“The oddest and most unusual compositions have an overwhelming objectivity of their own, a calmness with no wavering of either emotion or illumination: the calmness of things that have already happened.”

(Luigi Carluccio, 1962)

More than any other Surrealist painter, it is the Belgian René François Ghislain Magritte, also known as the “saboteur tranquille”, that chose to call the established techniques for the observation and representation of reality into question. Those seeking to interpret his works, which appear to be precise renderings of the world at first sight, end up falling into the web of an indefinable mystery. To quote Luigi Carluccio, an acute interpreter of Magritte’s work and the owner of Le Duo for some years, “the oddest and most unusual compositions have an overwhelming objectivity of their own, a calmness with no wavering of either emotion or illumination: the calmness of things that have already happened.”²

After initial involvement with Cubism and Futurism, Magritte became aware of the intellectual foundations of the language of painting on beholding the Metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico. In the young artist’s thinking, painting thus relinquished the function of creating images for the more stimulating one of giving shape to ideas. The defamiliarising effect generated by the combination of legibility of the image and absurdity of the reciprocal internal relations became the expressive hallmark of Magritte’s work. Unlike de Chirico, however, he did not draw upon his own experience of life but rather developed an impersonal discourse on the nature of the pictorial language and its irremediable otherness with respect to the visible world.

After a phase of Dadaism together with his friend the composer, writer and artist Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens, the first owner of the Cerruti canvas, Magritte was soon drawn into the orbit of nascent Belgian Surrealism. The movement’s principal theorist was the poet Paul Nougé, who urged Magritte to move to Paris in 1927, precisely when the Surrealist community was engaged in a dispute over political commitment (French editions of Trotsky’s writings became available that year and André Breton, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard all joined the Communist Party). Supported by a close network of contacts – also of a commercial nature – established in Belgium,³ Magritte continued to address the question of the paradoxes caused by the illusionism of painting during his time in Paris (1927-30) while soon going on to examine the complex relations between word, image and reality.

The word paintings constitute cold and lucid consequences of the crisis into which language was plunged at the turn of the century with figures like Ferdinand de Saussure, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Lautréamont, Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry.

His word paintings were born out of growing involvement with the Parisian Surrealists on the one hand and his recent collaboration with Nougé on the other. Published in Brussels in 1927, Quelques écrits et quelques dessins de Clarisse Juranville, a parody of a popular 19th-century grammar book, was actually a joint work with the Belgian poet looking forward to the long series of word paintings produced in Paris, including the famous Trahison des images (Betrayal of Images, 1929, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) with its violent clash between the enlarged stereotype image of a pipe and the caption Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The work was to arouse the enthusiasm of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who asserted that it was to be read as a calligram,⁴ and became a crucial starting point for the conceptual aesthetic approaches of the second half of the century.

The word paintings constitute cold and lucid consequences of the crisis into which language was plunged at the turn of the century with figures like Ferdinand de Saussure, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Lautréamont, Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry. Magritte presented a compendium of them in the magazine La Révolution surréaliste (December 1929) entitled “Les mots et les images”, an array of eighteen panels exemplifying what happens when the visual and verbal languages are juxtaposed with reality. If words and images are made of the same substance and can replace one another without altering the meaning of the representation or verbal utterance, their inability to grasp the things and events of the world is nevertheless established.⁵

As the Cerruti canvas shows, once the idea of a correspondence between human languages and the world outside has been unmasked as an illusion, the image finally becomes autonomous, freed from all constraints and open to the awareness of an irrational dimension bound up with exploration of the paradoxes and incongruities of the mind. The duo that gives the work its title – a biomorphic shape with a thick rim of metal bearing the word fusil⁶ and a strange object like a washstand with no jug or basin – thus stand out proudly against a dramatic reddish sky. The silence of the scene is broken only by the title of the composition, possibly a musical reference to a pair of vocal or instrumental performers.⁷ The physical consistency of the two elements with their apparently incoherent forms is asserted by the solidity with which they rest on the rough lunar terrain and the dark shadows stretching from left to right.

It is not hard to imagine what may have prompted Francesco Federico Cerruti to purchase the painting, possibly between 1972 and 1983.⁸ No less important than his love of the Surrealist avant-garde in this case is the pedigree of the work, previously owned by Mesens and Carluccio,⁹ and shown in some of the most important Magritte exhibitions, and finally the spell cast by a painting whose exploration of the boundaries and contradictions of verbal and visual language make it an indispensable term of comparison for the collection of precious books and bindings he was building up at the time.

[Fabio Cafagna]

¹ I thank Simon Crameri of the Beyeler Foundation in Basel for kindly providing information about the passage of the work through the hands of the dealer Harold Diamond on the basis of the label “Galerie Beyeler Basel no. 2325 K” on the stretcher.

² L. Carluccio, in Turin 1962; now in Carluccio 1983, pp. 181, 182.

³ Sylvester 1992b, p. 158ff.

⁴ Foucault 1973.

⁵ Menna 1975, np. no. 23.

⁶ A similar form appears in another work of the same year, namely L’apparition (Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie), no. 220 in Sylvester, Whitfield, Raeburn 1992-2012, vol. I, p. 273.

⁷ For the titles of Magritte’s works, see the lecture he delivered on 20 November 1938 at the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, now in Magritte 1979, pp. 91-104, in particular p. 100.

⁸ However the work is not listed in the handwritten “Inventario dei mobili, dipinti, sculture, argenti, tappeti, maioliche, porcellane e oggetti d’arte che si trovano nella villa di Rivoli alla data del 30-06-1993” (Cerruti Collection Archives).

⁹ Carluccio also owned another two works now in the Cerruti Collection, namely Scherzo: uova by Felice Casorati (c. 1914) and Il risveglio della bionda sirena by Scipione (1929).