René Magritte (1898-1967)

L'esprit et la forme was executed in 1961 and dates from the period when René Magritte had turned once more to the collage format that he had used to such great effect in his early works. Indeed, as was the case in some of his early collages, Magritte has used the cut-up paper from sheet music - in this case, apparently a waltz - as he had in the previous examples (see D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. IV, London, 1994, p. 312). Here, Magritte has added to the leaf-tree and bilboquet, which resembles a chess piece, by creating the impression of a cracked wall on the right and a jigsaw-like arrangement of forms at the top and the bottom - it is as though they were mysterious, semi-geometric stalactites and stalagmites, locking together at the bottom but seemingly coming apart at the top and tumbling down the composition. Any sense of perspectival depth is deliberately disrupted by the use of the sheet music: the collage element is emphatic of the artifice of the entire composition.

It was in part through the collages of Max Ernst that Magritte had begun to understand the magical and mysterious juxtapositions that were to become the foundation of his entire Surreal aesthetic. As he recalled of the revelation that the German artist's example had provided, in words that are as pertinent to L'esprit et la forme as they were to his early collages:

'Max Ernst superbly demonstrated, through the shattering effect of collages made from old magazine illustrations, that one could easily dispense with everything that had given traditional painting its prestige. Scissors, paste, images, and some genius effectively replaced the brushes, colours, model, style, sensibility and the divine afflatus of artists' (Magritte in 1938, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 214).