O Tempo Antigo (Le Temps Jadis) - René Magritte

O Tempo Antigo (Le Temps Jadis) - René Magritte
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OST - 38x46 - 1966

In this silent, night-time composition, Magritte presents objects in a new context, as per the dictum of the Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870), whose work had previously been rediscovered by the Surrealists. Magritte was inspired by the writer's concept — put forward in Les Chants de Maldoror, published in 1869 — that it was possible to view [something as being]: 'as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.' In parallel with this new vision of beauty, Magritte was influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. Following his discovery of de Chirico's Chant d'Amour (1914) in the journal Les Feuilles Libres in 1923, by way of the poet Marcel Lecomte, the artist sought to give precedence to the idea of composition over aesthetics, by assembling distant realities in order to create a mysterious, poetic universe. 'My eyes saw thought for the first time', he later wrote. It is 'a complete break with the intellectual habits peculiar to artists who are prisoners of their talent, virtuosity and all petty aesthetic frills. It is a question of a new vision, where the viewer rediscovers his isolation and hears the silence of the world.' (René Magritte, 'La Ligne de vie' in G. Ollinger-Zinque and F. Leen (eds.), René Magritte, Catalogue du Centenaire, Brussels, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 1988, p. 44). Although the presence of a fire does not seem out of the ordinary in Le Temps Jadis, the crow's head that meets the viewer's gaze is quite puzzling. From this stare emerges a profound sense of humanity, as the crow's head is embedded into a bilboquet [a cup-and-ball toy], scaled up to human size. Here, mystery reigns supreme, conveyed by the strangeness of the association between the disparate elements and by the limited palette of a few gradated colours. The enigmatic title, Le Temps Jadis, also refers to this timeless atmosphere in an indeterminate place.

Created a year before the artist's death, this work bears witness to René Magritte's career-long reflection on the apparent opposition between reality and illusion. It contains iconographic themes that the painter held dear. Fire is a recurring element in his work, first seen in 1934 in L'Échelle du Feu. Likewise, the painter depicted crows on multiple occasions, including in Le Prince Charmant (1948), where the figure of the bird is — as in this work — represented in the foreground on the right-hand side of the work. The bilboquet, whose handle takes the form of a chess piece, is a theme that is also frequently found in the painter's oeuvre. It was seen as early as the 1920s, in paintings such as Nocturne and Les Deux Soeurs, and became anthropomorphic in 1926 in La Naissance de l'Idole. Le Temps Jadis also reworks the composition of La Belle Lurette, made a year earlier in 1965, embedding the crow's head into a bilboquet instead of an eyeball. Le Temps Jadis bears witness to a powerful simplicity, characteristic of Magritte's final artistic period, which synthesized an artistic career made up of myriad influences. This painting is thus evocative of what the artist told Pierre Demarne in a 1961 interview for the magazine Rhétorique: 'The visible presented by the world is rich enough to constitute a poetic language evocative of mystery.'