In the early 1920s, René Magritte's life was marked by two landmark encounters with works that turned his life upside down. The first was George de Chirico's Love Song, a reproduction of which led Magritte to change his style and join the Surrealists, and the next were Max Ernst's collages, created a little earlier, which marked a break with all traditional means of painting. Ernst's work so delighted the young artist that he himself began creative experiments: the first papier collages were created by him in 1925, and during the next two years the series was replenished with 29 more copies.
The title of the collage, Reflections of a Lonely Passerby, comes from Magritte's friend and patron E.L.T. Meursen, who pointed it out during the inventory of his collection, which contained the work. It was borrowed from
of another work by an artist because of the similarity of the dark silhouettes of a man in an overcoat and a bowler hat, but we do not know whether the painter himself had anything to do with the name papier-collet.
The character depicted both on the canvas and in Magritte's collage Reflections of a Lonely Pedestrian is iconographic for the artist: he appears more than 50 times in his works, and, more often than not, his face is hidden. It is worth noting that at the beginning of the 20th century, almost all middle-class men wore such a headdress, which means that by using the image of a man in a hat, Magritte is playing with our perception. We think this character is an average bourgeois, but what do we really know about him? Moreover, the bowler was also a favorite headdress of René himself - which means that the character in it can be seen as a special type of self-portrait.
In addition to the silhouette of a man in the collage, we see a bizarre figure cut out of sheet music and a horse-drawn carriage. In his work, René Magritte often turns to the theme of movement in space: he depicts flying machines, jockeys and riders on horseback, and even horses harnessed, as in this work, to a carriage. Abstract images carved out of sheet music are present in virtually all of Magritte's early collages. Here such a figure resembles both the curl and the ephas of a violin or a violin key, it casts a shadow and balances out the human silhouette standing next to it.
Also in this papier-collé found expression of the specific life experience of René Magritte: in 1921-1924 he was a designer in a wallpaper factory, and a little later - just in the period of work on collages - he was engaged in the creation of advertising posters and theatrical scenery. In this regard, it can be argued that the flatness and neatness of the papier-cut figures passed into the artist's work from poster design; the simple composition of the foreground and the sky recalls a theater scene; and the landscape format was borrowed by Magritte from Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico who admired him.
Text prepared by Elina Bagmet