O Império das Luzes (L’Empire des Lumières) - René Magritte
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OST - 48x58 - 1949
Between 1949 and 1964, Magritte painted seventeen versions in
oil, with ten more in gouache, of the idea to which he referred as L’empire
des lumières. The artist’s friend Paul Nougé, the leader of the Brussels
Surrealist group, provided the title, for which the most appropriate English
translation is “The Dominion of Light”. “English, Flemish, and German
translators take [dominion] in the sense of ‘territory’,” Nougé noted, “whereas
the fundamental meaning is obviously ‘power’, ‘dominance’” (quoted in D.
Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 145).
The present L’empire des lumières is the very first oil painting that
Magritte completed which bears this title. The idea in this picture
quickly became popular, and during the next fifteen years the artist created
variants based on this original conception, sixteen more canvases in all, for
interested collectors.
Each successive picture displays the key elements in the present,
original L’empire des lumières—a nocturnal street scene in a placid,
well-maintained, bourgeois quarter of town, similar to the Magritte’s own rue
de Esseghem in Brussels (some versions were given country settings), with
eerily shuttered houses, some curtained windows faintly lit from within, and a
single lamppost, shining forth like a beacon, the sole illumination along this
darkened length of avenue. The hour is late, and most of the occupants are
presumably abed. Only the onlooker is witness to the bizarre vision that hovers
above the roof- and treetops—a night sky with neither moon nor stars, lacking
the least hint of darkness. For as far as one can see, a blue, midday, sunlit
sky with lazily drifting white clouds fills the ether expanse. In the characteristic,
straightly descriptive manner in which Magritte painted this scene, all is as
natural—but in myriad connotations, also as paradoxical—as night and day.
As David Sylvester recorded, this painting was named as one of three the artist
sold to his dealer Alexandre Iolas, on a statement of account dated 8 August
1949 (ibid.). Iolas shipped the painting in September to the Hugo Gallery, New
York, of which he was director. Nelson A. Rockefeller, then chairman and
president of Chase National Bank in Rockefeller Center, while also serving in
similar roles at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased this L’empire
des lumières from the Hugo Gallery on 30 March 1950. That Christmas, he
gave the picture as a gift to Mrs. Louise A. Boyer, his secretary, who later
became his executive assistant when he served as Governor of New York State
during 1959-1973. Following Mrs. Boyer’s death in 1974, the painting became the
property of her son Gordon A. Robins, and subsequently entered two further
private collections, including that of the present owner.
Magritte discussed L’empire des lumières in a commentary written for
a 1956 television program, later published in the exhibition catalogue Peintres
belges de l’imaginaire, Grand Palais, Paris, 1972:
“For me, the conception of a picture is an idea of one thing or of several
things which can be realized visually in my painting. Obviously, all ideas are
not ideas for paintings. Naturally, an idea must be sufficiently stimulating
for me to get down to painting the thing or things that inspired the idea. The
conception of a painting, that is, the idea, is not visible in the painting: an
idea cannot be seen by the eyes. What is depicted in the painting is what is
visible to the eye, the thing or things that had to inspire the idea. So, in
the painting L’empire des lumières are things I had an idea about—to
be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a sky above in broad daylight. The
landscape evokes night and the sky evokes day. This evocation of day and night
seems to me to have the power to surprise and enchant us. I call this power
‘poetry’. I believe this evocation has such a ‘poetic’ power because, among
other reasons, I have always been keenly interested in night and in day,
although I’ve never had a preference for one or the other. This intense
personal interest in night and day is a feeling of admiration and astonishment”
(quoted in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., René Magritte: Selected
Writings, Minneapolis, 2016, p. 167).
The diurnal antipodes of day and night have long served as poetically symbolic
realms that represent the contrasts in the human experience of existence, most
fundamentally the give-and- take between demands stemming from interaction with
the outer world, and those arising from the inner world of the individual self.
The tensions between reality and dream—day and night—lie at the very heart of
the Surrealist ethos.
The beauty and revelation of L’empire des lumières—perhaps the latent
message that contributed to its enduring iconic status—is that Magritte gazes
far beyond any such antithetical notions, even if in this painting he appeared
to cast such contradictions as the traditionally opposing elements of earth and
sky, night and day, darkness and light. The alignment of element with idea,
with one alternative or the other—in either a positive or negative sense—is
fraught, however, at every turn with shifting ambiguities and reversals. The
artist discovered instead the underlying conciliation and harmony of these
opposing ideas. “After I had painted L’empire des lumières,” Magritte
explained to a friend in 1966, “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 time
as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same time as
happiness in others.) But such ideas are not poetic. What is poetic
is the visible image of the picture” (quoted S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh.
cat., The South Bank Centre, London, 1992, no. 111).
The circumstances behind the evolution of the Empire des lumières idea
into a painting are not clearly apparent. While staying with his collector
Edward James in London during February-March 1937, Magritte gave a presentation
at Roland Penrose’s London Gallery in which he considered, as stated at the
outset, “certain features peculiar to words, images and real objects” (D.
Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. II. p. 53). In one example early in the
discussion, the artist cited the opening line of André Breton’s poem L’Aigrette (from Terre
de clair, 1923): “If only the sun would shine tonight” (ibid.). Although many
of Magritte’s outdoor settings appear in daylight, and numerous interior
subjects are given a suitably nocturnal mise-en-scène, the conflation of
elements signifying day and night had outwardly figured only occasionally in
his paintings. For example, in Le promenoir des amants (1929 or 1930;
Sylvester, no. 324), two framed images of daytime clouds appear as if hung on
the wall of a night sky, above buildings and trees. A night sky with a crescent
moon and stars emblazons the façades of buildings at sunset in the
gouache Le Poison (1938 or 1939; Sylvester, no. 1142).
Evidence of Magritte’s intent in the L’empire des lumières theme at
the end of the 1940s may be found in a series of texts that he authored during
1946-1947, five manifestos under the title Surrealism in the Sunshine. The
artist railed against the idea, sanctioned at the end of the Second World War
and still more recently during the emergence of the Cold War, in “philosophies
(materialist or idealist),” that “The man on the street...thinks he must live
and suffer and that the very meaning of life is that it is a dream-nightmare.”
Magritte reminds us that “La Terre n’est pas une vallée de larmes... We must
not be afraid of the sunlight using the excuse that it has always served to shed
light on a wretched world.” He concluded by announcing: “Here comes the sun to
dissipate life’s shadows: joy and understanding to help out. Our mental world
is filled with sunlight: the joy we have chosen as a sun to guide us. We have
chosen pleasure as a reaction to the years of tedious terror, and consequently
we stand firm in our longing for joy, a joy that will spread and grow more
intense for everyone when the last noxious fumes of ‘knowledge’ have vanished
from everyone’s mental universe.” (K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., op.
cit., 2016, pp. 94, 96 and 101). This is likely the vision of a “Dominion of
Light” that Magritte sought to express in L’empire des lumières.
The English word “empyrean” may be relevant here, as an adjective relating to
the heavenly or celestial, or as a noun signifying “the highest part of heaven,
thought by the ancients to be the realm of pure fire” (Oxford English
Dictionary)—but only, however, insofar as this image may conjure, by way of
simile, Magritte’s night sky filled with light. The artist would have taken
issue with any suggestion derived from a religious tradition, or any “mystical”
notion, as he revealed in comments regarding an interpretation that his friend
the poet Paul Colinet had offered for the fourth version of L’empire des
lumières (formerly in the collection of Georges de Menil; Sylvester no.
781). “His attempt to explain it is distressing: 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, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 200).
A Poetic Art
“The art of painting, as I see it, makes possible the creation of visible
poetic images. They reveal the riches and details that our eyes can readily
recognize: trees, skies, stones, objects, people, etc. They are meaningful when
the intelligence is freed from the obsessive will to give things a meaning in
order to use or master them.
“The searching intelligence sharpens when it sees the meaning in poetic images.
The meaning goes with the moral certainty that we belong to the World. And so,
this actual belonging becomes a right to belong. The changing content of these
poetic images tallies with the richness of our moral certainty. It does not
happen at will, it does not obey any system, whether logical or illogical,
rigid or fanciful.
“The unexpected appearance of a poetic image is celebrated by the intelligence,
ally of the enigmatic and marvelous Light that comes from the World.”
René Magritte
(From La Carte d’après Nature, 8 January 1955, p. 6; in K. Rooney and E.
Plattner, eds., op. cit., Minneapolis, 2016, p. 161).
Selected highlights from among the variant versions of L’empire des
lumières
Magritte’s repeated treatment of the Empire des lumières idea amounts
to a theme with variations; the alterations from one canvas to the next, in
nuance and motif, serve to expand and enhance the poetic effect of the artist’s
intentions. Changes in the size of the canvases, alternating as well between
horizontal and vertical formats, allow the viewer to experience the impact of
Magritte’s conception in different ways.
At this point, it should be mentioned that the present L’empire des
lumières, while the first picture of this subject that Magritte completed, is
not the first he actually began. This honor belongs to the penultimate,
sixteenth version (Sylvester, no. 954), which Magritte began in 1948, but set
aside when no more than two-thirds completed, before he turned to the present
canvas (see below).
The artist painted the second version (Sylvester, no. 723) of L’empire des
lumières less than a year following the present painting, in June 1950, on
a larger sized canvas, allowing a broader array of building façades, in which
the artist told Iolas he had “revealed the full strength of the idea” (quoted
in cat rais., op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 157). The more engaging,
intimate effect of the present, original painting, however, is undeniable.
Iolas sold the first variant to Jean and Dominique de Menil by the end of the
year; they immediately gifted the picture to The Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
Because the De Menils desired a L’empire des lumières for their own
collection, Iolas placed an order for the fourth version (Sylvester, no. 781),
which Magritte completed in August 1952. It was shipped to New York in January
1953 and there acquired by the De Menils (sold, Christie’s New York, 7 May
2002, lot 36).
Version 6, 1953 (Sylvester, no. 797) was sold to Richard Rodgers, the composer
of South Pacific and other Broadway musicals, in 1953 (sold,
Christie’s New York, 11 November 1992, lot 18). Version 7, 1953 (Sylvester, no.
803) was acquired by New York collector Arnold Weissberger after 1953 (sold,
Christie’s New York, 14 May 1986, lot 53).
Peggy Guggenheim purchased version 8, 1954 (Sylvester, no. 804) in October
1954, having seen it in the Venice Biennale. Because of confusion stemming from
the efforts of three parties to reserve the picture prior to the Biennale,
Magritte discovered he had in effect promised it to each of them—Willy van
Hove, the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, and his dealer
Iolas. The artist thereafter painted in 1954 three more variants, versions 9-11
(Sylvester nos. 804, 810, and 814) to satisfy his obligations to all three
clients.
Magritte painted version 12 (Sylvester, no. 842), probably in 1956, and sold it
directly to a private collector. The artist also managed the re-sale of this
painting to Chicago collector Barnet Hodes in 1960.
In response to a request from Iolas, the artist painted an Empire des
lumières in 1957 (version 13; Sylvester, no. 858). A member of the
dealer’s family saw the work while in progress, and upon completion became its
owner; the painting thereafter remained in the family’s possession.
Harry Torczyner, one of Magritte’s most dedicated collectors and the author
of Magritte: Images and Ideas (New York, 1977), commissioned version
14 (Sylvester, no. 880) directly from the artist in 1958 (sold, Christies New
York, 19 November 1998, lot 313).
Version 16, mentioned above (Sylvester no. 954) is the completion of the
painting that Magritte began in 1948. Having seen it in the studio, the
eventual owners learned from Magritte that he had been unable to resolve the
picture in its vertical format. They offered to purchase the canvas if the
artist would finish it, which was accomplished in 1962 (sold, Christie’s
London, 25 June 1996, lot 40).
Magritte inserted into the final version 17 (Sylvester, no. 1006) the
silhouette of the man in the bowler hat, his proxy, seen from behind, which he
painted in 1964 or 1965, for a private collection.
A painting showing a daylit sky above a nocturnal scene was left unfinished and
untitled at Magritte’s death on 15 August 1967 (Sylvester, no. 1066).
Nota do blog: Foi vendida em 2017 durante leilão da Christie’s
por US$ 20,562,500.
