La valse hésitation (The Hesitation Waltz), 1971

Used; Like New/Used; Like New. Aquatint and etching in colors on handmade flecked paper, after the 1955 painting, signed in pencil by the artist's wife Georgette Magritte to lower left and annotated 'E.A.' (an épreuve d'artiste, aside from the edition of 150) lower right.  Kaplan/Baum 13. Unexamined out of frame, apparently in fine condition.  Framed to 31 x 24 inches (78.7 x 61 cm.).
"La Valse hésitation is one of the most dreamlike, mysterious, and famous images in Magritte's entire œuvre. It features two apples in a flat, empty landscape, bordered in the distance by the sea, under a great cloud-laden sky, "the clouds the clouds that pass up there… up there the wonderful clouds!" (Baudelaire). Each apple is covered with a carnival mask. But what exactly are we looking at? Where is the apple tree from which these fruits have fallen? Where do the masks come from, and who put them there? Are these apples life-size or gigantic, like the one in La Chambre d'Ecoute? Are we at the beginning of a world inhabited solely by two forbidden fruits, before the appearance of Adam and Eve? Or, on the contrary, is this the end of the game, the swan song of the known world?

The masked apple motif first appeared in Magritte's work in 1946, for a cover he designed for View magazine. The style was still that of his war paintings, a period he called "cowardly" and to which his meeting with the art dealer Alexandre Iolas would definitively put an end, opening a new era. At the dawn of the 1950s, Magritte's obsession was above all commercial, focusing on the American market, which he hoped to penetrate through his association with Iolas. "It's useless to send brand-new paintings to America, as there's little chance of them finding buyers. What is needed above all are replicas of known and digested paintings", he wrote to Iolas in 1950. Magritte thus launched himself with spectacular energy into the production of replicas, but above all variants, of older works. This apparently mechanical activity of reproducing a work of art (with Marcel Duchamp as master of ceremonies) was not carried out to the detriment of the quality of the works, as many of the variants were far more accomplished than the original versions.

It was in 1950 that Magritte reused the association of apple and mask. This time, the masked apple is accompanied by its double; the two masked fruits are in the foreground, lying on the ground, in almost opaque shadow, while the sky is intensely luminous. Magritte has just painted his first Valse Hésitation. In the same year, he would paint the nocturnal version of this image, giving it the title Prêtre marié: the apples are in full daylight, while a thin crescent moon shines in the night. This surrealist combination of day and night is reminiscent of L'Empire des Lumières, which Magritte first painted in 1949.

Antinomic, day and night have long been used to represent opposing poetic and symbolic realms, metaphors for the duality of human existence or the tension cherished by the Surrealists between reality and dream. La Valse Hésitation quickly acquired the status of a perennial masterpiece of Surrealism, because, like the artistic movement it celebrates, it is saturated with opposites that harmonize: the rotundity of apples and the flatness of the background, the calm of a still life and the waltz of a masked ball, the emptiness of the sky and the clouds that populate it. Magritte continued to return to this image and rework it right up to his very last works, including it in Le Domaine enchanté, the major set design project he conceived for the Knokke casino from 1953 onwards. Eight versions on canvas are known for La Valse Hésitation and Prêtre marié (compared with 17 for L'Empire des lumières)." (Sotheby's October 19, 2023 Modernités Catalogue, Lot 9)