O Belo Mundo (Le Beau Monde) - René Magritte
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OST - 100x81 - 1962
A remarkable example of Magritte’s mature painting, Le
beau monde unites some of the best known elements of the artist’s
iconography: the curtain, the apple and the sky, all depicted in a setting that
is at once interior and exterior. The canvas is dominated by three monumental
curtains, with an apple in front of them. Marking a recession towards the depth
of the composition, these elements are placed on an unidentified plane, which
could represent a stage set or a corner of a room. Through the use of curtains
Magritte presents a juxtaposition of opposites – the paradox of concealing and
revealing, and the contrast between the natural and the man-made, between
interior and exterior settings. By confronting these contrasted elements, the
artist evokes the essential surrealist paradigm of questioning the significance
and purpose we attribute to various objects, and creating new meanings by
placing these objects in new and unexpected contexts.
The enigmatic atmosphere of the present work is further
emphasised by the notable absence of human beings. While the unpopulated
stage-like setting contains no elements that would indicate man’s presence, the
central curtain, occupying the focal point of the composition, is suggestive of
human form. Its sharp-edged shape, filled with the image of a cloudy sky, can
be traced back to the paper cut-outs that Magritte first developed in his early
drawings and papiers collés of the 1920s. Explaining this
amalgamation of the sky and curtain imagery, the artist once told a reporter,
‘the sky is a form of curtain because it hides something from us. We are
surrounded by curtains’ (Magritte, quoted in Sarah Whitfield, Magritte (exhibition
catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, n. p., note to no. 120).
The image of the present work has its origin in Magritte’s
oil Les mémoires d’un saint of 1960, in which a cloud-filled stage
set folds at the edges and metamorphoses into a curtain. Later that year,
Magritte used the image of three curtains for the first time in the
painting La Joconde. Here, the central curtain is filled with a cloudy sky
and the curtains are accompanied by a bell instead of the apple, and depicted
in a generic interior setting. Evidently satisfied with this image, Magritte
returned to it in several works, including L’Image en soi of 1961, a
similar composition in oil which he painted for André Breton, as well as the
present oil of 1962 and several versions in gouache, one of which now belongs
to the French Community of Belgium and is on display at the Musée Magritte in
Brussels. Furthermore, he later used this image for a sculpture executed in
1967. Of all the different versions of this image, Le beau monde is
arguably the purest and most powerful example.
Jacques Meuris wrote about Magritte’s use of curtains in his
compositions: ‘From the very earliest canvases, once Magritte knew what he was
doing, drapes were a repeated feature. They appear in both Blue Cinema (1925)
and The Lost Jockey (1926), for example. One way of looking at them
is as a technical device. They are usually shown with loops, giving them the
appearance of open stage drapes, and they enable the artist, through a process
of optical illusion, to locate the planes of his image within the pictorial
space. Another way of looking at these drapes is as a way of suggesting the
fallacious (misleading) nature of the painted picture in relation to what it
actually represents. Hence the idea of the stage set, to which the drapes lend
emphasis. This is clearly the case with such paintings as High Society [the
present work] and La Giaconda (Mona Lisa). However, the “meeting of
drapes” (Magritte’s phrase) adds a quality of obtrusive accumulation that
causes the viewer to see quite different elements that sometimes assume the
form of drapes and other drapes that present areas of sky or houses’ (J.
Meuris, op. cit., p. 169).
In April 1962 Magritte wrote about a closely related work in a
letter to his friend, the poet André Bosmans: ‘I have painted a picture which
is a variant of ‘Mona Lisa’, and very astonishing, I think: (blue curtains,
one of them with clouds […]. The interest of this image, I think, is – in
particular – that it shows the same curtain as one in ‘Mona
Lisa’, and again demands some felicitous intellectual effort from us, that is
to say it demands that, in addition to other thoughts, we name this image
differently from ‘Mona Lisa’’ (D. Sylvester (ed.), op. cit., pp. 358-359).
According to the inscriptions on the reverse of the present work, Magritte
originally intended to title it Le jardin d’Orphée, but eventually decided
against it in favour of Le beau monde, a title that was probably suggested
by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire.
According to the authors of the Catalogue Raisonné, Harry
Torczyner, one of Magritte’s most prominent patrons, saw the present work at
Easter 1962, shortly after its execution, and wanted to buy it from the artist.
As Magritte had already sold this picture to Herman and Renée Lachowsky,
Torczyner commissioned Magritte to paint another version of it, which resulted
in La Peine perdue, completed several months later. The Lachowskys soon
afterwards sold Le beau monde to a private collector in whose family
the work has remained to this day, during which time it was included in several
important international exhibitions. Vendido em leilão da Sotheby's em 2014 por 7,922,500 GBP.
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