Kees van Dongen

Devant Le Restaurant De La Paix By Kees Van Dongen

Jean-Gabriel Domergue 1889-1962 French Elegant Lady with Feather Boa Signed "Jean Gabriel Domergue" (lower left) Oil on canvas A radiant masterwork by French artist Jean-Gabriel ...

Jean-Pierre Cassigneul b.1935 French La terrasse devant la mer (The Terrace by the Sea) Signed “Cassigneul” (lower left) Oil on canvas laid on panel This monumental, three-panele...

Marc Chagall 1887-1985 Russian Couple sur le lit (Couple on bed) Signed 'Marc Chagall' (lower right) Oil and India ink on canvas Marc Chagall's exquisite work, Couple sur le lit,...

René Magritte 1898-1967 Belgian Le carnaval du sage (The Sage’s Carnival) Signed “Magritte” (lower right); titled and dated "Le carnaval du sage 1947" (en verso) Oil on canvas The enigmatic paintings of René Magritte have become some of the most familiar and celebrated of the Surrealist movement. Among the most influential of the Surrealist painters of the 20th century, Magritte is an artist of international renown, as beloved for his popular appeal as he is for the psychological intensity of his works. The present oil on canvas, entitled Le carnaval du sage, was executed in 1947 at the height of his career, and it is a tour-de-force example of the haunting, mysterious scenes that comprise his oeuvre. Painted in the years following the Second World War, Le carnaval du sage showcases several recurring themes from Magritte’s oeuvre. Chiefly, a juxtaposition between the visible and the hidden is keenly felt. Throughout his career, Magritte explores the psychological obsession with revealing what is hidden, particularly with regard to the human face. In his Le fils de l’homme, he obscures the face of a man in a bowler hat with an apple, while his Les amants (Metropolitan Museum of Art) conceals the faces of two lovers with white sheets. In Le carnaval du sage, Magritte juxtaposes the blatant nudity of his central figure by masking her face, simultaneously revealing and concealing her from the viewer. The work also incorporates two of Magritte’s most common tropes – the glass of water and the baguette. Lending the scene a strange sense of domesticity, they appear infinitely familiar and distinctly out of place, and thus heighten the uncanny effect of Magritte’s composition. In the background hovers a ghost obscured by a sheet, a figure which was of particular fascination to Magritte beginning in 1946. He once wrote to his fellow Surrealist Paul Nougé: "I saw in a dream an answer to the problem of the ghost: the traditional ghost draped...