Candle in the wind

Alastair Smart on René Magritte, the artist who set the world alight

The year of 1953 was a good one for René Magritte. Recently signed up with the visionary New York dealer, Alexandre Iolas, he now had financial security – and a US collector base – which he had hitherto been lacking. The year also saw the unveiling of a set of murals he had designed for the casino in the Belgian seaside hotspot of Knokke-Le Zoute.

Magritte produced one of the most famous paintings of his career in 1953 too: Golconda, featuring myriad bowler-hatted men either levitating above a suburban street or falling from the sky onto it. (It’s unclear which.) 

Now in his mid-fifties, Magritte was in the midst of a creative peak – during which he spoke with ever increasing confidence about his practice. “Art evokes the mystery without which the world wouldn’t exist” was among his pronouncements. 

Mystery is certainly evoked in Mélusine, another painting from 1953, which is being offered in October's 20th/21st Century Art sale at Bonhams in London. It depicts a pair of golden candlesticks on a ledge. The one on the left contains a candle that has burned out. The one on the right, by contrast, seems to be melting before our eyes, bending under the heat while the lit candle inside it is intact. 

Such a process defies the laws of physics and the viewer’s sense of perceptual logic. It epitomises Magritte’s great contribution to Surrealism: images of ordinary things in far-from-ordinary states, settings or combinations. 

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world wouldn’t exist”

Magritte was born in 1898 in the provincial town of Lessines in north-west Belgium. He went on to study at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the city he would call home for most of the rest of his life. He took to Surrealism – the movement with which he’s synonymous – relatively early in his career, painting his first picture in that style in 1926 (two years after André Breton had drafted the Surrealist Manifesto).

His only real stylistic deviations took place in the 1940s, when Magritte entered his so-called 'Renoir period', in which – as an antidote to the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Belgium – he produced Impressionistic paintings with bright colours and feathery brushstrokes. This was followed in 1948 by his 'Vache period', marked by coarse, cartoonish imagery that owed a debt to his compatriot, James Ensor.    

By the turn of the new decade, however, Magritte had returned to his signature style. Indeed, the Surrealist works of the 1950s show an unprecedented refinement and poise, the sense of a master in complete control. Proof can be found in his 'The Empire of the Light' series: beguiling street scenes where it is somehow the middle of the night and the middle of the day simultaneously.

“The Surrealist works of the 1950s show an unprecedented refinement and poise, the sense of a master in complete control”

In the case of Mélusine, the dark background contrasts with the white of the candles and the brilliant gold to mesmeric effect. Baroque artists such as Georges de la Tour in France and the painters of Vanitas still-lifes in the Netherlands had often used candles to symbolise the fragility of life. Humans, like candles, burn brightly – and briefly – before being extinguished.

Magritte wasn’t one for such straightforward symbolism, though. Nor does the title of this work help us hugely in trying to understand it. According to a medieval legend that was popular in the Low Countries, Mélusine had been a female figure condemned every Saturday to transform into a serpent from the waist down. Her fantastical transformation is comparable to the fantastical transformation of Magritte’s candlestick.

When it came to the titles for his works, though, Magritte insisted that they were “conversational commodities rather than explications”. He often turned to poet-friends to name a painting after it was finished, requesting simply “a title compatible with the… emotion [they] experienced when looking at it”.

One might add that Mélusine isn’t made up solely of the two candlesticks on the ledge. Behind them is a stone wall with a large hole in it: a hole shaped like the profile of a man’s head with a hat on top. Appearing in numerous works throughout his career, including Golconda, the man in a bowler hat became a Magrittean trademark – the symbol of bourgeois uniformity or, as the artist put it, “Mr Everybody”.   

It's perhaps far-fetched to see Mélusine as another such work (the hat isn’t quite the right shape to be a bowler, for a start). However, the hole in the wall is certainly an intriguing compositional element. One that brings us to the heart of Magritte’s creative process. Did he himself fully apprehend the mysteries that his pictures contained? 

“Magritte famously worked in a suit, shirt and tie and purportedly never got a single drop of paint on them”

One might suppose so, given the way he painted in such a deadpan manner – famously working in a suit, shirt and tie and purportedly never getting a single drop of paint on them. “The art of painting is an art of thinking,” he said in 1949, as if what mattered to him were ideas not the act of putting brush to canvas.

On the other hand, in a discussion late in life about the meaning of his work, Magritte told an interviewer that “one cannot speak about mystery, one must be seized by it” – as if he were perhaps just a cipher for communicating the enigmas of the universe.

That all said, the precise nature of his creative process doesn’t affect our enjoyment of Magritte’s pictures. The same year as Mélusine, he painted a similar work of two candlesticks on a ledge – called Le Carrousel d’Esclarmonde – which is currently on long-term display at the Magritte Museum in Brussels. As for the work coming to Bonhams, it has a distinguished provenance, and for many years was owned by the famed Belgium-born watchmaker and art collector, Severin Wunderman.

“There aren’t many painters who hold a candle to René Magritte”

Magritte was an artist who looked to make us rethink our experience of the world, and how we fit in it. In today’s age of rampant misinformation and artificial intelligence (AI), this act seems more relevant than ever. Put another way: there aren’t many painters who hold a candle to René Magritte.

Alastair Smart is a freelance art critic and writer.

20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale | 10 October, London, New Bond Street

For enquiries, contact Hannah Noel-Smith on hannah.noel-smith@bonhams.com or +44 20 7468 5814