This gouache is one of a number of works on paper which were given by various surrealist artists to Wolfgang Paalen, so that he could combine them to form four surrealist portfolios. Each comprising fifteen original drawings, they were sold at the 1936 `International Surrealist Exhibition? in London, with the aim to help fund surrealist publications. It relates to his celebrated painting `On the Threshold of Liberty?, which shows a room with walls made up of paintings. The recurring motifs of blue sky with clouds, bells suspended on a metal drape and hexagonal drums are explored throughout Magritte?s oeuvre.
René Magritte (Belgian, 1898 - 1967)
Magritte was born in Belgium and, apart from a few years spent in Paris in the late 1920s, lived there all his life. Unlike many Surrealists, Magritte did not subscribe to the view that the unconscious could be expressed through chance or 'automatic' techniques. Instead, he planned and executed his paintings with all the deliberation and skill of an academic painter. The results are surprisingly credible images of seemingly illogical scenes. Magritte would undermine logic by tampering with scale and by placing unrelated objects in unexpected settings. A constant theme running through his art is the relationship that exists between the painted image and the visible world, between fiction and reality. Magritte's art blurs the boundaries between the two.
