“Surrealism claims a freedom similar to that of dreams for waking life.”

Is reality nonsensical or do the human organs of perception disrupt its orderly naturalness? The twentyseven- year-old René Magritte may have pondered just such a question on viewing the enigmatic paintings of Giorgio de Chirico for the first time. It was in 1925 that his friend Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens showed him photographs of some works by the founder of Metaphysical art (cat. p. 810). These included Le Chant d’amour (The Song of Love, 1914, New York, Museum of Modern Art), a canvas in which the attraction of incongruent juxtapositions (a red rubber glove, a plaster head of the Belvedere Apollo, a green sphere, a brick wall, a distant train…) is expressed with an open violence rendered still more dramatic by the stark clarity of the scene. Thirteen years later, in a lecture at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, Magritte recalled that encounter and the change in course that de Chirico’s painting brought about in his career: 

“In 1910 de Chirico played with beauty, imagining and creating whatever he wanted. He painted Le Chant d’amour, where we see a boxing glove [sic] and the face of an ancient statue together […]. This triumphant poetry replaced the stereotyped effect of traditional painting. It breaks away completely from the mental habits peculiar to artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity and all the little aesthetic specialities. It is a new vision, one in which the viewer rediscovers his isolation and understands the silence of the world.”¹ 

Magritte was spurred to abandon his early Cubo-Futurism and recent Dadaist work not only by de Chirico but also by two more great contemporaries, namely Max Ernst, who showed with collage and frottage that it was possible “to do easily without everything that lends prestige to traditional painting”,² and Joan Miró, whose automatic and semiautomatic biomorphism was to prompt the Belgian artist’s series of word paintings.³ The time had come for Magritte to embrace Surrealism, one of the few ways - together with dreams, madness and love - to escape the mediocrity of the present. In the same lecture, picking up the grim omens on the European political scene of the tragic war that was soon to devastate mankind, Magritte proclaimed the freedom of Surrealism as a new form of humanism for a society fallen victim to the poverty of its era: “Surrealism […] offers humanity a suitable method and mental orientation for carrying out investigations in fields hitherto ignored or despised that are nevertheless of direct concern to mankind. Surrealism claims a freedom similar to that of dreams for waking life.”⁴ 

The influence of the Metaphysical master de Chirico, which was never to disappear even in the period of Magritte’s full artistic maturity, is readily discernible in the Cerruti gouache. The work shows a plaster head whose whiteness is impaired by an eloquent patch of red on the right temple. A cut rose lies on a stone parapet, on the other side of which a melancholy view of the sea by night with waves and a waning moon can be seen through the opening in the middle of thick curtains. The composition is nothing new in the artist’s vast repertoire. The first oil painting with this particular iconography was produced as early as 1942 and followed over the next fifteen years by many other works, mostly on paper.⁵

The Metaphysical combination of incongruous elements is clearly evident. Le Chant d’amour is a sure comparative image, to which we can also add, for the dramatic reference to the bleeding wound, the premonitory Portrait de Guillaume Apollinaire (Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, 1914, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne). Apollinaire was indeed not only the inventor of the term surréaliste in 1917 (cat. p. 316) but also the poet on whom Magritte focused great attention in his subversion of the relations between word and image (cat. p. 810).⁶

The Cerruti series of works by Magritte ends with a small drawing in pencil and pastel on paper entitled La Pomme (The Apple). Attributed to the Belgian master but not listed in the catalogue raisonné of his graphic art, the work is hard to date, not least because the apple is one of the most recurrent iconographic elements of his artistic maturity. Comparison with the known works suggests a date in the last decade of his career, when the apple became a fully autonomous subject and increased in size to the point of pressing for air against the edges of the sheet of paper.⁷ What is certain is that the drawing was bought for the collection, perhaps before any of the other works by Magritte, from the artist Ezio Gribaudo, a friend of Cerruti, who left his mark in the Italian history of the artist’s book in the 1960s with the Fratelli Pozzo publishing house (cat. p. 914).⁸ 

Fabio Cafagna

¹ Magritte 1979, pp. 94, 95.

² Ibid., p. 95.

³ Sylvester 1992b, p. 166.

⁴ Magritte 1979, p. 94.

⁵ See the oil paintings nos. 505 (1942) and 806 (1954) in Sylvester, Whitfield, Raeburn 1992-2012, vol. II; and the gouaches nos. 1181, 1254, 1294 and 1436, dated between 1942 and 1957, in Ibid. 1994.

⁶ For Apollinaire’s influence on the Surrealist movement, see C. Girardeau, “Préambule aux générations dada et surréaliste autour de la figure d’Apollinaire”, in Paris 2016, pp. 221-231.

⁷ See, inter alia, nos. 1407, 1407a, 1508, 1509, 1525, 1529 and 1530, dated between 1956 and 1963, in Sylvester, Whitfield, Raeburn 1992-2012, vol. IV, to which we can add the gouache no. VI/38 (1962[?]-63) and drawing no. VI/102 (1960) in Ibid., vol. VI.

⁸ G. Bertolino, F. Pola, “Intervista a Ezio Gribaudo”, in Barbero 2010, pp. 73-89. I thank Ezio and Paola Gribaudo for kindly providing this information.