René Magritte (1898-1967)

Painted in 1928, Les reflets du temps dates from early in René Magritte's artistic career, when he was developing the visual language of his unique perspective on Surrealism. It was only recently that Magritte had been inspired by the juxtapositions and atmosphere in Giorgio de Chirico's 1914 masterpiece, Le chant d'amour, to explore the silent poetry that could exist between incongruous objects. During the late 1920s, Magritte also created a number of celebrated collages in which he explored these links, and it is the language of collage that is recalled in Les reflets du temps, with its clock at the centre and the two words near it, hovering like speech bubbles or indeed like scraps of paper.

Each of the words appears at the end of one of the hands of the clock, implying that they are somehow linked to that moment in time. This was an effect that Magritte explored in a similarly-themed picture, in which he showed a patch of woodland and another of sky at the extremity of each arm of the central clock. In Les reflets du temps, he has evoked the sky instead by writing its name - 'ciel' in French - as well as the French for cannon. The link between these concepts may prefigure Magritte's Au seuil de la liberté, painted the following year and now in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, which showed a cannon pointing at a selection of windows containing different elements including the sky.

At the same time, with its clear play with the meanings of words and the concepts that are so arbitrarily linked to them through the process of language, Les reflets du temps anticipates his celebrated picture, La trahison des images of 1929, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In that famous work, a picture of a pipe has an inscription below it explaining that it is not a pipe. Magritte was dismantling the entire nature of language and representation during this period, as would be reflected in his text Les mots et les images, also written in 1929, in which various statements about language were accompanied by illustrations that aped yet gleefully undermined the linguistics texts of the Swiss pioneer of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. As Magritte explained in Les mots et les images, 'An object is not so linked to its name that we cannot find a more suitable one for it' (Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 260). In Les reflets du temps, with its deliberately incongruous juxtapositions, he has parodied the visual language of educational diagrams in order to illustrate the mysterious limitations and power of language and thence of the universe that we ourselves inhabit.