed at one point a painting was promised to four different collects ors. Yet, Magritte was concerned that the works should evolve artistically rather than as a response to external pressures. As he wrote in a letter to the dealer Alexander Iolas: ‘I have to find a way of justifying the replica in my own mind. I managed to enrich the first idea’ (quoted in Christoph Grunenberg & Darren Pih (eds.), Magritte A-Z, London, 2011, p. 49). This careful process of selection and enrichment can be seen in the way that the compositions evolve over t.mes . Much like the great series of artists such as Monet (fig. 13), the works speak to one another, growing through association: ‘The repetition of this particular theme, and its slight variations from painting to painting in the series, expands the poetic patterning, creating rhythms and rhymes amongst them’ (Patricia Allmer, in ibid., p. 49).

The present work belongs to the group of large-scale compositions painted from the mid-1950s onwards that includes the versions in the Peggy Guggenheim collects ion, Venice and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (figs. 14 & 15). There is a remarkable attention to detail and technique, with each leaf of the tree picked out in sharp silhouette and architectural details painstakingly replicated. Indeed, one of the compelling aspects of these works is the balance between their immediate visual impact and the precise detailing of the hinges of the shutters or the railing of the gate that draw the viewer in for a closer look. Important attention is also paid to the structure of the composition which centres on the strong vertical of the tree and the smaller vertical of the streetlight. As a source of light, this latter holds our attention and in the absence of any human presence in these works, its truncated arms and domed top have often been related to the bowler-hatted man that was the artist’s alter-ego (fig. 16).

There is a kind of visual joke in this idea that Magritte would probably have enjoyed. The idea of him inhabiting these works makes sense, as they certainly inhabited his own thoughts. As well as expressing ideas about our lived reality, for Magritte, this group of paintings also had the power to create ideas. 'After I had painted L'Empire des lumières', he told a friend, 'I got the idea that night and day exist together, that they are one. This is reasonable, or at the very least it's in keeping with our knowledge: in the world, night always exists at the same t.mes as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same t.mes as happiness in others)' (quoted in Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, note to no. 111). This simultaneity is the real power of L’empire des lumières and underpins its remarkable visual and conceptual impact. For Magritte it became the ultimate combination of opposites, inspiring a series of images that remain among his best-known and most celebrated pictures.

Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet and Magritte

One of the Belgian master’s finest works, L’empire des lumières was painted by René Magritte in 1961, for Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, a close family friend. Magritte’s connection with the Crowet family began when Anne-Marie’s father Pierre first encountered the then-unknown artist, whilst studying law at Brussels university in the mid-1920s. A friendship developed as artist and law student realised that not only did they both hail from the same part of the country, they both shared a sense of humour and artistic taste.

This friendship – and the legacy of patronage - would endure into the next generation through Pierre’s daughter, Anne-Marie. She was sixteen when she briefly sat for a portrait with Magritte at his home, where he preferred to paint. So striking did Magritte find Anne-Marie’s features, he told her that he had been subconsciously painting her face for years before encountering her. That painting eventually became La Fée Ignorante (fig. 18), one of Magritte’s most powerful portraits.

Not only was the painting of Anne-Marie’s face a powerful moment of inspiration for Magritte, but it marked the start of a warm friendship between the artist and his muse, that lasted until Magritte’s death in 1967. As with her father, the younger Crowet shared with Magritte a cheerfully absurd sense of humour, a passion for art and an innate appreciation of Surrealism.

In 1960, Magritte painted three works for Anne-Marie, including L’empire des lumières. The work has remained in her collects ion ever since.

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