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René Magritte - New Years (Les Nouvelles années) [1942]

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René Magritte - New Years (Les Nouvelles années) [1942]

Combining some of Magritte’s best-known motifs, Les Nouvelles années exemplifies his ongoing engagement with the Surrealist interrogation and transformation of the object. The iconography of a large leaf has its origin in Magritte’s hybrid tree-leaf which first appeared in the 1935 oil titled La Géante and would recur in his painting over the following decades in a variety of different contexts. In a letter to André Breton of July 1934, in which he wrote about paintings he was developing as ‘solutions’ to various ‘problems’, Magritte commented about the problem of the tree: ‘I am trying at the moment to discover what it is in a tree that belongs to it specifically but which would run counter to our concept of a tree.’ He soon found the answer to this question in the image of the tree-leaf: ‘the tree, as the subject of a problem, became a large leaf the stem of which was a trunk directly planted in the ground.’

[Sotheby’s, London - Gouache on paper, 50 x 62 cm]

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